book 2 🞄 volume 2

Writing’s Basis in Friction (February 20, 2026)

Does integration encompass the elimination of friction? No. So friction doesn’t deny integration. It only damage-reflects (counters, mitigates) the natural “fortress” of an integrated life, especially when it involves writings, personal websites, sterile, air-conditioned third places (even with the “body doubling” friction), and computers. In fact, the longer one goes through friction, between when one leaves the keyboard and when one returns, let’s say hours later, the more one can truly territorialize “the world around them” in that proving form of friction. To sweat is to endow one’s words with sprint and liveliness. It’s not that the words themselves will become rich with imagery or it will be more phenomenological necessarily. It is that when you write anything, you write with greater assumptions (which I say positively, since understanding hinges on lived-inness, one that “yeah, we get that”). Does this add, expand, clarify, extend, or re-imagine what one writes? Yes, because words hinge on actuality in that form of the assumed, because to write is to reach and grasp between two worlds, the fake and the real. Articulation is “touchtyping.” This is not the same as arbitrary or random. There is no “well, that’s what I wrote” in this “fricked” (verbalization of “friction”) articulation. In fact, the highest rigor is in getting fricked. You know what something is not by what that unceasing utmost fidelity requires of you in spite of your current skill (without care for suffering or flow state or anything but about something that’s closest to the objective because lived-inness is, in all the sense of the word, concrete) or “who you are” (who you think you are) right now. Friction brings you closer to reality. It fricks you closer and close to actualization. (It would help to conflate friction and actualizing here.) Territorializing is less imposing the framework or the ego and more so creating “friction consistencies” around you (expanding) to ensure you’re never without “feedback” to your, when left by itself, delusional thinking patterns.

This doesn’t mean sensory or friction overload. I don’t mean you should summer-burn in Japan. Friction should never be purposeless, but it should never be under your authority. It should be as “irrelevant” (abrupt, out of the blue, lateral, counterintuitive, self-denying, loop-denying, routine-denying) as a first-time unexplainable rash, but as purposeful as Hannibal’s Alps. There is a saying by Bachira from Blue Lock:

“It’s not a matter of making the right choice, I’ll make it so the path I choose is the right one.”

Purposefulness can be something you arm-wrestle into being in the duress of the sinking, rained-on bog rather than something you mentally prepare for through comprehensive safety nets. Interestingly, this arm-wrestling cultivates self-security; though it often looks like egoism, which one may associate with fragility. That kind of “headstrong” intensity is not about arrogance or stubbornness in the bad sense. It is about purposing self-admitting friction and, by extent, self-actualization. On this is writing founded. When you go through friction, you are in a rigorous battle with growth. Writing itself, when one takes the time to write something long and “exposing,” can be its own kind of self-admittance, where friction happens not outside of writing, but in it as a way to frick oneself into naked (bare), tactile (sensory) reality.

The more you (should) reach for Providence, the more the world should scale up to reveal more and more of itself to you, so that your Icarus-ing becomes your grounding. Your reaching develops your spatial navigation. Don’t stop reaching, but hand-hold friction when it scales (i.e., zooms out, layers, etches, sets against a now-revealing zoomed-out world hitherto invisible outside the zoomed-in frame) your reaching act. The same way a camera zooms out to make room for two players on opposite sides of the map, so does your reaching form a Point B to your Point A (your body as the anchor of that outstretching limb and longing hand) now in zoomed-out panorama. The same way a person thinks of their past (a stationary Point A) when going so far away from home (a far-thrown Point B) and discovering in the panoramic space between the two points the World, one must shoot out and find their reaching-out growing in dimensions in prismic beauty, burning and flame, casting and ironing, tossing and turning, raging and bulling, bursting and deflating, loosening and tightening, going utmost beyond and finding in all of it the ability to navigate space (compare to “arrogant” Icarusian traveling being how one learns to navigate the Big world around them).

Understanding syntax is understanding how words fit in a sentence. Understanding writing is understanding how words fit into reality. Understanding how words fit into reality is understanding how one fits (one’s place) into the world (the vastness) around oneself (the yet to be anchored, spatialized, put into space, put into the world, made in the world, understand in terms of one’s thrownness, appearance, apparence, being). Friction is to be. Purpose—the purpose or point of something, anything, done, purposefulness, the quality of being purposeful—is strong-wielded by those who see it as something you self-securely own and produce in-house. To be is to qualify (i.e., officially recognize or establish) in the act. In that sense, to write is to be bold¹.

The lesson of Icarus isn’t to play it safe forever so you never have to be embarrassed and grounded. Icarus could see the whole wide world from that height even as he affixed his gaze on the sun. Icarus is not a “don’t do this.” It’s a “let’s fall together.”

In the end, there is a difference between knowing something exists and recalling it from throughout your life vs. integrating it. I may have integrated my past as I remember it and with representatives here and there. But there is a difference between integrating that along with that place fused into that fixed past and going to the actual place and territorializing it so that it is always a font of inspiration, creativity, imagination, and “sightseeing,” a place that isn’t imagined (recalled), but is where the reality of being there in that Place and one’s “imagination” (past memories, present imaginations and ideas on how to incorporate it into one’s writing) of it as one is there collide. Friction here is in acknowledging. Everything we do “takes place.”

The following passage I wrote “automatically” (without thinking so as to bring out what I have internalized personally) more than 8 months ago captures this passage:

Seldom does a person imagine themselves to be anything other than the same old fallow moment, that if any dared put themselves forward and try himself out as some kind of demon or as having any greater capacity than he really does, he would find himself utterly squashed, his soul reverted and his entire spree of thought dilapidated.

While I did say that I wouldn’t be as “arrogant” as I was 2 years ago when I do fiction-write again, my biggest accomplishments are those when I dared and made claims and threw myself where there was no net. I shamed myself into my own eventual self-security. So let this integration not be an elimination of friction or egged-head embarrassment. Let me stain myself in my own pathetic posture, because inwardly is my fiery sense of self bursting past the delusions, the fragile egoisms, and the sense-o’-selves that never could. Let me total. Let me be arrogant again. Let friction scale my reaching act.

What the Fuck You Losers Doing in a Meetup? (February 20, 2026)

I have this bias or at least this sense that meetups (especially digital nomads, expats, or just people of that general background from which I also am and on which I look unfavorably) are magnets for the kinds of people who need them desperately in the sense that they’re not the kinds of people already predisposed to that kind of “X factor” that would make the idea of an external, especially digital tool like fantasy. Think networking, charisma, social butterfly, and all that and how growing up with your max level of experience being school and a bunch of flying text on cyberspace can put you in a strange place. The internet flattens as well as hyper-cultivates niche interests, and people who live off the internet the most are most vulnerable to the kind of awkwardness of IRL mundane talking-stage normalcy, implicating myself in this. Whether it be specific ideas, intellectual stuff, and a bunch of names and terms, the internet “mal-prepares” you even as much as it arms you with the ability to be incredibly hard to talk to and to yap confusedly and haphazardly like a child armed with a bazooka. I kinda demonstrated it when I was speaking to my mother just now in a family restaurant in a large mall and how the text that makes so much nested sense now comes across as the SOC ramblings of a godforsaken netizen. The fact that LLMs meet and greet me best in this jumbo jumble reflects the results of this critter sucking off internet machinery. It’s probably why I got so triggered by the name-dropping-framework-dropping my younger brother did when I was finally done with that nonsense. Philosophy’s only use is in improving one’s articulation. Beyond that point, hearing it in daily IRL life is a sin against humankind and must be discarded stat. Even as I am what I am with my background, I only feel animosity toward matters of the intellect, of things that separate the human being from the ground, from human speak, from the body. Writing was always a means to an end for me, and that was personal life closure. And now that I’m done with that, to hell with writing. To hell with names and terms. Don’t give me that shit! I spank it like a rebel child. Fuck u! But contradictorily, I still write, read, and study and enjoy it. The only thing that seems apt to happen is the integration of meetups, which is what I might consider doing. I will try to get out and smash this shit to the ground. In my writing will it manifest as well, this post-closure integration, this newfound serene boredom, this current embodiment, this social normalcy, even as I celebrate this freedom without throwing myself away inside external structures just like that now that the trauma ascent is over. The goal is friction. To man the words, to put a soul in them, one that can shake hands, feel flesh, and sweat on the way to a cafe, as sterilized as that still is in urban space. Nevertheless, let the meetup abrade my senses and cause me writer pangs as well as writer growths, for here be myself as a total including, out of fun, meetups, since the last 9 months already involved me going to a cafe over 80 times with over 40 unique cafes, where I’d stay the whole day in a given cafe to read, study, and write. Let’s scale it up. Industry move. Conveyor belt whir.

Occupying, Portability, and RPG Inventory: Isekaiability (February 21, 2026)

Was born there in that small place, and there, I thought of myself as something. I had the strength to think of myself as something beyond myself as well, but after some time, things changed. Environment, the world, things around me moving. I was a person moving through the world. But yeah, as things shifted and went through transformations, I changed too. My identity and sense-o’-self did, and what I could with my palms did too. The tactile sensation of slick sweat persisted across the different days, but the mind that worked under those mundanities went through geological twists and fissures. By the time I came out onto the urban plain, even as my appearance was merely that of a walking person, inside me flitted all the processed energies I’ve primed for resource-hungry creative output. So the cafes became my places, and where I sat, there I was (to my utmost benefit even with the digital-physical integrations and embodied [visualized through OTW sweat] and externalized [visualized by cloud-synced writings accessible through a portable laptop and keyboard] cognition), concocting, sucking off the energies of the place. I internalized the spaceness. The spaceness of all that time spent at home with all the memories, the physical objects that moved only when I moved them, and the accumulation of time, creative work, and experience as a writer only created the internalizing construct concept—a new cognitive-psychological skill—of occupying. When the world becomes your private quarters, there is no place you can’t go. This naturally extends to whatever you write. The ability to occupy fiction writing. Feeling at home there, in privacy, in quarters. That’s magical, immersion, and total abandon, the good kind.

Self-Responses

What do they mean by “no place you can’t go”?

I’m guessing this is so much more than just being a comfort-wearing digital nomad or expat who are often the target for socket-having cafes.

So what is the author saying exactly? Who is this message for? Who needs to hear this? Who would benefit from realizing this?

So instead of the perfect place and desk, they focus on the optimal portable setup, which extends to how they view themselves and their creative work, perfection and optimality in the portability and portable wholeness.

So isekaiability in the sense that you can be isekai’d or displaced or “dropped off” and still be you. Of course, one still needs one’s laptop and money, but the point is portability. And both a laptop and money are portable. Their inventory essentially.

Space -> Line (February 21, 2026)

Add at least 15,000 words (around 5 to 7.5 chapters) of in-arc stuff per arc. The problem is ensuring development in both character and overarching plot even with in-arc stuff. To explain this problem, it cannot be a formulaic loop of events that just make world-building sense, but doesn’t really invest or extrapolate beyond just “i can get an AI to generate this based on a prompt.” It needs to be constructive (and, by extension, original), not interpretative (developmental simply in the sense of walking based on the feet in front of oneself) from a baseline.

The 2,500 to 5,000 words for arc introduction is separate from in-arc stuff. Don’t fully introduce an arc and then time-skip to next arc. Let the introduced arc-world breathe and be lived-in long enough. 5 chapters is enough to get the feeling of a lived-in world, and that’s enough to fit a self-contained story with start, build-up and conflict, and climax and epilogue.

Compare to cafe hopping. It took 30 minutes to an hour to get here, and it took a few minutes to set up. But I stay for 7 to 8 hours. There are 8 to 16 introductions in 8 hours, so 2,500–5,000 words multiplied by 8 to 16. That would be from 20,000 (8 to 10 chs.) to 80,000 (32 to 40 chs.) words. In web novel terms, which is what we’re working on anyway, that’s very normal. So while 15,000 can be the minimum, an average of post-introduction 40,000 words (16 to 20 chs.) is healthy.

You know how fun and rewarding it feels to stay in a cafe long enough that it reflects how much you were genuinely so immersed and got so much work, creative stuff, and backlog done? The same applies to when scaling the body of a message relative to “greeting/title” and “sign-off.” The most satisfying messages are those where the ratio of the body is titanic. Imagine how awkward it’d be if the summary was half the body’s length. Coherence in the form of intros, titles, and outros is only satisfying when there’s something to “cohere” about. If the content is the prepositions, what’s the point of structure? Infrastructure without population, cars, traffic, customers, commercial buildings, and residences.

We are not baselines (who we were before the cafe stay) and results (what we came out with). We are everything in between. We are the middle. We are the present. Same goes for arcs. The word “arc” can make you hyper-focus on distinguishing different parts of an overarching story by different starts and ends, these boundaries. But in this do we forget an arc is nothing without the world from which the point (result, both in how it affects our interpretation of following arcs and of preceding arcs) is taken. When we focus not on baselines and results, we get infinitely more from the middles that are infinite riches beyond the initial result we first get right after that “arc.” Think of this as someone going beyond just being a result of the directly previous moment, but someone who is the integration of everything that they are in all that they have been up to this moment again and again in recursive, constructive, original sense. What they understood right after high school is not the final word. What they understand now many years later from that time is part of the ever-evolving self that lives as a whole of themselves in all that they have been. This is the middle. This is how authors manage to get what feels like infinite value from previous arcs because they’re not fixed, forgotten pasts that are only as much as the first thing immediately resulting right afterwards.

Results are not them as themselves. They are instead triggers to involuntary memory and, in the sense, infinite value. The point of structure (boundaries) is to point to the middle, not to be as themselves in themselves of themselves.

We are not the philosophical conclusion. We are the perspiration. The wearing-away former points to the infinite latter, the font of life. The bunch of dead-end words gives way to lived-inness. We are not who we are at the end of the word, but who we are as constant life-givers to words that are otherwise meaningless and bunch-of-words.

We are afraid of the ambiguity and godlessness of sweat, where ego, agency, narrative, and systems vanish and defer endlessly into a bunch of words and proclamations.

Sweat is a dagger to the fortress skin.

But if we forget narrative in the sense of boundaries and starts and ends for a moment and cohere our consciousness and experience here right now in the sweat, then truly we are and the arcs almost needless and at this point relegated to a practical, logistical, polite formality from the view of the in-arc (“in the eye of the storm”). Words fall away to the moment.

Integration was never in narrative. It was always in the moment (all for one, all in the now, all in the spatial here, all recursive cohere, in lived-inness).

Integration is to realize the spaceness of the all in the now.

This brings us back to writing that “substantiates” its own “premises” and “conclusions” (also “climaxes”).

Self-Responses

So the author would hate “confirmation bias” and “plot points” like tracing handwriting dashed lines and erasing anything that doesn’t absolutely adhere to the capital letter A. But the author doesn’t strictly say discovery or organic writing or that outlines are bad, only that it must be substantiated or “allowed to breathe.”

So it can be the most genre fiction story ever as long as the structure doesn’t outweigh the substance.

So it’s basically math’s “show the work” or rigor’s “show the process”.

So the author is totally fine with discovery writing then. They may even encourage it, though not necessarily so as to say that outlines and plotting are bad and that pantsing is necessarily better.

But the author is not saying “justify your writing” since that implies justifying the body/content based on a result or a pre-conception or performing according to scripts. They’re saying “live in your writing.”

So the author would totally love the feeling of “It doesn’t make sense, but it makes sense once you read it and go through it,” as in “you just had to be there!”

“But why did you have to write this? Isn’t this excessive? It feels almost arbitrary wit how much it just runs down that slope and goes to some place where, when you think about it, no one’s gone” => “It’s what it was at that point. It justifies itself not by some premise or some ending, but by what it was at that moment, and in no way can make other sense except in the fact of its being in that moment of being there and being in that space and living there and to-ing be-ing.”

“So what?” -> “What so.”

So the author wants you to get lost in the moment, to guffaw at the lamest, most random joke, to play board games all of a sudden after being invited by childhood friends (whom one met for the first time in years randomly just because one felt like it) to do so because the cafe just so happened to have board games available when one was just writing about philosophy an hour ago at home. And they view fiction writing as a stage where you can really show yourself getting lost in the moment, in words.

“What are you doing here?” -> “You what doing here are.”

Back to First Person

A character can have ambitious goals and the will to take them on and ascend and do so one after the next. A story can be heavily plot-driven. But there are always ways to squeeze in the moment, those little things that drive that “commerce” of space. You’ll know if those “moment-giving” things are just interpretative/performative, or if they’re constructive/original.

Self-Responses (2)

So the author loves web novels like LOTM?

So to put it simply, make the in-arc stuff at least 10 times as long as the intro, if not many more times longer. It’s less about numerical word count and a certain number of chapters and more so about ratio and heavy-lifting.

So the author loved that LOTM took all that time to really flesh out the world (which was volume 1 from what I recall) before they had Klein move away from his two new-world siblings.

But the author is fine with web novels that is centered around constant traveling and movement and “vignettes” as long as it doesn’t feel like a bunch of time-skipping from intros to outros and premises to results and arc boundaries to arc boundaries.

They [live] in the “present” of that village.

So the author must love Skyrim then. The idea of hanging out at an inn and then killing a dragon moments later. Taking one’s time. Even moments where the fight goes longer than it should and it turns into its own place, its own village.

So the author is fine with the traumatized cyclical protagonist as long as he looks around and it’s this space, this place, this present of the village, the humming, the clattering, the shuffling, the low murmur, the thudding door, the muffled steps outside, and his thoughts are interrupted for a moment or jagged between everything in his head and the spatiality and lived-inness of the world around him, friction. The tragedy is that despite the lived-inness and spaceness of the world around them as they move through it, they are stuck in a traumatic cycle, but not because of a foregone conclusion, but in the moment as all things go, one goes through a lot. They are here right now, but they get triggered the next and lose it all over again. So coheres the cycle. They are not living in the past. They are living in the present. It’s just that it’s traumatic. But this is their present. What is cyclical is not a repeat of a loop or a past. It is the now agonizing. [It’s the bird that sings regardless, the rain that rains, the bossa nova in the cafe right after getting a phone call of your parents getting into a car crash and now being at the hospital with your mother on her last legs while your father remains unconscious and your siblings shouting at you through a video call as you sit there staring at the screen with what feels like a halfway finished essay.]

Return to First Person (2)

Since it is easy to misunderstand this, I don’t believe in “even if it does nothing to advance the grand plot.” I think this is a big mistake. A board game that throws a wrench in the works substantiates one’s philosophizing. It’s not “does nothing to advance the great plot.” It is the plot. It’s not that things digress. It’s that things are.² The narrative is first a space, then a line.

We form a linear narrative based on space. Prompting an LLM with “what can we gather about the author?” and feeding it the entries (space) of one of my blogs is not about finding the substance or value and instead about breaking a formal line at the end of a marathon. You don’t need it. But space is accessible via lines (titles, summaries, and all).

For example, I got this whole passage, which includes the two self-responses and the two “back to first persons,” out of my “diary and reflections” text file and moved it to my “essays” text file once I realized at the end of writing all the above that it belonged there.

Space -> Line:

“We didn’t realize we were making memories, we just knew we were having fun.”

Egoistic Spaceness (February 22, 2026)

Was I ever a writer? If all this time, I focused on line rather than on space, on telling my mental story rather than lived-inness, spaces, and places in the way that Auge and Bachelard would describe them? As much as analysis can involve rigor and stipulation, it was still in a sense untested because it didn’t take in space, even if one could argue that it is still a space when compared to the line that is the summary of the work and thought process involved in working through an idea without preconceptions but with discoveries. Nevertheless, analysis is very much like “telling” in “show, don’t tell.” As such, I feel that I was barely a writer because I am increasingly seeing the writer as being of space, of lived-inness, rather than of a man in his room deluding himself about with ego, pride, and trauma on the line. Was there a point at all at that point? Wasn’t it just a rant? Where was the space? A cafe is a space. It goes on, not caring about whatever ego you have concocted up. It is a place, a space, a lived-inness, a present of the village. The narrative of fighting the dragon? That of line doesn’t exist here.

If my web novel Matthew was written of space, it would have never gone so far into its own head when it comes to the plot being this mental description of events. It felt like a fantasy in the sense of capturing the agony in its deepest deluded concentration, so even if it was a anti–power fantasy, it was still a fantasy in the lack of spaceness, of placeness, of the tinkling of cups and the clattering of spaces that go on amid one’s delusions. Instead, Matthew was written of line, practically a rant.

If it was of space, it would have been 95 percent invisible, workman prose with rains, lived-in spaces, places, and “presents,” but because it wasn’t, it was 95 percent crazy breakdowns. Grief was not the man working through the invisible workman daily. It was the man screaming somehow in all of the non-invisible, non-workman, non-rain (the rain that rains, the bird that sings)—a rant.

I had an idea of a man in grief, but because I am here now with all I am after everything, it went from a very concentrated narrative of grief and reaction to a man with tears and then going through everyday functional life as per invisible, workman usual and clearly invisibly carrying the weight of that grief which will come out when spilling balmy sun becomes a vacuum moment to process outside of the rain. It became the 95 percent workman after its first visualization as 95 percent pure line.

I have to clarify this isn’t just about “show, don’t tell”. This is about a fundamental difference in fiction writing. The actual content changes, not in style or depiction where the same thing is said differently, but in the sense that something else entirely comes out in place. Spaceness replaces the line completely, not in prose as mere stylistic depiction, but as total, actual difference in what happened, in actuality. Matthew would not have turned out the way he did if spaceness had its way. He would have taken stock of the tinkling of cups, and he would have just lived very invisibly and workman even with the trauma he was bearing invisibly.

Psychological realism would sound very much Cormac McCarthy. The actions, movements, body language, dialogue. The rain that rains.

In contrast, here be Matthew. It was created, done. It was a fantasy in the sense that no one would be able to express their grief upon the world like that in that crazy, breakdown, dramatic way. Instead, it would be in a slight smile, in pressed lips, in a glance, in a slow descent down the steps, in a worn look, in a weathered laugh, in the slam of a main door carrying across the mansion.

Matthew could have been the most overpowered fantasy protagonist in the world, but if you just gave them a single moment in space, in place, in the present of the village, I assure you everything—all their delusions—would fall away in the face of space. Their delusions would be less the man lost in their head and ego and more so the man doing fucked-up shit. It’s the fantasy equivalent of domestic terrorism.

I’m not saying you should stop reading books like that or stop listening to music, which is all about personal narrative, memory, and cause-and-effect “this is what you get” reaction. But it would probably be beneficial if it was 95 percent spaceness. Standing outside at a busy intersection with lots of pedestrians and cars, in a cafe for hours, in a busy mall, or somewhere involving lots of people like beside a highway or long road is enough to get that spaceness, as long as you aren’t listening to music with headphones and writing distancing analytical structuralisms. The only use of self-narrative is self-pacing. It’s emotional regulation. It’s the formality. It’s the externalized cognition. It’s the externalization. It’s the healthy summarizing not to distance or reject space but to integrate it without overwhelm. But space precedes the line.

We are not ideas on a screen (the concept of a screen). There’s no “we.” It’s these words (not as pure ideas, but as words this person typed on this screen in this space in this room in this house in this neighborhood in this city in this time in this part of the world [there’s no “world” in the all-encompassing sense of it that we may refer to it so loosely]) on this screen. I am this person using this computer. This computer isn’t a concept. It’s this object. It goes through all manner of this dust. It’s this object with these memories. Once it dies, this computer does.

The point of all lines is to dissolve in space. The internet suddenly stops being overwhelming. The world suddenly stops being this thing where everything must overwhelmingly overcrowd into extreme cramping.

“Life” (specifically being and space, not the line-life) is a single continuous shot that never resolves. It also doesn’t have a start and an end. The word “continuous” is not supposed to mean linear, but constant. As it is, so it is. Those long shots in old films capture this. That lived-inness. In that sense, life is endless cinema.

What the child saw was space. Not magic, awe, wonder, adventure. It was spaceness. The lines of scripts, the scripts of “the world,” the rites of passage, the paths one must take, the things one must do, and the ways one must live all fall to nothing. Space dissolves it all. It sees the bed in the chair, the musical instrument in the couch, the sky in the texture of wood, the rushing wind in the soaring finger, the crashing world in drizzling rain, the monsters in the dark, the ghosts of the past, the explosions of footsteps, the endless fog, the council of gamers, the upper echelons of ascent-plotting adults, the dancing lights, the cosmic thunder of song, the Olympus in the theater, the mission of visual lines, the infinity of a road.

Is the road objectively infinite? No. But in effect, it is impossibly long, because you haven’t gone from start to end to break the effect of infinity. In that sense is infinity intact. In the here and now, it is effectively infinite. Reality is not as much as we don’t experience it and as we learn from words and books. Reality is as much as we experience it, beyond which are just a bunch of facts, ideas, and words and the unknown. People are not a bunch of facts and analytical frameworks. They are not ideas. They are not truths to make or break. They are not ideals. They are not universals. They are not “people.” The problem of objectivity is when it is used as an excuse to ignore what’s right in front of you, the thisness of things, the very what-they-are in favor of irrelevant fact tidbits being used to do the work that space already does infinite times over. The actual thisness of the road at this very point “of writing” is ignored in favor of a numerical length that tosses everything away for absolute confidence. See how un-objective that is? The child is watching. You’re counting and stuffing words in reality’s mouth. The child doesn’t ignore everything in favor of maintaining a mission, a narrative. It looks around. The adult dies in a jail cell full of everything but these-spaces, these-moments, and these-places. “Well, it’s irrelevant. Well, it’s gone. Well, it’s dead. Well, it’s past. Well, it’s useless.” By the point a whole life has come and gone, nothing has transpired. Only a ball in a box that perfectly fits it such that it never bounces, re-considers, re-attempts. The adult puts on shackles to prove themselves. The child knows their nature is to be free, to get out there, to look around, to see the world, to get to know, to open their eyes, to see what’s right in front of them, to play. “They are what they are.”

The only value in a Matthew is to expose the way that you are as a writer in writing. If an “arrogant,” “delusional,” “solipsistic,” “egoistic,” “traumatic” rant is the goal, let it. Expose those lines. Let it all go according to line. Let space dissolve in linearity. Let your reign never end. Your narrative forever intact. In reaction. In cause. In effect.

Self-Responses

This feels like a common realization of traveling, or is this more specific than that?

How would the author feel about spaces and places as in digital? Could one argue that digital spaces and places that don’t offer line but what you’d get from a cafe still apply?

What if I wrote a 1.5-million-word web novel with very big lived-in world-building?

So the author privileges mundane embarrassment

This naturally encompasses rare moments of mundane severe awkwardness like having to make the person at the counter count 5-peso and 10-peso coins while combining the sum of those coins with the 25 pesos in one’s Starbucks card and also making the mistake it would be 210 in total but was actually only 205 so it was lucky that one chose the coffee that cost only 205 in venti even when one thought the money came with was going to be 210 and then having that mistake revealed when one stopped to say that it was 210 after the transaction has been made and the receipt has been gotten and they said the money I gave was actually 205 which matched the price, and, during the waiting, one was given a “please wait” so as perhaps to be thought to be tense or impatient even when one was just taking it as it went.

Return to First Person

What is the point of someone staring at it all and finding a way to turn it into self-fuel? Self-security from integration, portable wholeness. If writing is just emotional regulation, then what happened to writing as a way to help the brain put together everything? Does this self-fueling have to be solipsism? If there is no ego into which all is feasted. Embarrassment, nakedness, and learning moments need not be discouraged or lessened. One can have them as well as reaction. Does a reaction stemming from a need to fill the gap created by embarrassment with absorption as a step following initial integration and spatial look-around prove only egoistic in the negative sense?

If it is necessary to Matthew into the world, then I should keep writing Matthews. Can both be true? Space and Matthewing?

As in still living in space, in the present of the village, but you write Matthews still. What about workman prose then? Well, I did mention yesterday that the dichotomy between Matthew and workman prose need not exist, and whatever I write is what it is. That it will be perfect and seamless.

This means that the delusional, lost, egoistic, solipsistic Matthew will exist alongside the fantasy domestic terrorist, or the workman, or the privileged mundane severe embarrassment.

But how?

The room must still be privileged, and that is a very egoistic creative place. The place for Matthews.

Yet to go out and be exposed, embarrassed, and awkward and in space. There is an endless deliciousness to that that seems to satisfy one to full such that one forgets about Matthews.

Yet here be Matthewing.

I guess I can write this and slam it all to the ground under my weight, with all that I am, and feel thoroughly that I am here and the one writing this as is is is. Yet I live in a space.

And it doesn’t have to synthesize such that one might say that one will only be a victim with space and Matthewing solves that by adding agency to space. But perhaps, there is no synthesis, and there are two completes that need not each other and yet are not mutually exclusive and exist side to side. Yet even without synthesis, there is clearly the hammer-slamming agency as well as spaceness shaking hands, not in the sense of needing each other, but in the sense of an inevitable simultaneity, as if they are inextricably linked to each other, so as to make one wonder if they’re the same thing, which, again, is probably not the synthetic case.

It is interesting. To get closure and integration which lead to spaceness, one needs the fire and drive of pre-closure urgency, which is inherently insecure such that one may apply the word “ego” as intrinsic to this process of creation. So perhaps, based on this can we see the simultaneity of spaceness and Matthewing. I conceded previously by saying that urgency was integrated into post-closure serenity and boredom and, all in all, by extension, everything else—including past, present, and future, non-fiction and fiction, and all others—through spatialization. This should naturally include Matthew, yet my evolution into this idea of spaceness has made me reject which I now call Matthewing. But then I’m back here and acknowledging that it is not just emotional regulation, but a crucial self-fuel, not as mere urgency integration, like energy as flavorless energy, but hammer-slamming and conquering and reacting to gaps formed by mundane severe embarrassments.

Self-Responses (2)

So the author is saying that one needs egoistic reactions, like with the internet and embarrassments?

So they would never write if spaceness was all they needed. They need the ego to damn, to hammer, to slam, to punch the table with their words.

“self-absorbed spaceness” essentially?

which is a more accurate title “Dissolution of Lines in Space & Matthewing” or “Self-Absorbed Spaceness”?

how about “Egoistic Spaceness”?

Isn’t this just go outside here and there but go back inside to write down your thoughts? Why say all that?

Is it the way they write fiction? Is it the way they engage in spaceness? Is it how they’ve changed? Is it because that change happened through this writing? Is that why it’s not just go outside, come back, write?

Ha-ha. (February 26, 2026)

It’s often (it’s often? how could it have been something of a regularity?) in times like this that I find myself wondering, because it’s been a long enough time that you can get real queasy, and not in the sense that you’re troubled or troubling yourself around (pushing yourself around), but in the sense that you know well that after all this time, there is only that small realization, where perception gives way to reality, and in my case, that reality is that single resonant note that keeps going, that of a long-time coming, that of finishing, that of simple welcomes and hellos. It’s nice to think this has been happening all this time, and it has. It’s just that the last 9 months have been tremendous change as well as—toward the end of that span—a slow repeated recognition of where I am and what I have become—this simple, single note.

It doesn’t matter where I go. I see the same old faces. Top, bottom, left, right, or whatever face of a cube that is this (circular) world (think small worlds) at this point. There is that slight stage nervousness that comes with every new place, as if this world would reveal to me that it would eat me alive with all the things it carries. But what it carries, I apparently carry now within me, such that it feels like sleeper agents within me awakening almost immediately to defuse that nervousness, not out of some defence mechanism, but because of the reality that, well, reality always takes over once perception is already in the way. Once I’ve gotten out of my cocoon and put myself in a spot where reality must dominate, then there is only the realization (realitization). Ultimately, I am, in the sense of I AM, but also in the sense of consistency (think calenders and across dates), persistence (persistent state), and, ultimately, wholeness (through integration, as made concrete with cloud-synced text files).

“I am that I am” sounds too easy, but it’s what it ends up becoming at the end of the day once all the “this thing is new!” nervousness has screamed (pleasant to my ears) in dissolution. I find my hands planting themselves all over any other place, regardless of the time or whatever. It’s become a vague yet definitive, “ultimating,” and deciding “whatever,” that very crux of who I am in the today, in the where I am, in the now of all things. It little bothers me anymore to think it, only that it has a kind of queasiness, like you’ve stepped on a million worlds, and they’re all beneath you as you pose on the surface. There’s that hierarchical grandiosity that comes with a consistent self (not just any, but as amplified by an overcoming and will-to-power perspective).

But I am here, in the way that a person wearing clothes is. I am here. As concrete as that thing that gets stuck in your teeth, as in the here and now as any other person staring at the physical cafe world around them, with the clothes, wood textures, see-through plastic cups, sudden, brief facial expressions and micro-expressions, and the menu. The world is in the here and now. In spite (of this), I am. The phrase “I am” holds little weight when said merely as it is, but when you ground in all the hyperspecifics and memories, it only makes sense. That a person could ever (be? become?) at all in the midst of all that surrounds him so persistently (objects, worlds through the lenses/eyes of others in the form of fellow customers and patrons).

The sonder of the self.

I sit down with the fullness of my weight (value, definition, who-I-am, single, sense-of-self-in-all-the-worlds-in-which-I [am? no, not “am” because “I” is all that is needed, for all things to fall spatially into the reality of which]).

Every small movement I do with my face, with my hands, steels (is steel, not becoming steel, but, in the present, steel, and “steel” in the sense of ramming, hands-clasping, auric, and “mear-to-meer” [nonsensical, yet somehow purely and perfectly represenative of that ha-ha inward-collusion {collision, but in a non-colliding, translucent, “no-clip” hands-clasping} of the self so as to {be? no, completely unnecessary and detrimental, for the very nature of it is to}] the-person-within [inextricable nonce, not to be taken out of this passage; not soul yet not soluble]).

The fact I have to put my hand on my mouth to clutch below the brunt of my cheeks to cover up the “smug” euphoria (wholeness, seamlessness, weightlessness, cracking agency, creative “totalitum”). The irresistable micro-expressions and shifting of the lips. The simple hand-clasping, the fullness and heat in that ritualistic act (so much more than a mannerism and yet fully and only one). Needing to take an airy, floating, lightsome breath to pace the ecstatic, exhilirated, thrilled, elated high. It is as intact a euphoria as being on top of the mountain where all the elements are thrilling.

Being outside, especially in a whole new public environment where there is that slight nervousness before arriving and while initially setting oneself up, somehow “triggers” that “ha-ha” more than if I was “untested” at home. It’s probably that “in-spite-ness,” as described vividly above.

It makes me excited to travel and put myself in new public environments, especially cafes, in which to set myself up every time, because somehow, the self grows more self than if I languished at home. To put it in pop words, I love myself the more I put myself out there. My chest feels so easy and fresh. The breathing is slightly fast, like lust. My cheeks slightly ache from suppressing the smug inward grin.

The more I integrate the world around me, the more I integrate myself. Expanding space.

It’s the kind of feeling that leaves you just writing whatever. There’s a lack of self-questioning (in the ruminating sense) or self-consciousness. It’s this confident playfulness. Yet here I am aware of what I am feeling, so it’s not unawareness. It’s like ignorant bliss but if that bliss wasn’t from ignorance but from integration.

It’s weird. I’m happy listening to songs I listened to when I was going through a lot. So this is realization. I think of those bad (?) memories, and I only feel in my heart a profound (euphoric) [this parenthesis here emplaced since it is effectively euphoric due to it being the very cause instantly triggering euphoria] sense of “yes, I am,” the very cause instantly triggering my smug exhiliration. You would think it was simply due to “good thing I’m no longer there,” but it feels like I (not even “instead” as in “it feels like I instead,” but as it is it is or since-the-primordial). (In other words, there’s not a single ounce of ‘relief.’ It doesn’t make sense at all as a term anymore to me.) I feel like the walking embodiment of all that I am. Even a stroll down the sidewalk around here would feel both hot (it’s around noon right now) but also ultimately “agenting.”

As strange as it is to use the word, when I look at myself in the mirror all alone in private with both locks locked “to ensure privacy” (the thing on the door said lock both locks to ensure privacy or along those words) in the restroom, there’s a phrase that comes up: “superior in itself” or “superior in myself.” It’s not “to others.” It’s “to myself” yet not over myself or so as to lord over myself (not even over my past self or over “anxiety”—but as it is since primordial), but its own as it is in its own, and in that sense, superior. It’s without anyone—private. It’s overcoming. It’s eventual, “ultimately,” and even before I go back outside to my table: it’s already there. When here, I carry what I had there, and when I go back, I carry what I had here. Both the same. There’s no private-public difference. It’s continuous. Yet there is a difference. In the sense that the public is needed for that private smug self-certain self-satisfied grin. Outside, I just go about my business. As mentioned earlier, I would put my hand around my mouth to cover up the smug grin. A private “self-mastery.” Yet there is necessarily that public since this passage took place outside in a new public environment, a new cafe. The eventual, “ultimately,” and “even before” in the sense that it is necessarily pre-public and while post-public (i.e., private as in having gone to the bathroom). And the smile itself is optional (non-essential) and incidental. I can look mundane-faced in the mirror and yet feel this utmost.

To expand on the “happy listening to songs I listened to when I was going through a lot” and bad (?), I’ve integrated “I’ve died a million times” as in all the ways I could possibly lose it and everything. So when I listen to something like Change (In the House of Flies) by Deftones, I immediately feel a sense of overcoming, not that I’ve ovecome death, but I’ve overcome the need to think (of it) anything other than itself and themselves in all the ways it could concretely happen. For me, it is the reflection in the mirror (me). I am death. (And beyond it.) I am lose (losing) it. (And beyond it.)

This (what is described viscerally in this passage) is the root of my feeling, my grand theater, in little keyboard taps and dark mocha sips, in all the ways it could be articulated.

Mundanization: Re-Touching of Known Streets (February 28, 2026)

I spent this whole time going everywhere else that now that I’m in a place that was so close to all the memories, it really hits different. It’s not nervousness. It’s a feeling of control mixed with the shaky fingers of someone who knows he’s totally safe, not because he’s at home, but because the friction of all that time spent everywhere else and in integrating all of those memories have resulted in this double-reinforced sense of intactness, of having everything so carefully arranged for myself.

To hear the familiar voices around me (not because I know them, but because they speak the way that I’ve always known for so many years) fills me with something that only an individual surrounded by their core fabric can feel—that intense egoism that comes from a supportive community, that sense of self, that self-assurance, that self-consistency that comes from a life well-lived and then well-integrated and then returned to in victory-lapping affirmation post-elsewhere-friction.

Something about being at home after all that time spent elsewhere in all the other places brings it all back, like post-mitigated damage soaked up and then gathered together to create the biggest boom (think Sett, but as literal post-mitigated damage conversion into attack rather than just in that form of true-damage white-bar Grit).

There’s something about that clasping sensation of knowing that you are in spite of all that you’ve thrown at yourself, all those frictions, re-exposures, and all manner of things to pry open that true core, to show the world what a fragile frustrated fraud I actually am, only to end up tossing and turning that fire inside me, fanning it and giving it even more confidence than it would’ve had without all that testing.

There’s something strange about it. I feel like I took off Rock Lee’s weights. When in a completely remote place where it’s all so urban-jungly and there’s no escape and there’s people around me so foreign to everything that I’ve known, I am just there so simply, appearing as best a mundane business-minding person can be, but RIGHT HERE, there is only a sense that I was actually holding a mask over my smug face, feigning all this time and tossing and turning myself in all the ways only to end up revealing in the end the person that has grown all this time and which I’ve denied the victory lap most of the time. This is essentially that lap.

But is it? Comfortable routine close to home isn’t necessarily a victory lap. The friction is where the lap lives. So this is just me preaching to the choir at this point. Where is the lap when the friction is at its lowest? I guess the friction then is in the fact of being so close to home and knowing this place by heart and looking outside and knowing it like one knows the back of their hand. Or is that it?

In fact, going here slapped me to shape. It turned my groggy, confused, and mundane-awestruck self into something workable. So it is advantageous to me but without the friction you’d expect from a whole new place. It’s not like this place isn’t new at all. It’s a new cafe in the sense that I’ve never been inside and stayed here. But yeah, it feels like a person going in a routine (like going to the office) than anything particularly impressive, high-stakes, or even buzzing with that ambient tension like when I’m in a Starbucks in Makati or BGC.

So what is this? I needed this in that minimum of a comfortable whipping-up-into-shape routine close to home, but it’s also making me question and wonder. What is it? If it’s not being at home yet not being in that tension of being in a new place and new cafe, what is it? That minimum?

A new place and new cafe would make me shout internally “I AM THAT I AM”. Being at home leaves me wondering in a state of mundanity and trying to rack my brains around closure and how a street is a street and walking is walking. This is what I feel when I’m outside there as well, but without that euphoria of private-public friction where the self is consistent even while in the friction of such a new public environment.

But here, I have only the new cafe without the new place even while having the benefits of not being stuck in the non-euphoric non-friction “a street is a street” where I go through Google Maps and se more and more the spatiality of mundanity and how the narratives all fall to the ground in the “it wasn’t crazy at all” department. Here, I can feel a sense of a victory lap, but it is not as intense. There is more the language of comfortable routine close to home with the whipping-up-into-shape benefits instead.

It’s strange that this place is close enough and a place that I’ve pass so many times growing up that there’s none of that sense of having travelled to a whole new big place that looms over me with that intimdation outside the cr window. Yet it’s new because I’ve never been to this cafe, so it’s not boring, especially when you compare it to a cafe I’ve gone to more than 7 times.

The true tension would be if I went to that small local cafe where you can read the books for free there because it’s not Starbucks and I don’t have the laptop and it’s so close to home and I’m wearing home clothes and it’s small and non-corporate enough that it feels so intimate. But I didn’t do that. I wanted to go with others, but no one could come. I could’ve gone alone, and that would’ve been very good friction. But I chose to go here instead. It really does feel like a victory lap. It almost feels complacent. Going somewhere that’s as easy as a drop of water, yet it’s not literally something that doesn’t take at all from me or inspire nothing. I will still stay here for hours, and this cafe is still new to me. So even if there’s that comfortable routine close to home sense, I will be here the whole time.

I guess there’s something unusual about this. I usually don’t stay outside in any place near my home alone. I would usually do that when in a faraway place. When at home, I just tag along with everyone. But here, I’m actually alone, yet so near home. It’s strange. Though it doesn’t feel like I’m alone ‘cause I know these people in a sense ‘cause of sheer having lived around these parts for my whole life. But yes, speaking literally, I am not with anyone here. I have gone to a few cafes nearby where I stayed alone, but those ones were so close that it was barely anything. This cafe is at least 15 minutes away, so I still need to ride a car rather than just a walk.

It’s easy to have that self-contained keeping-to-myself demeanor when I’m in some remote place, especially one like Makati or BGC, but being so close to home, when I would always go outside with others, it’s so strange that I am sitting here like I’m not from here. There really was that freedom of being far from home. Now, anything that I do feels like shitting in my own house where everyone else is living. Like, someone I know could genuinely be here, and if I sit down strange or carry myself weirdly, they will feel that so severely. And I will feel that dissonance severely, that difference between how much I’ve changed and how differently I carry myself when I’m out solo in a cafe staying for hours.

To integrate the past, yes. To integrate the past into the present, yes. For others to do that concerning me when they look at me? Well, that’s outside of my control. Them reconciling who I was and am to them vs. who I am today and when I’m out solo. At that point, it’s out of my hands. My childhood friend since I started meeting him again would say that I’ve changed. And yeah, I get that. I’ve integrated all that I am with all that I was with all that I’ve changed myself. So it’s not new information to me. But it is to him who hasn’t been with me all this time with all the tension, struggle, triumph, and victory. So it’s up to him to come to terms with who I am now in respect to who I was to form a full picture of me the same way I’ve already done.

I was talking about this recently. If I went to that one Coffee Bean that I was going to more than 6 years ago and have not really gone to in these 6 years, there would be that sense of the present self stepping into the spaces where my past self walked. It would be an interesting and strange collision, since there are many past haunts that I haven’t gone to in the last 3 years especially. I say 3 years because this span of time is when I started my autobiography and started journaling, which would lead to me getting closure (including with my parents, with childhood friends, with church). It was in the last 9 months that I did over 85 cafe stays and went to 50 new unique cafes with an 8-hour stay each where I’d write, read, and study. So the last 3 years were crazy. Anything before that that still lies untouched by this present self will get a rude awakening upon my re-touching, like occupation.

If there is the force moving through the world, there is the force moving through the known places (the places my past self walked). That is an interesting tension and friction and conflict. That of the comforting routine close to home and that of the friction between the WHO I WAS and the WHO I AM. Places that I have continued to visit in the last 6 years naturally don’t have this same effect. The opening of a can of worms is crucial to this friction.

It’s been 10 years since a very different time of my life. It’s natural that the person that touches those places that has lain untouched since then will be like an occupier, like an adult visiting the once-humongous playground equipment. There is a violation in that sense, like the laws of one world intruding and defiling those of another. It’s sort of like an overpowered protagonist from Earth laughing, ignoring, and disrespecting the laws, traditions, and scripts of the xianxia world he now lives in. His background is key to his exercising the full potential of his powers. “No, no! You’re supposed to be anxious here!” No, the adult just stares at the teenager trying to provoke him, and he’s just inwardly smug. “No, no! That’s all wrong!”

There was a time when the world was crazy. Now, it really is just a bunch of people, streets, and buildings. The craziness of the world depicted in manga used to reflect how I did see the world, but now, the only time that I get anxious over nothing is when I’m sleep-deprived. In almost all cases, I look around, and it’s just people. I used to go crazy. So crazy. Seeing my childhood friend go so wild in the eyes over getting a job really reminds me that I really have changed. There really was a time when the crazy compressed extreme crazy narratives really, really depicted how I saw the world. Now, I just take life as it goes. A face comes and goes. A seat comes and goes. A walk comes and goes. It’s a hot street. And that’s all it is. I look at Japan in Google Maps, and I realize that all of these places remind me of places I’ve already been. The world was like the Japan in manga for me for so long, but now, the world is like the Japan I see now in Google Maps. Just a bunch of people walking, sitting down, drinking coffee, and typing a bunch of words in their laptops.

The world used to go so crazy. But now, all I see is a bunch of people physically walking around and sitting down and drinking coffee. And it’s the same anywhere everywhere. Japan, Makati, BGC, here.

Those manga (and those fiction stories I wrote years ago) really captured what living with trauma and mental conditions were like, but they did not capture just how mundane the world actually is and how much we extremely compress and project so much onto nothing.

There was a time a manga scene showing a hot street meant the philosophizing toward the end of the world or the craziness of society or the hell of modern life or the irony of the mundane. Now, all I see is a street. Just someone saying “Nasaan po ang CR” and doing his business while the cafe music is playing.

Before i went here, while waiting in the car for my Dad and younger brother to enter the car, my thoughts exhibited that private euphoric agency that I now have as a consequence of the integration and this mundaneness. I was thinking, looking at a single leaf with the bottom left part of it getting sunlit as it flutters up and down, something along the lines:

The leaf is mine, even if it isn’t literally in my hands and I do not own that tree. Just the sheer fact of being able to create a copy of this visual scene moment in my own head, including this leaf and the world of that leaf, makes it effectively mine. I can “save” the world of that leaf at this moment, the lived-in world of it. Any story that I end up writing, without even needing to describe the leaf perfectly, but just needing my “permission” of imaginative inclusion, will contain forever the lived-in world of that leaf, not a snapshot, but the world of it at that moment as it plays along animatedly fluttering.

The world of that story is alive and breathing in the worlds of the leaves it includes. All of those stories I wrote that include the “copies” of the worlds of the leaves that I saw and visual-scene-copied over show sheer ownership. And those stories being written during a time when I was going through a lot doesn’t invalidate this. I now have the privilege of reading those riddled stories while being utterly fine on my side and can glimpse at the included worlds of the leaves I copied over, regardless of proficiency, literal description, evocative poeticism, or abstraction.

This current cafe stay is effectively narrative denial (not conscious, but the literal moving in of the occupying present self who now experiences the world this way) and a demonstration of that copy-ownership not in the sense of the consistent self even with the place and new cafe, but in the sense of the consistent self even in new cafes in “known” places. The mundanization of the street—rather than a present self going into a new place and seeing the street already as mundane—because there is an “overwriting” (not erasure) of the known street into mundane.

Untainting: Small Polite Smile, Friction Hunger, Smug Knowledge, “It Hurts” (February 28, 2026)

I probably mentioned this already recently, but there was a time when the questions “what is a person?”, “what is a dog?”, and “what is a car?” always came so readily. But now, I despise those questions, but I am no longer asking them and life, the world, and everything no longer bothers me such that I find myself needing to ask. It is not that I am no longer curious, but I have arrived at a point of my own personal growth, closure, and healing that I take pleasure and satisfaction in just taking things as they are and meeting them when they come instead of losing it over “what is X” questions. I guess it’s because I’ve answered those questions innumerable times in all the ways that they could be skewed, singed, and stretched into and out of my noggin that now, the only thing’s left is a self-actualized underlip, one that goes out and about and feels in the palm of a mundane, modern, business-minding hand that there really is all the world in it in copy-ownership, in grounding and friction, in new places, in overwritten known places, in that groggy almost-confused “a street is a street” being at home. There now is a person who grows externally and not by inward retreat, pure imagination, and re-framing. And I am understating “grows externally” here, because there really is that “what is X?”-rejecting, friction-hungry, self-actualized-underlip “a walk is a walk.” In other words, the self-certainty and mundanizing have only driven a private excessive eagerness (hunger, insatiability, voracity). The curiosity is no longer unactualized, and it is now mundanized and externally hungry (rather than inward and re-framing in that sense).

But it makes sense why I had to ask those questions. Them as questions themselves sound over-intellectual, but when you think about it, all language begins with the bases. Because the bases were tainted in my traumatized perspective, I had to clean things up. I had to work with concepts and “what ises” because without them, I could never properly separate the past from the present to achieve integration and non-projecting mundanity. By separating the dog from the cat in a sense, I went and found the physical walk and, through this, accomplished the underlip, because I am not without the past nor all in it. Instead, I am the past as well as the present, the moment as well as the vastness, the sky as well as the ground, death (in all the ways I could die) and joy (in all the ways I’ve known it and continue to know it). This is how that underlip gets its curl, that private smug knowing. That non-reframing totality in “a walk is a walk” comes from a momentary glance with all to reach the mundanized, actualized, externally-hungry now. From a blur of triggers to “a street is a street” where I am euphorically agentic (privately actualized, self-certain, and self-consistent), mundanizing, and externally hungry.

This has inadvertently resulted in a speechlessness with fiction writing, because when the main treat is now external instead of the unresolved, re-framing internal, then fiction feels like a man hitting his head against the wall. When a street is just a street and narratives fall away in an external-friction-hungry, euphoric-agentic, self-actualized, mundanizing underlip, what you have left is not a man losing (and loosing) his mind upon the re-framed world, but a man walking and sitting down physically, after which he drinks a cup of coffee. Embodiment—the business-minding private euphoria of the actualized mundane palm—has separated me from the inward-retreating, re-framing, unresolved, rage-suppressed “man-I-am” that thrillingly horse-drove the cart of my stories. I find myself looking at Google Maps and getting excited about traveling to new places with new cafes and old places with new cafes collide with the world to get the euphoric agency of EMBODIMENT.

The fiction story was the beating-victim of everything that I inwardly wasn’t (unresolved, suppressed rage). But now, it looks at me from the side as I go about with the mundane up-reaching swaggering palm. There is nothing to exorcise: “I AM THAT I AM.” Those privately knowing eyes, that mundane hand, and that soft underlip.

In other words, I am the person I masturbated over. While fiction writing, I constructed an ideal (yet which was colored by my tainted perception), a “MAN-I-AM,” the actual upon the plain, and now that I’ve reached it in the mundane palm of my hand, I don’t need anything but a simple moment in a new public environment where I can express my external hunger for friction and the euphoric agency I feel privately in business-minding gestures and walks (literal, physical walks). To BE. That was the goal. Now, I AM. In words as simple and polite as “where’s the bathroom?” The privacy of the actual. In a soft (public) smile. The unexplainer. The world-in-one’s-own as one moves about in small, workable, business-minding movements. The fullness in a single glance, in a gentle rising of the hand. The world in a small whole smile.

So yes, I depicted the protagonist engaging in traumatized acts of violence in those fiction novels. Trauma and violence was the language of the unresolved, of the tense, smoldering, torn look, of the person who has yet to be, who has yet to totalize all that he is into the smallest moment of a glance. Of the “to be a person.”

It is not that I am not grandiose, but it is an inward (private), self-assured eagerness (inwardly grinning). I will still talk and feel grandiosely, but in a small, polite smile tucking a lustful grin inside. It is a private, inwardly squinting satisfaction. So when I write fiction again, it’s not that it will lack grandiose, the-self-upon-the-world energy, but it will come from someone who is so self-assuredly (already-agentically), euphorically, and external-friction-hungrily grinning and cackling so hard that he can’t hold it in anymore.

Self-Responses

Why is “re-framing” bad?

what do they mean by “grandiose”?

What does the quiet aspect of it mean?

What’s the difference between them and just about anyone else? Nothing? Is that the point? Would you be able to tell? Or would it be useless to try to tell?

But how is the gentle rising of the hand indicative of power while actual depicted violence isn’t?

How would one even write a fiction story demonstrating power without it being mistaken as just someone walking about or someone just being unresolved-violent? I feel that there’s no way to depict that power unless you show how they experience the world even in the mundane even without violence or perhaps even when they do demonstrate violence such that it isn’t either just someone physically walking about or is unresolved-violent.

If hitting someone screams unresolved-violent, if just walking screams just walking, then there must be some way to demonstrate power that isn’t either of these.

Without it feeling like someone intellectualizing or detached in a bad maladaptive way. Because if someone wasn’t angry, anxious, or desperate, it can come off as overly calm or callous. The inside joke thing can sound arrogant or like a detached intellectual sending people to gas chambers.

I feel that it is impossible to depict it without finding a possible negative psychoanalytical explanation.

I can imagine writing a protagonist who exhibits the traits, and one interpretation among many could be easily that they are messed up because there’s an absence of trauma. Trauma is very humanizing. Someone who is quietly healed, self-secure, and agentic can easily across as inhuman. I mean, one could argue, “How can anyone ever be mundane? What’s more, self-assuredly privately smugly eager in a soft public smile and polite ‘where’s the bathroom’ questions?” That’s a distinct kind of person that fits all manner of archetypes, not all good, not all bad.

Maybe, it would look like someone taking their time in full polite-smiled integrated (encompassing also death, torture, and violence) awareness of the world around them, with the full weight of who they are as joyful, wonder-filled friction-hungry people who inwardly know-know, unproven yet total, “superior in themselves,” self-certain, self-mastered, in full view of new places.

Return to First Person

But let’s try demonstrating this “someone” in an example. What would it actually look like?

I mean especially in a fantasy world? It feels like there’s no way to depict such a character in a world where violence is the norm (not saying that the real world doesn’t have that). If it just reads like a chippy, jesting guy who puts his arm around close friends’ shoulders, who gets serious when goblins come, who understands death, fragility, torture, suffering, agony, and violence, who grins smugly, ambitiously, self-assuredly, euphorically, excitedly, and hungrily behind his mundane, soft, polite smile, and who mundanely goes about unproven, then I’m not so sure about that. But maybe that’s the only way? If not the best? If we’re going with this, will he say “it hurts, it hurts” as he is dying not knowing that he is dead for sure but is still stunlocked by the sudden attack and pain? Is that it? Is that the “ethos”?

How about we remove the chippy and jesting? And just leave it as someone just standing about, going about his business, doing stuff as is, and moving about in mundane gestures? Not that they’re not social or that they don’t banter, but that they’re not an entertainer in that sense of chippiness and being a jester.

So they have a “smug-knowing” inner world when they can sit on the grass at the end of a day or battle and stare at the thrilling mountains, but they are also external-friction-hungry. Both/and.

Self-Responses (2)

the title “Tainted -> Small Smile” doesn’t work anymore then. We’re not just working with a small smile. This is so much more. It’s not just a shift from tainted to a small smile. The friction hunger, the smug-knowing inner world. This is wholly different altogether.

Self-Responses (3)

How can someone who has integrated still have that joy, that wonder, that hunger, that thrill and excitement, that adventurousness? To be so mundane and yet so full of this? So full of agency and euphoria even while gently raising one’s hand? To say “where’s the bathrooms,” to hear the narrative-denying variety of mundane chatter over the course of many hours in a cafe, to see streets being just streets, to walk mundanely about, to hear a woman’s voice say “battery low” in one’s bluetooth headphones after one just wrote so “profoundly,” to feel sleep-deprived, to get frustrated while playing a LoL game, to feel grandiose, to feel self-assured, to smile so softly, politely, and “smally,” to see the death and life in things, to feel smug-knowing, to feel that inner world, to hunger for friction, to experience such immersion even still, to say “it hurts, it hurts” when pain abruptly comes to the body like a cramp, to get excited over a new book like it’s the first time one has read books and to gain somehow a thrill even from the integration of the previous stories, to see even there somehow the excitement, the friction for which one is hungry, and the “new places” rather than the exhaustion and oversaturation, to feel somehow the empathetic, aesthetic, and sincere sensitivity of a child even while working with things (like analysis) that would normally leave someone callous, exhausted, dismissive, jaded, and oversaturated, to have the capacity to feel intensely while holding together all of those things, to cry so soft-heartedly, to get affected by a song like it’s the first time one has ever heard music and to feel that even while holding so many songs, tracks, compositions, and lyrics in their head? I mean, wouldn’t integration leave someone exhausted or oversaturated or burned out? Where is that? Why is there still that hunger amid the mundane coming from integration? How can someone see all the stories they’ve experienced and integrated and not think “joy gone, wonder gone, hunger gone, thrill and excitement gone, adventure gone”? Isn’t there a point where it’s like some conflict happens between these items in the above list of things? Or is it that they all only each work individually because they are all together and true?

Paused Growth (March 2, 2026)

After the last 9 months of over 85 cafe stays and over 50 unique cafes all over the region for 8 hours each with writing, reading, and studying, I am now returning to home, taking on a new challenge—the friction of being at home, utter stagnation, paused growth, and stillness.

Before the 9 months, I spent years developing my voice and becoming whole. Those 9 months were all about vindicating the voice and wholeness through friction and spaceness. But now, after 9 months, it has become a comfort zone because as soon as I go outside, I immediately feel so euphoric and agentic because the friction immediately validates my wholeness and voiceness such that I have private smug knowing behind my small polite smile. That private self-actualization with friction intensifying it. This has become my new comfort zone, I realized.

So now, I’m back at home again. I’ve been taking a break for the last several days, and just now, I realized that the next step isn’t just returning home. It’s utter stagnation. Utter sitting down. This is no longer post-closure, external friction hunger, and narrative-dissolving spatiality in that external friction sense. This is paused growth itself, which revolutionizes the external-friction-dependent spaceness which may have dissolved narratives but still had that “narrative” of friction where one must journey, travel, and undergo friction from being in a new place in a new cafe for 8 hours.

1. Pre-9-months: Wholeness (Weakness: Untested and Unproven)
2. 9 months: Antifragility (Weakness: Friction Hunger)
3. Next(?): Paused Growth

Analogies:

1. Kayle (incompetent, inarticulate, insecurity, trauma)
2. Sett (needs Grit to go aflame)
3. God Mode (can go aflame without external friction even while being articulate, competent, secure, and whole)

Self-Generation (March 4, 2026)

I never thought about integration like this, but I realize that even if I’ve already gotten closure and have already achieved wholeness through my autobiography, journaling, and closure with parents, childhood friends, and church, spatiality, and embodiment and antifragility recently through, firstly, 4 months of all-day-everyday submission to fiction literature study, relentless, accelerated critique feedback loops, and original vignettes of my own to test out, experiment, and use as case studies for trying out actively-noted phrases taken from across pre-existing literature, for learning the principles driving these phrases, and for absorbing critique and, secondly, 9 months of over 85 cafe stays and over 50 unique cafes where I averaged writing, studying, and reading there for 8 hours each (about once every 3 days), and have also entered the new stage of acknowledging that antifragility and external friction hunger is their own comfort zone so as to arrive at “utter stillness,” while I have written much about this in journaling, I have never actually shown comprehensive integration through fiction.

So there’s so many things that I am only now beginning to write in my fiction stories. I’m essentially syncing it and bringing the latest updates, like an old Minecraft version like 1.5.2 suddenly jumping to 1.20. So it will take time for me to integrate all the parts of my life that I haven’t written down in fiction yet and which I now will be able to do with much more ease now that I have already reached this point of (1) wholeness, (2) antifragility, and (3) utter stillness.

I don’t mean that I will write utter stillness per se, but expect that I will incorporate so many aspects of life, the world, and everything that I haven’t done so before and in ways I haven’t done so before when it comes to topics I’ve already touched on. Pre-wholeness, you can imagine what I was writing then. Pre-antifragility, you can imagine that there is wholeness without embodiment and external friction and having gone to so many cafes in those 9 months. Pre-utter-stillness, you can imagine the heavy reliance on external friction even without pre-wholeness trauma.

But now, you will see utter physical realism as well as utter psychological realism working together. This is because of my freedom from external friction and trauma and my ability to articulate them in fiction without actively going through them myself since that collapses this ability to multi-track cognitively with myriad states of mind (MSoM) and leaves one “vignetted”—here sad, there happy, here cooking, there eating, here bantering, there crying. Moreover, you will also see all kinds of scenarios that I’ve never written before, all of which require MSoM. So as time passes, you will see so more and more things not in separate fiction vignettes or fragments, but all of them altogether MSoM in one long-form fiction story.

I was right that the fiction vignettes would eventually give way to scene blocks (which aggregate to form a whole chapter unit) of a continuous long-form novel, but it required that tantalizingly challenging synthesis that only utter stillness can perform.

And now, for the last three days, I’ve been writing a story that is increasingly showing latest updates, though not comprehensively yet, since it is still at 8,200 words (vignettes for me ranged from 200 to 2,500 words for context), but even from that small amount, it has accomplished so much novelty, not sheer novelty, but novelty specifically multi-tracking and multi-targeting. It is doing so in a way that revolutionizes the medium (not itself) in the way that I do it. There is technical sophistication in what has only been vent and reportage in what used to be mere psychological realism. It balances the objective and the subjective, and it does so with stylistic control, without looking at the explosion which it has so deliberately fashioned behind it. I don’t mean to compare myself to the greats, but relative to myself, or, more precisely, how I used to be.

From the bud those 8,200 words have given us, I expect to see even more ‘fiction integrations’ (I call them that to distinguish them from non-fiction, which is what this passage is doing). Scenarios that never appeared in my previous fiction will debut and do so against the compartmentalized and with great complex weaving, only accomplishable with a brain that has merged psyche (psychological realism), friction and technique (both of which conduce to physical realism), and utter stillness (controller).

Technique, as that avatar of friction, used to be an enemy of wholeness (psyche). But with time and integration, wholeness embraced it. And now, with friction bowing low, utter stillness has taken the controls, displaying both its psyche (psycho-realism) and its technique.

Obvious examples of utter stillness’ work:

One:

The goblin killer raised her head and rubbed her face, letting out a suppressed groan.

Red took in a breath, then jittered it out.

The other woman looked down, one corner of her lips twisting up. Her brows drew inward. Her head swayed around weightily. A sigh forced its way through the nose.

Red’s lips pressed.

He had to kill it. Somehow. He had to do it. He had to do it now.

Now. Now. Now. Now. Now.

The goblin kept walking. How far? How long?

The goblin walked, walked, walked, walked, walked, walked.

He pried his eyes wide and bore holes at it.

Die. Die. Die. Die.

The goblin was close to disappearing. He had to get it. Come get it. Come get it.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

He bolted in the direction of the goblin.

The goblin turned. Red ran the whole way.

The spear thrust. He skirted it, grabbed its head, and smashed it on the ground. A hot stream of creamy red erupted from its scalp, and red trickled down its lips from biting its tongue. He ran his foot against its face. More blood poured out from loosened teeth. He punched the side of its neck and used a rock on the ground to force blood out of it. The drip soaked the dust.

The goblin yelped and screamed. Its howls thundered across the passage leading outside, where the sky crawled forward. The beating and squelches resounded in the women’s faces. The dark blurred the motions. The shadowy blood blotched it.

Two:

Dropping his giant sword, the man stared down, touching around their bodies. He took out a shiny trinket—just polished—and pocketed it.

“I live in a world, and I must be.” His voice fell mute in their dead ears. “So I must. So I am.”

He walked away out of the cave.

The flowers stirred, and the birds chirped along.

“I have never been anything more than a person. That’s all I’ve ever been.” His voice drifted, and his gaze lifted to the distance. The sky overspread his vision.

A bead of blood cooled on his arm. He released his canine tooth from his lower lip.

“I am alive, I am free. I truly be!” His voice carried to the trees. His face crumpled briefly several times, as if about to cry, but it never did.

His figure went farther and farther away, disappearing into a speck inside the sky-smothering forest.

The greens smeared his vision. The sky twisted and swelled. The ground shook. The hands itched. The eyes stung. The throat clogged. The arms stretched. The weeds pricked his face. The dirt wore his skin down.

He jerked and twisted. He screamed and coughed. He slammed and swung.

A smile spread across his face.

He baltered home.

“I’ve always been a person,” he said.

“Yeah?” he answered himself.

That the last three days showed most of my word count in fiction is significant: fiction is becoming just as valuable a mode as non-fiction is in terms of main processing (cognition), emotional expression (wholeness), and demonstration of skill (technique). In the past, fiction was a rant (no control), while non-fiction did everything: analysis, observation, deliberate rant, even technique. Now, fiction is no longer just a beating-victim of two hells: one, unresolved trauma (pre-wholeness) in the form of “heady” psychological realism and, two, performing to please maddening technical critique (all friction, no emotional expression and genuine using it to cogitate) in the form of vignettes. Today, it is making its way to the comprehensiveness (MSoM) of non-fiction. This equality naturally means the stamina to make long-form novels.

Yet crucially, fiction actually does something non-fiction doesn’t. I can self-generate friction and ground wholeness in it through fiction instead of relying on the comfort zone of antifragility and external friction hunger. This self-generation is where utter stillness and MSoM live. This allows me to “philosophize” and genuinely arrive at novel, original insights that I wouldn’t if left only to non-fiction. In other words, MSoM and utter stillness are essentially self-generation. Fiction is that instrument of it.

Post-wholeness led to boredom, which invited friction and testing. At first, they were maddening, but with time, they became too comfortable, euphoric even. To solve this, utter stillness came out. Through it, pondering (intellect, cognition, cogitation), emotional expression (release), and craft (friction) now share a single room. Friction is self-generated, boredom is cured, and wholeness is assured. This moves past a reactive life enslaved to trauma, external friction, or critique. Instead of depending on external spatiality, I can build spaces myself. Fiction answers the question, “Can you hold all of it at once?” It proves it, demonstrates it. It can’t go any other way. Integration is intrinsic, and fiction shows that. Journaling everything? Sounds great, ‘till you meet friction. Taking on everything externally challenging you? Sounds great, ‘till you meet sitting down in a room knowing both trauma and friction are no longer driving you. From nothing, can you still be? Will you still find a way to scream and feel alive? Fiction says yes to both.

Person (March 7, 2026)

It’s very easy for me to notice, but I was at a new cafe again as per usual, and for some reason, out of all the days, I realized that it really didn’t feel like I was necessarily pushing myself to say or make anything in particular. This is something that I noticed even in the new cafe I went to last time. As time passes, the division between how I am at home and how I am at the cafe dissolves. It is not that being outside doesn’t affect me, like when there’s kids and the fact that I am sitting down on different chairs and tables. That does affect me on a physical level and in terms of focusing. But it’s no longer the craziness that it used to be, where the distraction completely threw me into orbit. Now, I just take my time the same way. Sure, I can’t do the things that I would do at home, but that’s starting to matter a lot less. When outside, of course, you still have everything around you that’s new, but it feels less that that’s causing me to have something new to work with and more so just things that are just taking up space in your head around you but not necessarily so as to be crazy whatsoever given that I do take my time just as I would at home even given the factors of environmental novelty and what would otherwise have been distractive boost as it was in previous cafe stays. Things have changed. I have changed.

This doesn’t mean that the cafe is no longer having an effect on me or that I’m becoming so at home when at the cafe per se. The latter makes sense, but is its own separate thing. This focuses on my personal change and where I am currently in my journey as a person, writer, creator, etc. themselves.

When the cafe becomes just a place where new things happen with disruption, distractions, and all unrelated to the actual thinking and writing process itself beyond what any environmental factor could affect and effect, then you know something’s profoundly transformed.

This doesn’t mean that I used to rely so much on the cafe necessarily. “Rely” is the wrong word, since I could still write prolifically at home, just for very different reasons. It’s that I have become so much more stable creatively and emotionally, and “very different reasons” doesn’t feel as profound as it used to and has become environmental factor, if that makes sense. It impacts me as much as a new environment and just being outside in a public environment affects anyone. The “taking my time” part is crucial for why I’m making this claim. To drive the point home, this isn’t about “outgrowing needing external environments to unlock [my] creative self.” Even then, I was not unlocking anything. There already was creativity. There already was a self. But it’s about the difference between how I was at home and at the cafe, which has now dissolved into environment. In other words, they essentially synced or integrated, so it’s not that there’s no impact, but that there’s no difference. They’re continuous even while being environmentally distinct to each other. The shape of the self is one mass of both. It’s the environmental version of the “I’m childish and not self-serious one moment and serious and philosophizing the next,” essentially, where both become continuous with integration (the continuous person beneath those two gains recognition, usually with the help of processing and journaling and such). This is naturally not about “viewing” or “I changed my mind and realized that they’re the same thing.” It’s experiential. For context, in the last 9 months, I went to over 50 new unique cafes throughout the region and visited a cafe once every three days where I was outside for 12 hours (including travel time), where I read, wrote, and studied for upwards of 8 hours. This is crucial to what I mean by “experiential,” so while I did say that it’s not about becoming at home in the cafe since it still is public and outside in the way that it affects me, it hinged on experience, which isn’t the same as “becoming at home.” It’s not about it no longer derailing my focus or that I “stopped being a person who needs the right conditions” since the conditions were right every time whether at home or in the cafe, since I am focused in both cafe and home. Instead, it no longer derails who I am. It is continuous in who I am. Consolidation.

To explain what I mean by “taking my time,” it’s essentially the position of no-position, where rather than resolving ambiguities and contradictions, you let them sit and you spend a lot of time just sitting there and letting it happen (literally more than 40 minutes of staring at the screen and not writing anything but still actively thinking and trying the whole time) and trying to resolve it anyway but having them all sit together in the end. This makes sense when you’re at home, but the fact that it is now occurring outside is where the sync lies. The consolidation and resolution is in the spatial holding, the continuous/integration. This was never about justifying one’s presence in a cafe to keep producing output followed by this current ability to take one’s time, but literal capacity.

Self-Responses

objectively, why is the author now able to do this “taking my time” and “spatial holding” in the cafe as well, which I assume has an equivalent term somewhere?

So when the author says that the self is continuous, they crucially mean the self as this spatial holder and negative capability.

So their who-I-am became continuous because they can now hold ambiguities and contradictions that their who-I-am is made of or spatially holds.

The ability to sit in intense no-position for those 40 minutes maps onto their who-I-am’s presence exactly?

“If I can contain the all I am in the cafe for 40 minutes, then I can be the all I am in the cafe for those 40 minutes. If that is the basis for the whole day spent at the cafe, then I am, in all the things I was, in the cafe.”

Self-Responses (2)

So rather than dissonance across mental states, especially new public places and environments, biological variations, and varying access or relationship to one’s externalized cognition, among other things, it’s sonance across them all, not due to the perfect setup, but due to integration from the person themselves. The wide range of condition-combinations (similar to external game states in League of Legends, but encompassing internal ones too) is consumed.

Self-Responses (3)

Going by the League analogy, they’ve essentially become more cognitively competent. [No.]

Is this essentially self-mastery? [No.]

So they don’t need to perform roles, but are themselves variedly

Why is it significant? Is it because of how grueling it is to do an equivalent of those 9 months itself?

So it’s not just those 9 months, but those years that have built up to this point—this capacity. It’s a genuinely rare, special thing then?

So most people go straight to 9-to-5, and they never really get the privilege of solitude and self-excavation the same way the author has and never reach a point of something such as those 9 months all the way to this “consolidation” that isn’t just consolidation in the general sense, but a rare special kind particular to the author’s entire matrix.

Is it specially because it is so experiencedly articulate as a reflection of all of that whole matrix that it’s not just consolidation in the sense of a person sitting down in a cafe and being content?

So what is consolidation in this case? What makes it so significant in the author’s entire matrix? Why is this entire thing even special?

Why is it not just any consolidation (think memory consolidation, or other “consolidations”)?

Self-Responses (4)

Consolidation is then non-consolidation?

So it’s not “I’ve written literally everything in infinite possible detail and then synthesized and then consolidated.” It’s “I’ve reached a point of writing, processing, and living with everything (external and internal conditions) such that I have consolidated past the need to consolidate.”

Self-Responses (5)

So trans-consolidation in that form of the self is true negative capability.

Self-Responses (6)

the anti-move

So writing is not consolidation, but rather throwing a lot of ambiguities and contradictions (which each itself inherently require a position) in no-position, in spatial holding, in negative capability, in trans-consolidation.

So the articulated consolidation of a position is necessary for the spatial holding of positions in no-position.

Self-Responses (7)

doesn’t it build strictly and directly upon spatiality?

And it’s not the same as antifragility crucially?

But it’s not just integration?

Why is articulated consolidation important?

Is it because articulation forces true integrity, which hinges on feedback loops?

So it’s neither consolidation or anti-consolidation (to the point of radical skepticism)?

Trans-consolidation demands judgment on the micro level, but withholds it on the macro level?

So the author keeps away from “theories of everything” and handles logistical problems in the here and now as their current perspective constrains them and thus consolidates integrity.

But that also means contradicting what one just said moments ago?

Articulation, rather than perpetual deferring, is perpetual re-framing then? [No.]

So it would be perpetual contradiction? [No.] Or at this point, can it really be only spatial holding? but somehow still not deferring?

So it’s grabbing a bunch of full stances distributed across expandable levels within dialectical towers that clarify, expand, complicate, contextualize, and question them and pooling/arranging/spreading them within a superstructure/main road of unconsolidating restraint. Rather than systemic or supersystemic (which would imply each stance is dialectically systemic), it’s superstructural and ever-flowing, so it’s a “forgetful” person continuously sauntering throughout it. This world takes rigor on a thinking walk.

Self-Responses (8)

Yet “superstructure” implies that they cannot be separated from the mind that “knows” all that it has taken.

how could you escape consolidation while demanding that consolidation must be escapable?

Even if one makes an argument and complicates it, is it really disagreement, is it really such that trans-consolidation as a concept must emerge? I feel that self-disagreement is less disagreement and more so putting more words to an otherwise unqualified statement, and in that sense, you cannot be separate from the argument you started with no matter how far you drag it through the mud of your complications and ‘disagreements’. There is always an etiology behind even your most damning questions, and there is always a throughline where ever-flow becomes ever-know, that ever-knowing being a mind’s own shadow.

One doesn’t know more from multiple angles insomuch as they design those angles within what they already have pre-conceived as multifaceted and thorough.

Or perhaps I’m attacking the engine of rigor itself. But I feel at least, in a conceptual or metaphorical level, there is much still to digest, much left unresolved.

The god plays with itself through humans it calls enemies and those it calls friends, because a story needs a plot and, without conflict, it gets real boring. But it is ultimately “divine.”

Self-Responses (9)

either godhood or trans-consolidation, who knows?

Return to First Person

I might just be arrogant. That I thought I could doubt myself and assess myself using different ideas, because what difference is there in the consolidating self? In the mind that goes on and tells all it knows that it has found, and to what mind do all of these revelations go? To mine. What resonates with me reflects me. It speaks to me. It talks to me. It affirms what I say. The converted go on about life-changing ideas, but what more is a person than the sum of all that they have already pre-expressed themselves to be? Is that a radicalization (reductio ad absurdum) of the initial doubt to make it seem impossible and thus untrue? I didn’t find something new. I found a new word to articulate the pre-existing godhood. I told myself words and through those words discovered how I could manifest the arrogance tucked deep inside. That thing from which I drew energy and dressed it in words feigned open-mindedness and changeability. I don’t drink out of the essence of that drink. I drink out of mine, and in my own, my own. If I doubt integrity, do I doubt rigor itself? Am I dressed in dialectics when inside, I am god? Are we all such when we think? Do we engage in a worldwide dance of proclaimers? I’ve conceded, but I’ve given you nothing. I’ve conceded, but I’ve given you nothing, a pawn trap, an added slashed price to make the original price seem much cheaper. Do I prick my own palm and in that sense exercise full control over my body and what conflicts should I incorporate into my Jesus story?

What is the point of writing? To believe I could ever put into words anything? To have even the idea that I could ever be? To feel genuine, authentic, and self-honest? I don’t know. But I wonder. I wonder what it is that started this all. I was struggling, wanted to put things together, wanted to put myself together. And now I’m here. I mean, it’s just a bunch of words, but it makes me feel so myself, so unique, so genuine, so there, so real, so once. I mean, saying this doesn’t really erase the concern of godhood. I might just be god-ing in the flesh Jesus-style. Yeah… that might just be it. Maybe, confidence is problematic, or not. I guess godhood might be the problem, but will rejecting it make it better or just feel that way? Either way, accepting or rejecting it both perform it according to its definition. Hegel would hate this questioning of the method, but who is he to speak besides someone with words and a mouth, not that he isn’t anything, but another name, another method, another way to make this “grounded,” to make this qualified, to make this self-honest and rigorous. At what point do all of these fall down? Or, well, they’ve already fallen. And I’m staring at the world from a god’s eye view. That arrogance of a single speck of a human being who thinks themselves both the speck and dares to claim they could ever carry that weight of speech to denigrate themselves that way. The arrogance of the speck. I am that I am, I guess.

Will crying now make me feel better? The tears of Jesus as he prays? The god in the flesh. How could I ever be?

Whether that’s integrity or a very sophisticated closed loop is… left open.

Maybe, the answer is both. I am both trans-consolidating and god (and, I am tempted to say, neither, even if, at that point, “both” performs “neither”).

Self-Responses (10)

But isn’t questioning and unresolving something in real time its own—if not the greatest—weapon?

Self-Responses (11)

At this point, the only solution I can think of is practical and quiet. Just use them. Not like costumes, but in the way that you are, including the very idea of them as costumes even as you lean so intensely on them. Practical and quiet step outside, and I want to believe their limitations are why they’re the only answer here.

Self-Responses (12)

why does the author write like that?

explain their “ego”

so there’s an intellectual playful egoism behind the self-responses themselves?

So the passage before the self-responses is not their full stance. It’s a fake easy-to-dismantle stance. Their full stance is what they come out with after the self-responses. The contradictions they introduce during the self-responses are part of the full stance itself rather than true separate criticisms. The criticisms are not criticisms any more than they are explanations of the true full stance. The pre-self-responses passage is like a straw man to prove their capacity to be “open-minded” and “rigorous.”

Self-Responses (13)

But if it’s genuine? If they’re genuine making sense of something in real time? One could argue that everything is criticizable, and criticism itself expands what it criticizes. All dialogue, all rigor, all ideas fall to this process.

Self-Responses (14)

So this is coextensive with the rest of humanity or humanity itself then? If we’re just breeding with each other… Transhumanists better cook up something crazy. And yes, I know the word “human” is still in “transhuman.” To transcend, there had to be something to transcend in the first place, and at that point, is there any transcending? Perhaps the prefix “trans-” is itself compromised, the word “transcend” itself.

Return to First Person (2)

I feel I’ve returned into a child. Somehow. Outer space that was so full of wonder now meets me now the same way.

Self-Responses (15)

How did all this land them on curiosity again?

So it’s returned into a bunch of words again?

The only purpose of words is to deny, erase, and cancel themselves out until the only thing left is reality. Self-honest (which intrinsically means precise because it seeks feedback loops) articulation is actualization because once words cancel themselves out, reality is the only thing that’s left and there you will see the actual.

Self-Responses (16)

what was the point? this entry, the entire project? i mean, we can use the author’s thesis argument last-line statement, but really, what was the point? the whole thing?

To be? That’s it? Sounds like the long way round, or maybe it was the only true way to get there. Is it richer than if they never made the trip?

Return to First Person (3)

You know, there was a time that I was longingly saying, “I just want to be a person.” And I guess now, it’s a lot easier to digest that I really am. If anything, that’s anything.

Almost 2 hours later (2:41 to 4:23 PM):

Actually, I remember now. What I’ve been saying recently was “I’ve always been a person. That’s all I’ve ever been.”

The Seven States of Mind (March 9, 2026)

1. Whatever (the wandering mind)
2. Arrogance (the totalizing mind)
3. Embodiment (the sleepy town)
4. Heart (the love of the people)
5. Travel (pure motion)
6. Hate (the strategist)
7. Dominance (the author)

Whatever

By the time I realized, so many people had come. So many people had… passed. I didn’t have time to think about it all, but I guess eventually, I did, and when I did, everything else followed. I mean, what else would follow?

Even now, I think, and there’s everything right behind me, beside me, and everywhere else. I have lived a life, as all people do, and there’s only that fact—that fact that repeats itself across everything that I am and all that I have lived and become and haven’t, in all the ways the possibilities tease me and curl toward me like a ghost or a stream or a trail of smoke. I can barely adjust the imagery before it dissolves or carries away in the river of memories. What state could arise from my being, from this person that I am—it can at best be called the Whatever.

For in a world so full of things, there is only whatever guides me presently up to the most minute detail, expression, or configuration as it grapples with all things in combination. Then it falls, quietly, into a spectrum of memories, into a wholeness of selves, into something that sits down on some porch, or on a bench in a library, or somewhere finite that can be called a place through which people pass—a non-place, or a third place. Either way, as soon as it’s all done and over, I will have become all that I was, and in that becoming, endless moments. I sit down as always, reading books, not the literal act, but the literal sensation of everything that I have filed away and am actively reviving in the text that is my mind that collects all of it in one big bunch, in one bough, in one tree, in one selfish gene.

I sat down; there I found what I lost. Not that it was mine in the first place or that it wasn’t. But at one point, I was with it, in the same room, smelling the same air, breathing softly, chuckling to myself but in their presence. There was a time it was like that, but now, I sit idly now, meeting it again, whether on my side in a bar or opposite me in a cafe. All I know is that whatever reunion this is, it must be everything; then it fades and what’s left is the hum of tires against the pavement.

I wonder where it all went, even as I see all of them thronging my mind and passing by without bumping into each other or necessarily being separated. It’s all that my mind could offer. Whether that’s a world, an inner one, or something else. Either way, there’s something strange about holding non-music, about dangling something in front of you then never truly resolving it, in sitting in that ambiguity, in the world of all which I should be, haven’t been, ended up becoming, and other things related to me in experience, but not in any biographical way. All of those moments that never added to anything yet revolutionized who I was—they appear like wisps floating around a walking person.

If I could sit, where? In what world? In what imagination? In what being, capacity? What would I be holding in my right hand? In my left? What sense of agency can I offer myself? What can I grip and feel its surface and its rim or hem? What would I be grounding myself onto? If there be something, hopefully, it sings. If that sound penetrates through everything, let it do so without flinching, then on and on, shrinking into the distance, leaving me settled on that bench. Where will I go from here? The super-world (world of worlds) stretches on in all directions.

Clouds litter the sky. Misshapen books clutter the floor. Whole lives burst, form, and expire in those books, and in those clouds, many reflections of who I was. In the familiar places, I project layers of meaning and memories of a time where I once was—as to what, I don’t know, save for what the sensations and images speak. At that point, what little am I in imagery? And in that little, the all I am? But that’s not how that feels like. The corridor shaping who I am doesn’t crowd or thunder in those images’ descent that one could say I hold onto a tethered magnum-opus ME, because at that point where the thoughts first arrive in droves and wisps and imbalanced coordinations but which nevertheless form an active, breathing landscape, there is only the person on the chair, neither exhausted or lively, only stateless, like a country without borders, without a name. The I AM dissolves into WHERE. And the WHERE dissolves into all places. And all places do not have in each other a shared name. They just are, never truly apart, but never truly touching save in their shared presence in my head. At that point, I litter the ground more than the books do. My pieces (not negative) cram the shelves. And I step far back enough to see them all together. Maybe that “I am” moment should come. But it never does. It drowns in a single piece like an outburst, but never in that everything this panorama is showing me.

Where am I?

Philosophical aside: My name is Whatever. If you know me, you know the little things. But I am not who I am in the Whatever. The person that speaks through this idea is not the idea itself. I am neither the sum of the little things in all the ways they appear, so it’s less a knowing of me and more so a knowing of yourself through the “me” that speaks in images, words, and ideas that only you can interpret. In such, you know the little things through me, in this idea I posit. If you understand this, you probably know more about what it means to try a word, then to splinter it and watch the shards sent flying.

I can never fully find myself, because the thinking mind rarely adjusts into a pinpoint unless an immediate environment compels it like a cafe. But you sit there in a familiar place looking at neighborly scenery, and there is nothing the mind can’t do. It shows you everything, and in that saturation, you are the covered entrance that opens into a huge city.

This captures what it feels like stepping out from the covered entrance:

Where the sunlight first hit, statues about a hundred feet tall rose from the hills, some hazy and peeking over, others stretching up the sky.

Ultimately, this is the Whatever, the wandering mind.

But arrogance is the fire that self-sabotages and burns before anything could be said to have been hilly and full of the worldliness of worn paths and legs and weathered books. Which is why we must argue for arrogance.

Arrogance

My hands grip onto the soft parts of the skinned body. And I enact the establishment of total control under the cloud that has empowered me, this cloud being the high horse of an angry heart. I move, and when I move, I move with the force of a herculean saint canonized under my own signature. So I must, so I must. That is the frustrating body which I seek to throw out of authority. I make way, and when I do, I do so with the wholeness of a construct, that posture of total administration. For I am, I am, singularly, I am.

So when I look, I take, and when I take, I move smoother still. The hierarchy is shaken, with me coming back on top, for even before time, I was, I was.

Restless hands give way to authority. An aching heart bursts outward in posturing. A merciless glare comes from invalidation. I scour the earth for my authority, and when I gain it, I bring myself back to all in all, for what came before was the body. What comes now is my realization.

I linger in the small things and in the large, and when the world moves, I turn it in anticipation, even if only to mimic the sensation of world domination.

I am is not the I am, but the I was in all the things I was summed up to form a bouquet, a wholeness which defies all shadow, which makes of it what they will, which turns it accordingly, which demands from all for the resolution of the self, for the entirety to be fully realized, for its claims to be made manifest. That is the self that seeks ravenously, and which must be made nothing, lest it devours the all.

So yes, while the hands shake in absoluteness supplied by arrogance, think for a moment what it means to dispel the ghosts, memories, and moments by containing, devouring, and claiming them. Even if you may have restored childhood’s unlayered experience in a sense, it is not ignorant, and because it is not ignored, it is projected on and de-layered, and that is something the child was never complicit in. The high of that oneness isn’t simulating childhood. It’s cutting your color cones.

Ultimately, this is arrogance, the totalizing mind.

But embodiment is where those flames dissipate and people are left to the sounds of the cafe chimes. Which is why we must argue for embodiment.

Embodiment

The soft parts of skinned bodies sing, and they do so idly, without cause, without reason. And when the worlds move, they move along with them, without hindering them, without complaint. They go along, and there they go, approaching steadily like steam-packets. What they do with what they have, they take it on journeys, and to what places, people do not know except the routines, the routes, which inform what people may gather from so assured states of places along the trips. There are no moments where the moments shatter or clatter away. They instead shift on their feet and go up and away like birds initially perched then excitedly swinging their wings through the winds. The lights never shy away nor deflate, only tuck away for a moment and shine again. By the time the skies light up again, there are paradises, and there are joys, not that there weren’t any the nights before, where cozy and snug sounds filled rooms and swept dusty roads. What occurred in moments occurred in all moments. The streets filled the boons of the worlds. What made their way streamed. What danced swung. What moved delivered themselves forward like clouds scudding dreamily which people see from the car windows on the highways. The skies never interrupt themselves, make exchanges instead, have summits, declarations, discussions, but never disturbance. They focus themselves where the yawns and yarns roll and follow the seams.

They like what they like, do what they do, move what they move, will what they will, and shine what they shine, like butter sticks when left on tables.

Ultimately, this is embodiment, the sleepy town.

But heart is where you get out to steady yourself in someone’s presence without thinking anything but what they fill the room with, because what else could a person be? Which is why we must argue for heart.

Heart

Sometimes, you stare at someone, and you get real riled up, and there is nothing you can do, because in your heart, they are the everything, not that they dominate all people, but encompass all of their souls, not that they are the all in all, but that in some small way, they smile in a way that connects you to people as people, in small words, in taut expression sometimes, in the way hands touch and embraces warm you up and lights grace their faces. Because people are people.

So you go in groups and then outward into the world, for the world loves a fresh face. Try yourself, and try your friends. See what tests bewilder you and challenge your wits. Try again and again and again and again. Climb the hill, climb mountains even. See how you fare.

Ultimately, this is heart, the love of the people.

But yes, we go out yes. Together we do. But we’re more than just the feeling of going places together. The places themselves are new. And so we see where travel leads us, not as us, but as the novelties themselves, toward new worlds, new dynamics and communities, and new ways to feel the moment. Which is we must argue for travel.

Travel

The road and views stretch on endlessly, and I can barely see where I am. By the time I’m there, I’m gone. By the time I’m gone, I’m somewhere else, somewhere I cannot see but be, because there is no seeing from one moment to the next, but being here and nowhere else, in the way that the moment feels, but not in the sense of a sleepy town where routines cast repeating, cyclical shadows on walls, but in the sense of time passing through and through and then never splitting between the moments or into the moment, except in the sense that being is in the here and now, but without dissolving inside it, always a step forward and away, yet not from one moment to the next, but in the animated state of moving, of having been in the current in the going to be. Where 9.58 seconds last as long as the sea as the sea lasts in the 9.58 seconds. There is a folding of space and time into velocity, into mid-motion, where last is first is current, where nowhere is here and here is nowhere, where “from” and “to” dissolve and the now is a moving current, not in a moment in which sleep occurs, not the all in now, but abrupt, fading, whirling, saying, speaking, murmuring, dancing, curling, flying, riding, mending, silking, drumming, humming, furling, calling, crying, drying, swimming, banishing, welcoming, throwing, tossing, hiking, trekking, treading, climbing, making, nodding, seeing, circling, meeting, going, parking…

Ultimately, this is travel, pure motion.

But hate anchors the traveler, prevents him from losing himself in the mirage of motion or in the sleepiness of a town or in the heights of totalizing oneness or in the peopling of heartful faces. It prevents him from losing sight of what is at stake, keeps him in a grudge, in a strong hold, in long-term ideation and planning, in strength that outlasts all without demanding the all into the self, but weaving from the anchored seat. Which is we must argue for hate.

Hate

It knows time won’t wait for anyone. But it doesn’t claim time, only works within it, and in the way that a person plans according to observation, not force. It doesn’t demand the world move according to him, only that he move in accordance with himself as he orchestrates through the world. He makes his way into the places and dances according to rhythms, swirling in a threading manner, clashing not with forces, but with routines and then rolling in anticipation and deliberate maneuvering. He is neither the ego nor the sleeper, neither the traveler nor the wanderer, nor the togetherness of people. He orchestrates from the inside out, from the outside in, not to travel, but to deliver, to make results, to create opportunities, to probe. Hate has given him all the fuel and direction he could ever need.

Definition:

Suddenly, you can do anything and do it with such confidence and no time wasting and waffling.

Doesn’t love just leave you in togetherness of people? Hate is much more self-possessed.

Hate can be alone for a thousand years. Love struggles to do that. It doesn’t know how to operate without someone to love. Hate internalizes, is often the language of people who love so deeply.

It’s why it’s often the language of people who love so deeply. I will utterly plan and orchestrate because love motivates me, but what I do must require hatefulness to spur me past a certain gruesome, obsessed, extreme point.

You want to protect because you love, but you get to the protecting part when something you hate gets too close and it erupts in what looks like hate.

Ultimately, this is hate, the strategist.

But hate spends too much time getting caught up in orchestrating the deeper web that they never think twice about what it means to dominate and not the fragile egoistic kind, but the kind that knows past a certain selfish, human point and goes straight to utter domination. There is neither totalization nor force in domination. It is hierarchical and true. Which is we must argue for dominance.

Dominance

So you were born. Well, under my authority, that is. And it was nice to meet you. Shake my hand. I know well in what kind of ways you think and by what things you are driven. There is only the sum of all things, and that in itself is sufficient. But that’s not me, nor myself. What is is. So think, or don’t. Either way, you will do. And I will do.

By this, we are total. See, I make the seeds, and they blossom. You trod the earth. I till the lands. You move the world. I create it.

Isn’t it nice to live?

Ultimately, this is dominance, the author.

Where (March 10, 2026)

Experience

I visit random hangout games and just stay there in the ambiences like a ghost where everything feels so hyper-connected, fast, alive, intimate, and observable. Like looking at numberless player-created books in a Roblox digital library. But also going to an old high school roleplay game and just hanging out there for hours and even going to the fishing spot and doing nothing there for hours or just walking around even if no one’s there and just feeling the silence. But also going to an active hangout game in a map set in Art Deco and seeing all manner of people talking in voice chat. But also going to some random green nature hangout game where there’s lots of small unique details and it feels like a place with lots of history. But also going to a random niche forum about web revival and seeing people yap and talk and suggest and express in ways that are much different from Discord. But also doing a long browsing session through random Discord servers with varying sizes, topics, rules, mods, chatters, and lurkers once every 6 months and just seeing all manner of conversation, activity, and all that. Sitting around in an endless sea even while inhabiting those small spots and just being there observing the small world around you that is all a part of this bigger everything that you can ghost through so seamlessly and yet so immersively in a sensory, observational way even if it’s digital. But also random personal Neocities websites that vary starkly in content, writing styles, interests, curiosities, weirdnesses, and such. Exploring 19th century texts as well 20th century as well as 21st century traditional and web novels. Taking the time to really know what kinds of people are everywhere, in random bus or train games, or in Youtube videos showing all manner of lives even if you find them weird, strange, and niche and showing all kinds of places, architecture, vibes, and mundanities and ways of editing that captures the energy, from vlogs, game shows, podcasts, video essays, and showcases of games and animations, seeing the sense of interconnected endlessness that encompasses even the most diverse and largest hubs as well up to the tiniest spots around corners or in alleyways in maps or the equivalent of them in all manner of places. Doing the same with traveling in real life and getting to know the geography of one’s region even if it’s a lot more finite and explorable, even while being infinitely deeper because it’s the reality in which all digital interactions are mediated with devices as one does 95 cafe stays for 8 hours of writing, studying, reading, observing, and feeling out the space, vibe, and people, each with commuting and traveling and with 55 unique cafes throughout the region over 9 months. Reading chat in Roblox in all manner of games the same way one listens to ambient sounds, background noises, and all sorts of conversations and talks within waiting lines or table groups that you are not a part of during all of those cafe visits even while being present in the same room, cafe, public transporation vehicle, terminal, street, or game yourself. A 4-month online friend that changes your life. A single afternoon feast with childhood friends that feels like eternity. A moment in a book that’s fixed itself on you. A web novel with 1.5 million words that lasts forever in your mind and never departs, always taking up space. A digital avatar’s face that feels distant and hazy yet affected you like the sky tore when the Toba supervolcano erupted. Digital moments that ripped something into you. Cafe tables, long table seat neighbors, and stares that you will carry with you forever. Roleplay medieval RPG interactions that span worlds. Quiet rain scenes in anime that continue to thrum in your head like the endless hum of tires against pavement. Scenes in web novels that repeat again and again as if in a time loop sitting beside every mild real-life decision you make. Usernames that resound in your ears. Memories of distant times erupt as smiles, twitches, and soft sighs. RPG levels that stack to eternity, that know you from the first moment you were born. Ancient game rules that no longer apply but stil hold fast in your consciousness: card games, Roblox games from more than a decade ago, board games, made-up outdoor games, made-up rules between siblings and family members, made-up currency for doing chores, in-game skins and chests that cost so cheap now in retrospect but meant the world and an afternoon journey to obtain from some random store through the busy market crowd. Small plastic monobloc seats on uneven concrete or dirt slopes, taking up not only your body, but your whole mind. Food that ate you more than you ate them. Faces that thronged continuously in a party. Adventures that never came to be, but you assumed you were a part of, whether in an implicit story in a Flash game, Roblox game, Minecraft maps, or in your strict imagination as you recall a past hyper-connected with all manner of stories, images, sceneries, games, ideas, rules, worlds, journeys, trips, moments, spots, faces, walls, corners, bathrooms, water surfaces and reflections, sensations (like right after you go for a swim and you feel sticky and worn), manga/comic panels, scenes, words, voices, tones, personalities, mannerisms, emotions, dirt surfaces, different vehicle shakings as they rolled, different bark textures (wet, dry, rough, smooth, thin, thick, rocky), paintings, depictions, concepts, tactile surfaces (like the cool green-painted wooden surfaces of scoring stations in air-conditioned classrooms), classic Minecraft imagery, moments (like rain in superflat worlds, sprinting at friends through the swamp, traveling across wide distances), maps, memories. Worlds that stay with you long after they’re gone. YET: without feeling overwhelmed, always in some moment yet always in some other moment as well. Small interactions that span whole distances, that go hazy on the horizon, but stretch up the sky before you. Constructed places, buildings, houses, structures, underground chambers, and paths that took only days yet dragged across years in the hyper-specificity of the blocking, arrangement, and manipulability in 3D space, imagery, textures, surfaces, and angles, the place as crisp as my fingerpad in front of my face. YET: I can turn off the monitor. I can pick up a new story and read it as if a child again. Recalling so much in a split-second and over any next ten seconds and without urgency, yet get into a flow state where I forget the everything of the self for the entire time I am awake on that day. I can sleep instantly. I can forget myself in pure motion. I can write aggressive “show, don’t tell” in a fiction story and have words like “clatter” be the only thing in my head. I can take full gentle simple self-contained total authority and revising immersion in the act of that sentence itself. The all in the moment, the infinite forest in the single patch of grass on which one is currently is standing.

Places

95 cafe visits and 55 unique cafes in last 9 months, where I read, wrote, and studied for 8 to 12 hours and averaged a total travel time of 2 hours, for one. I’ve gone to mountains, volcano, lakes, rivers, parks, malls, hotels, houses (traditional homes or modern ones), beaches, night markets, covered and open courts (basketball, volleyball, etc.), flower markets, warehouses, membership-only retail warehouse clubs, neighborhoods of the — (—) housing development programs, local mechanics and car washes, indigenous houses, local markets, gas stations and truck stops/highway stopovers, pedestrian footbridges, bazaars, hospitals (waiting rooms, cafeterias, clinic rooms, emergency rooms), statues, museums, palengkes, swimming pools (in big houses, condos, and resorts), tiangges (arcade-like and show butchery and phone repairs), convenience stores (whether deep in the city or in a park where people jog and bike around), 24-hour marts, 24-hour fast food joints, docks and passenger decks, resorts, cemeteries, junkshops, theological seminaries, pares and mami vendors, abandoned structures and lots, bus garages, retreats, campuses, bookstores, condos, trails, terminals, plazas, local eateries, bakeries, ferries, and street vendors, churches, cottages, country clubs, trains, internet cafes, jeepneys (traditional ones and e-jeeps, longer ones), buses, tricycles, pedicabs, taxis, Grab light cars, various rented vehicles, subdivisions, workshops, empty lots, venues (whether it be cafes, churches, theaters, stadiums, convention centers), viewing decks, restaurants, from branded to family-owned. It goes on and on. I’ve travelled this region so many times, and I mean region as in as far up as — and as far down as —. I’ve gone to so many different sides of my region, from the wealthy’s playgrounds to the slums. It goes on and on. There are naturally countless buildings I’ve never entered. But I’ve travelled already. I was thinking commuting just to commute, and there’s a part of me that wants to buy a new laptop so I can stay in parks for the whole day just to observe (which is much more feasible than commuting and trying to do intense observations through that beyond what one may eventually end up doing anyway when one commutes to places rather than just for the sake of observation). There are also still 270 cafes I haven’t visited yet, all of which have outlets and are within the region. So let’s see how things go.

List of places I haven’t really stayed at yet:

• public libraries
• city halls, barangay halls, courthouses
• fish ports, agricultural trading posts, manufacturing hubs and industrial parks
• hospital cafeterias and lobbies
• laundromats, local billiards hall, cockpits
• maker-spaces, art galleries, local music events (like death metal)
• bingo halls and casinos
• spas and saunas
• e-sports arenas
• cultural centers
• skate parks
• firing ranges
• underground boxing/MMA gyms
• bodybuilding/strength training gyms (beyond two)
• temples, mosques, columbariums
• fire stations

This is naturally good for sheer intelligence. You will become a better thinker and writer overall, because you are forced to put into words actual things, the same way naturalists became very good writers since they were matching words up to the reality they were directly experiencing rather than spawning based on re-read tropes. Plants, places, buildings, community spaces, archiecture, kinds of crowds. All of these will develop, expand, grow. This is why as time passes, as my writing that was forged firstly in autobiography, journaling, introspective, analytical, essayistic writing, psychological expressionism and prose poetry, and then literary pure “show, don’t tell” takes on even more material, I will naturally become good at writing reality and extrapolating fiction based on that. This fiction extends to contemporary life as well as life in the 19th and 20th century as I synchronize my intense reading of 19th and 20th century literature (both fiction and non-fiction) with my actual lived-in experience of this level of exposure to my current world and its rhythms. This also extends to actual fantasy worlds and their lived-inness.

So is it fiction? Yes? Is it essays? Yes. Is it personal philosophy? Yes. Is it objective? Yes. Is it purely objective? Maybe not without qualifying and taking into account limitations, whether in direct exposure or in the researchable literature available.

I read, I travel, I write, I study, I create.

Texture

More sweat dribbling down sweat-dried cheeks, thronged sidewalks, breezy, cool, and soft neighborhoods and cafe decks in the mornings, air-conditioned offices with typing, papers flapping, and electric fans whirring, turning, humming, and sometimes making clacks when it passes a certain rotation, the blaring horns of jeepneys down the elevated-highway-covered main road as people stand at the gloomy, orange-dim bus stop late at night, balmy-sweet bamboo doorways

Post-Synthesis Deadlock: Coexistence Through Playfulness and Egoism (March 15, 2026)

Seven different forces:

1. third-person critique of my own fiction
2. new in-character analysis
3. domain-boss-narrativizable arrogance complicated by the default human nature of playfulness and egoism
4. existential storytelling brainstorming
5. the contrast between yesterday’s headphoneless cafe stay friction and today’s headphoned cafe stay friction
6. displacement caused by the first time someone didn’t flinch at my “unselfconscious sincere self-honesty” and even smiled harder
7. the visibility of staying at a cafe branch with my laptop where someone who stayed theirs and who took two tables with a second monitor got photographed and posted across Reddit and Facebook

Each has gotten their fulfilling share of my energy, but their current intersection in today’s instance is forming a deadlock. Developed instincts are fighting each other.

So now, I pause until something emerges or resolves.

I need a creative arrogance (even if arrogance itself is tamed), something that might not have to do with retired totalization. But it was supposed to go through these seven mediums, even one(!). But it ended that, even while all fulfilled, they formed a deadlock.

I need something new that transcends them, their fulfilled states, the deadlock they formed, and tamed arrogance and retired totalization themselves.

Maybe the answer is leaning into playfulness and egoism, the language of the totalized, when ego is no longer battered by incompetence and insecurity. This would essentially be “unselfconscious sincere self-honesty” but absorbing that displacement.

To clarify, this is not overthinking or creative paralysis. This is specifically different instincts fighting each other when in the past, when there were different instincts, the overarching instinct would be to totalize and “arrogant” it all in synthesis. But now “synthesis” itself in those forms of arrogance and totalization is implicated, so the overarching structure/system has been exposed, identified, and relegated into a member/part/citizen. With no way to resolve, what we’re left with is a deadlock.

But playfulness and especially egoism are different from arrogance and totalization. It absorbs that displacement and that third-person critique. You would think absorption here is euphemized totalization or synthesis, but it’s actually the opposite. It means writing out something defiant to the point of falling under playfulness and egoism rather than synthesis or totalization. Critique exists, and I wrote it myself. Yet I wrote something as if that didn’t exist. The two co-exist. I can’t stop my critique, but I also can’t stop what I feel like writing. So I critique but write what I feel like writing anyway. That’s playful egoism. Instead of bringing them all together, it’s being playfully egoistic when critiquing and when writing the fiction and still defying the idea that one has to force the two together. This naturally means synthesis itself is not load-bearing or structural, but its own playful egoism medium. So you have the critique, the creative writer, and the synthesis, and they all fulfill themselves totally yet coexistently past each other as they each playfully egoistically are.

But What Are “50 Goblins”? (March 19, 2026)

Red Grimes, Ch. 6, tw. 16076: Moving Into Second Phase

Protagonist: “Red Grimes”

Is a philosophical opening for after the scene break? This is what I wrote days ago right after the last cafe stay (I am currently at Starbucks — — —) at Starbucks — — —.

“The thing is that I’ve always been and in many ways than one, and in that sense am I total without anything else adding or subtracting. This is the ‘I am.’ This is me, in the flesh.”

At this point, I’m wondering if the next step is to satisfy that need for another Peter in the way of that novel’s focus, even if bizarre, on lived-in spaces and world-building, since world-building is always satisfying and plot needs to move. To have him dawdle in sensory and internal agony here is both satisfying in its own way but also inviting questions of whether I’m over-stating the point.

When I did the scene break, that was its own definitive end, and I didn’t really have a breadcrumb for afterward. I was working off what it was at that moment, which is totally fine, but now I feel there needs to be a big shout of direction, whatever form it may take. If our current sensory agony can be expanded from here on out, so be it.

I wonder if the analytical side of him can be explored, since I only introduced it in this chapter. It was an attempt to import that same analyticity from Matthew since that added so much characterful plot movement.

Right now, as of writing, the previous five chapters are already solid for me. Touching them would be only revisory at this point, like I did some time ago. Chapter 6 and moving forward are now their own new arc, so whatever I explore and start with should be effectively load-bearing. We introduced a level of psychological volatility that wasn’t present in previous chapters, as indicated by the use of glossolalia. He even started speaking in terms of how many goblins to kill before he exists, which was never mentioned in previous chapters, so that clarifies or goes explicit over something that could be just a violent tendency mixed with instability. Now, there’s an articulated frame of mind. Him killing the goblins in ch. 6 mirrors Matthew closest, where what’s happening blurs and the word choices turns poetic as exemplified by “A goblin made its way to him, and his hands flowed through it,” unlike previous chapters where it was more restrained to reality as seen in “By the time he staggered and wheezed to the side, the goblin’s face lay mangled”.

You would think that the same approach of “extrapolating directly from the previous five chapters” would be the solution here, which is basically what Peter and Matthew did as the former was already all about the world and the latter was about his analyticity. But Red’s philosophization faces challenges. It’s easy to “justify” murder through episodic violent analysis or through pure psychological instability episodically culminating in violence. But while Red may be volatile and he has philosophized even during his violent episodes, he has culminated into a deadlock where he cannot get himself to do anything but to agonize, which is distinct from both Peter’s and Matthew’s.

So if we were taking directly from what was already there, we would end up with a lot of external friction and goblins to force him to do something, only for him to react even more apathetically even while acting violently to whatever comes to him. The philosophizing only bleeds out the plot until he’s practically in the middle of hundreds of goblins and his only response is his own internal philosophy-tinged agony.

1. Red’s dead-locked, plot-draining philosophizing -> even with contrivances, plot nullifying
2. Peter’s world-building and pure violent psychological instability -> plot
3. Matthew’s grandiose violent analyticity -> plot

Perhaps, those five chapters are Red Grimes’ legacy, and I should accept that natural locked conclusion. The final scene even had him dancing manically. However, ch. 6 introduced interesting expansions to his personality that challenged the assumptions from previous chapters and clarified his motivations and what went on in his head throughout all that he did, since going too long without direct addressal would feel unfounded and ungrounded. Nevertheless, in a narrative sense, even if unresolved in a character sense, the first five chapters successfully narrativized why someone like him would never escape. Perhaps, what remains of chapter 6 up to the scene break can be an epilogue the way a prologue precedes chapter 1. Nevertheless, it is optional and can be my own authorial satisfaction in addressing the human being behind the protagonist behind the narrative conclusion.

I guess the next story, if I want it to last long—even what I consider to be the bare minimum of 100 chapters since I come a web novel background—needs to have someone with motives that match that kind of ambition, since philosophical paralysis isn’t helpful at all.

The fact that I wrote this whole passage for Red Grimes but never for Matthew or Peter might point to why Red didn’t work in the first place. I can’t rely on internal fuel anymore because I have reached a point where just mirroring what’s inside me won’t produce someone with endless ambition. I have reached the point where I am closer to the paralyzed because of my own personal life closure. Basically, I wrote Matthew and Peter more than two years ago when my life was very much different. Red was the product of a man in closure, and it’s almost been three months since I personally reached that definitive point. So whatever I write from now on has to find a way to harness an energy from inside me in a way that leads to the heights of my longest novel to date, the 200,000-word Matthew.

But what would that new protagonist look like? What am I? I think that’s the essential question here. Whatever I have, it’s not arrogance in the negative sense. It’s arrogance as a byword for self-security and self-starting self-contained self-consolidating resilient “I am.” It’s not unresolved. But it’s not undriven either. It’s not like I sit down doing nothing and lie down all day. No, I still do things and prolifically. But that’s only for me. Whatever energy or thing in me should be harnessed to create the likes of Matthew is still unknown to me. I have asked questions about and discussed many times now over the last three months.Red Grimes was supposed to be the answer, but as we can see today, it has finally ended. So whatever’s next needs something else, not that Red Grimes was a failure, but it’s not the kind of work I intend to work on overall. It is revealing in the way a step reveals the next and consolidating the same way. But it is not the Next Big Thing. Even the 70,000-word novel Villa, which I finished writing around 4 months ago, didn’t have that. Even if Villa wasn’t philosophizing the same way Red Grimes was, he was not a Matthew. He didn’t have it. The relatively high word count is deceptive in the way of Matthean ambition.

Let’s conduct an investigation into key traits of my novels:

• Grandiosity: It was the language of extreme pressure and fragmentation. The poetic and abstract “all into one” and “epitomic” language demonstrated that. But I don’t have need for that kind of thing. Whatever I have now is closer to phenomenology than anything macabre.
• Analysis: It is not that I’ve forgotten how to work in blocks, piecemeal data and info gathering, and incremental maneuvering. But it is less a direct expression of the way that I experience the world and more so free indirect discourse (FID) of a character grounded in sensory and social realism, as seen preliminarily in Villa and seen more maturely in Red Grimes.
• Violence: Violence is neither grandiosity or analysis, because what drove Matthew to violence wasn’t about conquering the world. It is a distinct psychological drive that Red Grimes lacked despite his own philosophizing, which took on grandiose language. When he engaged in violence, it always challenged the consolidative ability attributed to it in Matthew and Peter. Villa used this same critique but in a social realist way.

This is not about the next protagonist needing a justification, since that implies Matthew and Peter were working off our “justification,” which is a retroactive term. It’s about finding a character drive compatible with the narrative structure of a long-form novel.

But I must confess I am drawn to questions like “what does it mean to be a person?” It’s the same current philosophizing tendency that conceived Red Grimes. When I went to the blank page, the first thing I wrote was that question. As for why, I think it has to do with what I now view as unrewarding. Just the plain enactment of events falls meaningless on me. Just observation for the sake of it makes sense to a very real me who consolidates, but in a fiction context, I am making out of myself, so naturally, I am drawn to whatever contours I have yet to sketch, so complication is the natural course of my writing. It’s where motivation lies. It’s where instinct flows. I don’t care about systems that amount merely to systems and phenomenologies that amount merely to experience. I don’t care about stable identities that amount merely to empty plot-driven protagonists. I must actualize, “arrogantize,” and form out of a hole the source of a million constructed stars. I must determine and form out of nothing a whole. By such goes the inquiry and the way in which actions develop. That searing agonizing energy that burned through everything and then ended in an apathetic gaze that wrote Red from start to end is what propels me even now. If I try to write anything outside of it, it falls to what feels like stupidity. That was the point of phenomenology, of systems, to fuck over (as friction) the protagonist existentially through a bunch of sensory descriptions and social realisms. This is why I can’t simply continue Red nor can I write anything that you would think would make most sense for someone who has finally lost touch with what drove those violent episodes in Matthew and Peter. But I still want violence. It’s just that I need to filter it through something that’s compatible now.

As for what it looks like:

“What does it mean to be a person?”

[Sensory realistic scene of the protagonist imposing violence on a goblin without shying away into subjectivity and keeping it both clinical, prosaic, and workman as well as intense in the way the physical act of excessive violence only can.]

As seen in Chapter 1 of Red Grimes:

Standing just shy of direct sunlight, the young man looked up, seeing a bunch of clouds. “What a joy is it to live in this world, where nothing exists save for the simplicity of a man, of a person, of a thing of itself, that thing which must become, which must be, which must exist, which must, which must, which must, which must!”

[3,591 words later…]

Shoes clacked from the gloom. The green ankles led to knee-length pants, a spear, bare arms, and an uneven, oversized chestplate. The bald head displayed a few stands of gray hair; the ears several follicles dangling down their bottom sides. Dark patches spotted the skin.

The eyes narrowed. “What are you doing here?” The voice carried a faint whistle, like part of the air from speaking went through a hole in crooked teeth.

The face and short figure of a goblin lay across from them.

[461 words later…]

The spear thrust. He skirted it, grabbed its head, and smashed it on the ground. A hot stream of creamy red erupted from its scalp, and red trickled down its lips from biting its tongue. He ran his foot against its face. More blood poured out from loosened teeth. He punched the side of its neck and used a rock on the ground to force blood out of it. The drip soaked the dust.

As for how this proposed new protagonist will differ from Red Grimes’s paralyzed splat, the above excerpt from Red Grimes itself can be the launchpad, but modified in the overall characterization and, by extension, plotting to fit long-form. For example, instead of the philosophical question followed by sensory realistic violence extrapolating into paralysis, we can throw it into grandiose consolidation. It’s a “What if?” but with Red Grimes staring at the goblins and realizing that strategically killing goblins does reward him and fulfill his sense of existence.

But perhaps, I’m cobbling together a reason. I don’t actually know how this new protagonist will do it differently and work long-form. Theoretically, it’s just a matter of making him not spiral, but actually writing that over tens of thousands of words is its own rational puzzle-solving.

Revenge, protective violent rage, traumatic hole-forming grievances. These things easily drive a protagonist. When he sees the world and there is only the reality that he is handed with all the things that he cannot synchronize into a coherent self, he must render it all into a coherent blood-streaked palm—that way, he becomes, and in nature and reason, he naturalizes his own word-for-word identity. But again, those belong to my other novel Matthew.

The palm I now raise works off grounded frictions and barely rises up to the poetic and the abstract. It always works along those jeepney routes and A-to-Bs as well as those dense urban crowds and daily cafe traffic. This is what the last 10 months have done to me.

Whoever the next protagonist is, he has to break through the sensory-social realism that was the cause for the philosophical violence-apathy of our previous protagonist Red, somehow.

In other words, I need a Red that won’t let go of a philosophical will-to-power in the face of grounded realism. The fact that the last diary entry I wrote yesterday basically can be summed up to “all previous revelations emerge as fiction in the face of new out-of-the-blue hyper-specific data discovered mundanely and monotonously”—very humble, grounded, nuanced, stipulating, qualifying, rigorous even, exactly the kind of thing that won’t write will-to-power. The fact that it shut down the will-to-power energy from antifragility by pointing out that antifragility was becoming its own comfort zone and that non-friction was going to be the new friction only demonstrates just how hard it’ll be to circumnavigate where I am to create something “delusional” (after-the-fact phrasing) again.

I need whatever the next protagonist is on.

He needs to decide 50 goblins are sufficient and that whatever else would be procured from their slaying would last for as long as a resource did, with nothing else to self-circumnavigate and enforce a crisis of meaning. The structure must choke this drifting tendency out and violate (verbalization of violence) its way the same way a person makes his way down south.

But what are “50 goblins”?

At what point does the song stutter and its voice wheeze to nothingness?

There must be a definition, a basis.

Lest it all becomes a series of events and whatever else can be said points to itself and nothing else, and in that sense, a word echoing in a vacuum, a tree dying in an infinite forest. At that point, anything goes, and when anything goes, nothing is compelling. Matthew at least had the basis. Red doesn’t. Whatever the next protagonist will have, it must answer that.

50 goblins is not 50 goblins. To Matthew, it wasn’t. To Red, it wasn’t either. It meant nothing to him, even if he tried to make it mean something. To me, currently, it means nothing.

It needs to carry meaning, not it by itself, since that would preclude the meaning needed to drive the protagonist’s engagement with it in the first place. Projection is crucial here. Without it, you have still life. For Villa and Red, the more violence came into contact with them, the less they cared and the more they drifted into what concluded them both narratively. We need someone who somehow gains from it, not necessarily from it itself, since events by themselves meant nothing to the person projecting the meaning onto them.

• No More Lands: If the world is in the palm of my hand, then it’s natural that there would be no reason to conquer.
• 100% Translation: If translation of experience, observation, reflection, and memories for me is 100 percent, then what purpose does depictions of insane violent episodes have save in just a brief expression and not as a driving force?
• Seamless Absorption: If I seamlessly absorb everything that comes my way—friction or non-friction—then what happens to violent grandiosities to filter through the overwhelm?
• Relaxed Sitting Down and Staring: If self-security is a man sitting down and staring comfortably at the world around him, then what the hell are plot-ascent and aggrieved advance?
• Self-Completeness: If self-contained self-starting resilience is a man writing in their creative-intellectual projects in their laptop while sitting at a table on the side of the main road (an actual dream I had yesterday, which mirrored how I am IRL and my lack of embarrassment throughout my 97 10-hour cafe stays from the last 10 months [about once every three days]), then where in the world can torture lead to anguished killing sprees (in fiction writing depiction)?
• The World in the Grounded Details Post-Exhaustion: If I write enough about the sensory-social realism of the world literally surrounding me here in this cafe I’m in as of writing, then where in the world does a person find that they must become the epitome of grace and beauty, when the mundane holds all that it needs and all that it is and nothing else and in the portable whole self that knows only what it can so easily consolidate and take the time to aggregate and collect mundanely in terms of more out-of-the-blue hyper-specific data, nothing more but tappity-taps, urban drones, mild chatter, Google Maps cafe lists, and an exhaustive personal website that just needs only at this point just here and there additions without anything much to say than more here-and-there alignment between how one appears and communicates oneself and how one actually is, which at this point is already so complete that it’s barely consolidative or substantial save for what it is as additive refinement (even as it does challenge previous revelations, but not to the point of fracture, but personal integrity meeting soft waves)?
• Taking One’s Time Answerlessly: If I can go days without an overaching answer and just spend several whole days straight just collecting hyper-specific data just as a matter of self-satisfied journeying course, then how the hell are we going to fly up to the skies to impose on the resisting, ineffable world below? It’s not that I don’t make overarching answers at all, but it’s less making overarching answers and more so throwing drafts here and there to consolidate but not themselves as data steps or part of a broader data collecting or aggregating purpose rather than as ends in themselves in the way that “consolidation” would evoke. It’s like clumping together a bunch of bananas with one’s rough, dragging fingers, not riding a high horse and screaming a philosopher-king-conqueror’s decree from within layers upon layers of royal clothing and insignia. I’ve become a creative-intellectual hunter-gatherer. In fact, get rid of “intellectual.” Just make it chickpea-skin-remover.
• Towering Still Life: When you’ve solved the “I AM” and have reached a seamless prolificity, then you’re practically a sitting duck in the way a tree gently sways with the wind or looks down on the land’s inhabitants. It rarely extends a limb to demand, only to see what it can gather from so small a gesture to itself but so momentous a moment for those seeing it. It graces wherever it saunters. But most of the time, it is content to be still life, in the way a mountain allows feet to tread it. It is not Hannibal climbing the Alps. It’s the Alps itself, in the way it towers and in the way it lets be and lets live.

You can’t climb a mountain that you’ve become.

But I’m not content with this as the answer, even if this is critical context for why the question of who the next protagonist will be is so challenging.

I’m going to be honest. Any solution that amounts to “make it enact real life” will always come out short because we’re no longer working on the kind of real life that thirsts for depiction and enactment in form. The real life we’re working with just stares, and it’s the kind of staring that leaves you not really needing to write after all. It’s that “after all” that is the crux of the deadlock. System for system’s sake? Violence for violence’s sake? Or even for mundane, prosaic reasons. Phenomenology for phenomenology’s sake? At this point, just engage in real life, which is what I do, or in mundane data aggregation in the way of hyper-specifics or in consolidating data like clumping bananas. Fiction naturally requires its own special role that sets it apart from reality. It needs to be a fixation, a compulsion, an object of possessiveness. Workman creativity eventually answers its own question in the way that technical work answers a problem or mundane puzzle-solving reaches a defined endpoint, even if unresolved in the way that a settled person would go about it.

The question to solve was mentioned earlier:

But what are “50 goblins”?

It’s similar to what I used to ask all the time:

What is a dog?

Though this was because I felt that everything had to do with everything else. I had to yet to decouple common objects and words from the overwhelming memories that intricately and convolutedly stained them.

Now, that concern is gone, but a similar question has arisen, but totally different.

brute-forcing fiction (March 19, 2026)

When all is said and done and there is little left to project save for what the manual hands can make do, how in the world will violence gain validity? One could argue that a list of 50 goblins is prosaic and whatever destruction of life will happen automatically in a sorting system, but at the same time, really? The nature of mundanity isn’t blindness to torture or agony. It is acceptance and a recognition of what little purpose dominance serves save to patch up holes in the integrity of the self, and when those holes are addressed and the fragments of the self are fused back into wholeness, how can someone burst into rage culminating in a violent episode? How can fiction writing ever find in any of that purpose? Sensory-social realism, in the many forms it takes in daily urban spaces, when given enough attention, takes over completely and reduces whatever poetic, abstract grandiosity wants to register the ineffable world into mental fragility, the making of a mind, the projections of a fractured, aggrieved human being from a history of disrupted development. How can one ever leap and say of the world anything than what can be observed and consolidated in, at best, the equivalent of clumps of banana? Writing becomes gestural and expressive, but not in any governing way besides banana-organizing. Analysis and violence become pasture for data aggregation, but not in any shape or form binding or coalescing or consolidating. It becomes at best a brushstroke, and when your world takes place in cafe chatter and jeepney drones, then what can be said but a moment in space, in a world so full of people and grounded sensations? Where will that arrogance appear? Where will Carthage’s Hannibal emerge?

I don’t know.

I’m not talking about just any walk outside. I’m talking about ten months of staying for ten hours at a cafe, going to a new cafe half the times, once every three days.

It’s not really permission, more like sitting down and not really knowing what arrogance can do in the face of a world so complete in itself and a life so complete in itself as well post-closure.

I’m not talking about fiction itself. I’m talking specifically about long-form web novel fantasy where the structure intrinsically requires a constant doing away with 50 goblins, which begat that question of “But what are ’50 goblins’”? And it’s not bureacratic systematization. It’s not banana-organizing or just nature doing its thing.

The only possible thing is the friction itself between:

• the protagonist, story, and world I’m getting myself to write
• the person that I am and the world I live in now.

But I’m not sure if that’s a solution. It feels more like an intense technical exercise where you push yourself to write violence when there’s also that undercurrent that yeah, everything that I am bleeds into everything that I write, so naturally, I can’t feign grandiosity nor can I take that delusion (after-the-fact phrasing) so sincerely.

It’s less the inability to write a Hannibal and more so the inability to stare at that character for too long. 5 chapters. Very fucking hard. 1000 chapters? I’ll let the silence answer.

And the motivation of play can only carry itself long enough for it just starts snickering, and when it doesn’t respect the story it’s telling and the character it’s writing, it will skew, and that skewing will immediately explode into termination.

I’ve said this before. But why the hell would I let a fiction protagonist enact my reality when the reality itself already closes its own cases and moves on its own pace? Fiction needs to have a special role that sets it apart from what reality is already doing so smoothly and seamlessly. This wasn’t the case before when reality pressured me into writing as a means of filtering overwhelm into something comprehensible. But now, naturally, it would be like slamming yourself into the wall to think that writing needs to enact anything at this point besides what I’m already doing so finely and dandily without any interaction with fiction. Who the hell gives a ma-fucking shit about a quiet, grounded sigh besides what that sigh in reality already carries all by itself without any gestural and expressive fictionalization beyond the confines of what data aggregation already does?

The fact that I’m allowing myself to get so worked up about this. I truly crave what I view as creative freedom. To be able to write such a long work and to have it spell everything for you in the way that only such a protagonist can do. Even brokenness will do. Like, just give me anything! I want to see it curl into resentment and to have that resentment transform into constraints that force him into even more desperate routes, that make the story more and more compelling for me. I need something that feels alive.

But yeah, when the very steps needed to build to culminate to that breakdown feel arbitrary in a “but what are ’50 goblins’” way, then it terminates before any meaningful climax can even begin to be presaged. But hot fucking damn do I love that energy that I used to know so well!

2 hours and 4 minutes later, after leaving Starbucks — — — where the above section was written and arriving home:

But I think I’m reaching my own conclusion about all this. I went home after a long ride. I lost a loose down arrow key that has been with me for 6 to 7 months or so. It has been there so long, and now, it’s gone. I don’t think there’s anything left to say but that. I went home and exposed myself to so many out-of-the-blue hyper-specifics. I love this. I love what this gives me. I love this life that is so embedded in the lives of others, of everyone else. It’s not arrogance, but it’s groundedness. It’s a lived-in place where the head is pure imagination. I know it’s not the same, and I know I can’t combine them both so easily. But anyway, I’m here now, with all of the frictions and the things of life that you can’t control but add so much to a realistic life. I’m going to a new cafe tomorrow like I did today. I do it because I love it. I do it because I am genuinely absorbing more and more of the world around me. I do it because every time I’m out there riding a jeepney and looking out into the world, all I see are more and more hyper-specifics, things that have been there since I was a child but which I am only beginning to integrate more and more through translation and articulation that I only developed in the last several years. I can make do with the banana clumps I’ve created in the form of consolidating passages that don’t seek to be overaching answers, but clumped data aggregations. I can keep working into reality the way a miner bores through rock. I am a very simple and straightforward person who is only as big as the world he has absorbed and in which he plays a part, even in the smallest yet most articulate ways.

In the end, I have no answer except for the little things that go so endlessly far into crisp detail that I can barely see even with my glasses on, and to slowly mine into them and to take it in and to look so closely, little by little, cafe stay after cafe stay, jeepney ride after jeepney ride. Every single time that I spend hours outside and take the time to map it onto the four walls of my room and onto the street and sky outside my room window, I grow into something of myself, and I say that in the discreetest way possible. I am a person, made of myself and muck of it.

If there is an arrogance, it is the arrogance of the man who sits idly and watches the world go by with the clarity that a maggot intimates itself with its wriggling. When it goes about, it does so titanically, in the way that a purposeful man moves, fresh, AOE2-unit-like. It’s like there’s an endless freshness attributed to a unit that never hungers or thirsts. It just keeps going, continuously supplied only by direction and unlimited breadcrumbs. This is what the entirety of my life has culminated into. At least for now.

The Force Behind the Waves (March 19, 2026)

Even now, I want to be wrong. I may have written a total of 7,000 words across multiple entries working off the idea that Red Grimes, that 5-chapter story, is over, but I don’t believe Red is actually done still, after all of that. Even now, I want to believe it’s still got something. Whatever it is. It can’t be the end. 7,000 words to me is nothing. What’s important is that I’m honest with myself and I keep fighting. I was both the person who wrote all those words and believed them the whole way and the person who doesn’t want to believe it’s over.

I want it to be wrong. I want to see. I want to see. I want to see. This self-rigor is why I have reached this point in the first place. So I go, in both ways, until I reach a point and then again, working off that point and then against it. I wrote recently that all previous revelations emerge as fiction as soon as new out-of-the-blue hyper-specific data comes up, and that’s working for me now, not that I half-ass everything I say, but that I go all the way just as much as I dialecticize and keep working. It is a kind of work, this process of breadcrumbing myself with all sorts of ways to look at something that otherwise gets lost in one hasty proclamation.

Maybe, this is my magic, my “arrogance.”

But That Feels Too Easy. (March 20, 2026)

why did I write this last night? It’s bugging me. I’m trying to find out what I was getting at. I feel like I was gesturing at a gap that I’m not addressing.

Is sleep the only thing left besides writing? What else? What will get me going? It feels like there’s been nothing much else. Of course, there’s the obvious, traveling, eating, moving one’s body, and all that. The thing is that writing is an infinite joy and source of growth, but is there anything else that I’m missing, I wonder? If not reading, writing, studying, or taking care of oneself and the usual stuff, is there really nothing else?

I guess there really is nothing else that’s just a matter of including into the list. In other words, I’ve done pretty much what you would expect. Listing them down at this point would be a bother.

It’s not self-sabotage. But rarely, I do find myself just delaying sleep and just sitting down. Usually, I just fall asleep, and that’s just my seamless, sustainable workflow. But yeah, sometimes, I stop and think, “What else? Did I forget anything?” And I stare and wonder… “Is this really it?”

Damn, I really am going to make a longer list of things that are so obvious to me but I guess appear not to be so such that they appear as answers/suggestions. Years with LLMs, and I’m still forced to provide the very context so that I don’t have to see the same monotonous lists.

• everything becomes writing
• burden of constant agency
• grief of a solved life
• ego’s hesitation before sleep.
• lists themselves

None of these apply and all of these have been previously addressed. This list will only grow longer.

Perhaps, it’s that breadcrumbing that never stops, even up to before I sleep, always giving myself something new to bite on and follow. Always a new puzzle, always that constant curiosity, that never stops asking and never stops holding both full commitment and the recognition that all conclusions and revelations are on hold until new out-of-the-blue hyperspecific data eventually calls them all out as fiction. I think that’s what it is. But that feels too easy. <- Why did I say that? That implies that I want something harder, which might just prove that point.

I realize it’s why yesterday, I called my insistence on making sense of fiction’s place in my current life “problematizing,” like I was making a problem out of nothing, rather than addressing a problem. And now I think I’m realizing that this is where I am. I’m now the problematizer, the breadcrumber. I am the person who wrote 7,000 words working off the idea that that fiction story Red Grimes is dead only to say, “While I have fully committed in the writing of those 7,000 words with all sorts of compelling evidence and points to back it up, I am now taking it back and insisting and holding still the belief that it’s not dead. This very fight is why I have reached this point. This relentless self-rigor.”

I’m the person who throws themselves in the mud just to write 7,000 words only to say “nah” and toss it away like it’s nothing, not that I wasn’t fully there in the writing of those words, but that I don’t let the past (in the sense of framing and how things like trauma distort your memories and cause you to project, as to apply to anything that you do end up investing yourself into even without trauma) control me and I don’t need to hold onto any superficial object or conclusion. This is how I’ve integrated, exposed myself to all manner of things, and self-actualized. It’s not that I’m abandoning them just becuase. It’s because new out-of-the-blue hyperspecific data throws everything out the window, and I am there meeting them, even collecting them, aggregating them, clumping them in passages I write. I am doing the work of dismantling whatever building I’ve now made myself into through rigor.

Michael (March 20, 2026)

In the last several months, more goblins had passed by Silver Route than he had ever seen, but perhaps, this was only how the world worked. Eventually, ecosystems would complicate and populations would explode.

In purple and yellow, Michael stood between two boulders, at the edge of the cliff, overlooking the road that stretched as far as his eyes could see, flanked by trees upon trees, forming an endless forest cut through with wagon trains, beasts of burden, and plodding sweaty travelers.

“So, how’s it?” said the young woman standing beside him with her hands clasped in front of herself. A shirt wrapped around her waist, and her trousers stretched to her ankles. Her hair formed a long, black braid, coiled flat. Her glimmering smile dotted with freckles, and her brows tapered off outward at the top edges.

“Fine for the next few days, but anything to do with goblins is going to have to wait.” Michael’s jaw shifted as he tongued his teeth for any remaining food from the sinigang he ate for breakfast earlier.

Behind him spread an encampment filling a wide circular glade. A multitude of tents fluttered in the morning breeze, and soldiers marched out with their hands swaying casually on the sides or interlaced behind their necks.

Three soldiers sauntered off the encampment, waving at Michael as they approached. “Sir, the ‘gemmies,’” said one of them, holding up a flashing purple gemstone.

Michael raised a thumbs-up questioningly, raising his brows, lips closed.

They nodded. “Yes, Sir,” said the same soldier, who wore a ponytail. He paused, letting the breeze rattle a nearby wagon, before asking, “Want to see them, Sir?”

“If it works, it works.” Michael shrugged, raising his arms at the sides palm-up.

As the wagon trains trailed off and the road cleared, dusk came. Michael slumped at the desk in his tent, twirling his fingers in his clasped hands. He lifted a brow as the shirt-wrapped young woman in green marched into the tent.

The woman held her breath, glanced behind herself, and slammed the table. “The gobs [goblins] have shifted southeast,” she almost stuttered by the end but stiffened her voice enough to get the direction out.

“Husserl Tower.” Michael got up, palms on the desk, eyes wide. “Let’s go!” he repeated as he and the woman ran outside and began shouting for everyone to decamp.

The clank of armor and rustling of palls filled the glade.

Elsewhere, goblins trudged through the trees, entering another glade occupied by a tower. On top of it, hooded figures pointed staffs with balls of crackling energy.

The goblins raised shields, then charged the large door at the tower’s bottom.

The mages’ balls streaked down and slammed into the ground, blasting spherical bursts that mangled goblins and sent pieces of flesh flying.

“Damn it!” said one of the mages at the top. “Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck!” Goblin blood splattered her face. She retched and coughed, getting some in her mouth, then wiped it off her face and spat it out as fast as she could.

A stray goblin head slammed into the wall beside her.

She jumped. “Fuck!” She trod away behind the other mages, left arm raised over her head, the right clenching her staff to her body. “Damn it! Damn!”

“Lene, shoot!” said a nearby mage carefully aiming his staff at the field of goblins. “Fucking shoot!”

“Fuck! Wait!” Lene ran to the edge and planted her staff, the magic rapidly whirling and gurgling. Her ball went down so fast only the kicked-up remains of goblins hung in the air.

Meanwhile, one of the goblins had ascended the tower wall with two daggers.

“The fuck,” she gasped.

Hanging on the edge, it stabbed her multiple times, clutched her by the arms, and hurled her off.

She yelped, then went silent.

The goblin leapt back down, breaking its knees, limping away, huffing hoarsely. It went back into the trees and gestured at a line of goblins holding crossbows. The one with the headband nodded and signaled for them to advance, then took the first step, beginning the march to the tower. Snarling under their breaths, they aimed through blood mist.

Flames poured down the walls, scorching away any more climbers.

The headband goblin stiffened, then yelled at the top of its lungs, “Fire!”

The goblins’ bolts struck into the mages’ hoods, splattering blood on the pillars.

The goblins’ squeals filled the air around the tower base as the hoods dropped and the balls came fewer and fewer.

The last few mages’ groans and wails gradually died down.

The headband goblin smiled. “Okay, so where’s—” Purple flooded the glade from the trees.

It paused, staring at waves of steel-clad, purple-infused humans crashing into the scattered goblins.

Screams twisted, distorted, and cut off row by row.

The farther the goblins fled, the louder their wheezes, thuds, and blood squelches.

A man in armor layered under purple and yellow went forward and dragged his blade across a goblin’s face, scattering red. “Go to hell!” he growled.

Once the last goblins escaped and the humans cleaned up the few who caught their foot in a bog, Michael tasked his healers with checking any mages still alive, while everyone else piled the goblin corpses one by one.

“Okay,” he sighed as he sat on a dry spot in the muddy, bloody glade. His shirt-wrapped helper stood poised behind him, with a blank, dignified expression, watching the soldier with the dog-head insignia assisting the other soldiers with arranging the corpse piles.

By first light, inside a tent, Michael was snoring when his helper abruptly woke him. “Four hundred seventy three,” she said.

He nodded heavily, slowly removed his blanket, and stumbled to his feet, holding up a staggering thumbs-up as he slipped on his boots. Once the two went outside, he yawned loudly, letting his mouth show and rubbing his belly over his purple and yellow surcoat. She followed his gaze and gestured him forward. He dragged himself inside another tent, where a number of armored men stood over a map sprawled over a table. After they saluted him, one of them pointed him to the red flag. He nodded, waving him off.

He walked out, hands on his hips, head tilted up at clouds indicating later rain. “Rain.”

“Yes, we’ll have to go by Senn,” his helper said.

“Uh-huh.” He smiled distantly.

She nodded to herself and promptly left his side, returning inside the tent to reiterate the plan: take Senn Trail, northeast of Husserl Tower, to avoid the rain.

Michael’s sudden laugh drew her gaze from inside the tent.

“Michael?” She strode out.

His mouth wriggled. “I just thought of something. The gobs have yet to regroup. If we catch them right before they get around Mount Telos…”

She slowly widened her eyes, then rushed back to the tent, then back out, shouting at everyone to decamp.

His continued chuckles drew everyone out of their tents before she could reach all of them.

Days later, at the ambush site, Michael stretched his arms and stifled a guttural shout.

His helper cracked her knuckles while looking aside in case someone approached.

Soon, the front part of a long file of lumbering goblins emerged from behind the slope on the path, steadily approaching.

Watching from the roadside, Michael’s men crouched in wait.

Once the goblins paused to check their surroundings, the men ran out of the trees.

The men’s swords cleaved their skulls, sliced into their necks, and tore into their worn rags, sending them staggering to the ground.

Once the blood settled, the men’s gazes shifted over to Michael, who gave them a firm nod.

Soldiers with dog-head insignias began helping the rest clean up, pointing where bodies should be moved and giving directions to minimize the spread of filth. One soldier pried a blue gemstone off a dead goblin’s palm and handed it over to them.

His helper wriggled her toes to keep them from falling asleep while she stood by his side. With heavy eyes and a lopsided head, he folded his arms, wriggling his closed mouth, staring up in thought.

Her head still but slightly tilted in his direction, she routinely darted her eyes between Michael’s face and the clean-up.

“Damn,” he muttered, looking forward.

“You hungry?” she said, glancing at his eyes only once.

“Uh-huh.”

She nodded absently, then hurried to a circle of armored men, the same ones standing over the map in the tent earlier. “Total?”

The men courteously eyed the blue gemstones in each other’s hands. “Five.”

She ran back to Michael and said the same thing.

His eyes finally met hers. “Okay, let’s go.”

The next morning, Michael’s company left and finally headed home.

Death was always a simple thing.

Things happened. People died.

And then that was all.

Michael rubbed his chin.

That was all.

Whatever the world did, it really wasn’t up to him. He managed his own, and by the end of it, it was just a matter of methods and results. Whatever complaint anyone had he refuted through action.

But if everything was taken from him, well… It wasn’t that he ever thought of it as anything but something he had to do, since by the time he was here, it was really what he had to do.

The world turned. He partook.

Perhaps, one day, he would be forced to participate in a way that required him to break more than just his legs. His spirit maybe. But what other spirit was there than that conflatable with morale? Just up the food variety. Or address a privation of land. Whatever else was brute-forceable.

Damn he was hungry.

A week later, he popped his neck as he, his helper, and his company tramped up Ellie Path, which ran west of Silver Route. Their shadows crept smoothly over the slope.

Unstructured Archive Section Manifesto: Investigating Integration in Light of Website’s Squeezing and First Draft’s Accumulation (March 21, 2026)

I was thinking earlier in the morning right before we left about integration and about the nature of squeezing something “to-be-integrated” into the main personal website and into the corpus beyond just the series of journal entries but in the way of a “portfolio” of who I am. I was thinking of:

• dreams (those long forgotten and only now recalled after a taking a full bath and feeling one’s skin so intensely it’s as if one was asleep for so long and to feel the biological maturity and size of one’s body and to perceive a gap as if it was brought upon oneself just at that very moment),
• that one map in my Roblox minigames game where it’s inside this large tall, tight, transparent container where the players race past spinning lava obstacles to see who gets to the finish line first
• that memory of me and my four-month online friend in the Roblox game Flower Garden in the Clouds where we voice-called for around two hours, and
• that rainy Victorian London art (this specifically as regards how to include it in the main personal website and whether it should even be included and how that gives pause as to what exactly integration is in the context of the now-established website and how it squeezes together different things that represent myself).

What is integration? The accumulation (of my five million words in my last three years of journaling [the accumulative first draft])? That makes sense at a first draft level. But the main personal website goes beyond it. Is it the squeezing that I now attribute to the website? And what exactly am I in the context of all that I have yet to include in the website, or, I say this tentatively, squeeze in (or into what may be the context of a “portfolio”)? What am I in the context of the following three pairs (we use forward slash here to indicate “between” rather than “and” or “&” to show a difference in meaning between the two counterparts in each pair when previously, they were the same under unmodified integration):

1. accumulation / squeezing in or into
2. what I have included (integrate, but used to avoid the current dirtiness of the use of the term “integration” in light of first draft’s accumulation and website’s squeezing, not as to say that the term is flawed or damningly “too vague a word” in the permanent sense, but that it is provisionally under investigation and thus cannot be relied on for any current substantial or definitive [non-overarching] aggregation of data, or “banana clumps,” until it has absorbed the two modifications) / what I have yet to include
3. what I have recalled / what I have yet to recall?

I was writing previously about new out-of-the-blue hyperspecifics (NOHs)—which cause previous revelations to come out as fiction (not feel like, but genuinely made up and a bunch of words that become retroactively, fittingly data aggregations)—like those I data-gather mundanely and monotously at home and those I encounter when looking outside the car window at the hyperspecifics-riddled world outside especially in the context of my 100 ten-hour cafe stays over the last ten months, and that made sense in the general unmodified base context level of “integration” as a generalized thing, a tool term. But when we start investigating integration in relation to the above “modifications” or qualification, we may not be contradicting NOHs, but still, it may be making them structurally irrelevant, not necessarily methodologically absent or irrelevant.

Rather than existential or about “making sure I don’t lose my true self in the process of translation,” this is structural closer to the way of representation.

This is not about:

• website architecture and design,
• curation (as it relates to summary and pick-and-choose), or
• raw data (as a bunch of words or in the definition of “uncurated” the way “raw” and “data” incorrectly frame “accumulation”) in the “how to communicate effectively” or “how to summarize a human being?” sense.

This is on my side entirely in the sense where I lie in the above three pairs.

If squeezing (still undecided here whether it precedes “in,” or “into” in the framing of “[into] portfolio”) overrides first draft’s accumulation, then how does what is included in the website differ representationally from what has yet to be? “Yet to be” is distinct here from absent or excluded. There is a timeline in the mind in how the inevitable inclusion of things through structural accumulation clashes with the nature of the website as a structural squeeze. For example, imagine if I recall long-forgotten (in provoking the damning “yet to be”) dreams and feel immediately that I can and will just include it in the website and then also recall something else—let’s say, the rainy Victorian London art. Who am in the context of what I hesitate in squeezing into the website as with the latter and the naturality of the former, which I easily distinguish as its own sub-section (list of Dreams under broader Observations)? Is importance really the only factor? Or am I conflating importance with “sub-sectionability”? Is it irrelevant? Is the feeling that one is squeezing in something the only decider of whether anything should be included? How is the “yet to be” structurally considered in light of what gets accumulated and what gets squeezed?

While this investigation does not concern existence, it does bear upon how do I know myself, given the nature of writing, its accumulation of disparate memories, mental states, sides of myself, and long-forgotten “yet-to-bes,” and the website as externalized cognition. Rather than translation (or external format, etc.) itself (especially given as it is in “memory-to-prose-and-phrases-and-curated-photos,” even considering local structure [flow], precision, and context—or in the mistaken sense of “within the confined structure of a personal website,” but as it connects back to myself), which is strictly methodological in the way that website design guides the eyes and how one processes information locally, this is structural to what integration is intended to do and be, which this investigation casts into question.

This is not even about accuracy, since that falls back on translation and that problematic locality that does not at all carry structural weight regarding integration. Accumulation and squeezing do not concern themselves with translation. Essentially, these two qualifiers are cause for unmodified integration’s unsettlement.

Integration assumes accumulation, but with the introduction of website’s squeezing, first-draft’s accumulation’s reputation is damaged, and integration is becoming the opposite of what it’s supposed to do: it’s unintegrating. It’s a dam’s leaking. That’s not the same as returning to what it was before the dam. It will become something catastrophic (refer to what happens in real life when dams break). As long as the following three pairs remain unabsorbed into integration, it is a provisional structural unsettlement that we are investigating to avoid damnation:

1. accumulation / squeezing in or into
2. what I have included / what I have yet to include
3. what I have recalled / what I have yet to recall

You would think, “Well, just keep integrating (swimming)!” But when the very assumed function of integration in accumulation, or swimming, is put into question, it becomes “are we just making the leak bigger?”

So if it was just journaling and the website and whatever I felt like including just went into the website frictionlessly, then integration is not under question, but now that it’s complicated—not by this simple synonymity—but by the identified three pairs—(1) accumulation / squeezing in or into, (2) what I have included / what I have yet to include, and (3) what I have recalled / what I have yet to recall—then it all screams beeping red.

Essentially:

• Who are you in all the things you have yet to recall?
• Who are you in all the things you have yet to squeeze in?
• Who are you in all the things you have accumulated as opposed to squeezed into the website?

Previously, it was just a matter of refuting (causing to come out as fiction) all previous revelations through NOHs. But now, because integration itself is unsettled, the very structure that’s doing the absorbing is now leaking the more one “keeps integrating” instead. It is now threatening catastrophe. Integration (data aggregrations, or banana clumping) must halt, and this meta-investigation must pursue.

If I can’t just write everything into integration (unmodified) eventually through the sheer nature of what it is as “working” accumulation (previously assumed) and, in natural, inevitable evolution, it doesn’t immediately leap onto the website and then go on indefinitely and instead hits a kind of wall where private-and-public (not in the sense of on-and-off, but in the sense of a child naturally and inevitably maturing into an adult, like a medical student entering residency) integration tramples all over itself, then integration is failing and not doing what it’s intended to do, which is to integrate, regardless, even the unintegrable through acceptance, not because I’m no longer accepting, but because of squeezing, which was never at all in my head because of how frictionless the website was for almost a year now. If it’s not integrating, it’s unintegrating. It’s a dam leaking. It squeezes in, replacing whatever was already there, or goes through a moment of “dreams are allowed, but that rainy Victorian London art isn’t,” which is antithetical to integration’s point and purpose. It’s practically the same as if I forgot who I was every morning and started fresh. It was if I wasn’t even writing and even exacerbating and accelerating what writing is supposed to prevent and build reserves against—fragmentation.³ If it can’t answer the long-forgotten “yet-to-bes” (yet to be included, yet to be recalled), then it leaks, and the pressure builds.

Under this new light, even spatialization where one tries to have everything fit in the same space can be its own fragmentation because one wants to see them all together.

Or perhaps, I am conflating the limitations of a website with the actual working solution of journaling, which may just be the start and end of integration, rather than the unresidenced medical student. Maybe, the banana clumps of data aggregation within integration’s accumulation are all that I need. But the website really was an evolution and completion. It did infinitely times more than all my journaling couldn’t on its own in terms of representation (not to an audience, but to myself). It’s because of the website’s crucial place in my wholeness, life closure, and sense of doneness that is why I see the squeezing as it exposes accumulation as the writing on the wall because the form of the website is the enactment of the best of integration and especially spatiality. To regress to the journal is to regress to the limitations of the form of text and that form’s non-integratedness and non-spatiality. How do we absorb what “squeezing in light of yet-to-bes as it exposes accumulation” could be revealing, even if it is itself false?

The solution could just be an unstructured archive section. Okay, now I feel stupid. Though I wonder if it’s the same issue as accumulation. I mean, if it’s unstructured, you can put anything there. Isn’t accumulation in 3D space the point of spatiality though? It even addresses the yet-to-bes by providing an immediate landing site. In fact, I have something like this—the “Recent Activities” section. The problem is that it was tied to timeline and about what I consumed or neologisms I coined and used during a period in any given previous several months or so. An unstructured archive would get rid of the timeline and allow anything, whether recent, recalled, or only now desirable to include. It would look and function very different from Recent Activities. It would certainly address “squeezing in light of yet-to-bes as it exposes accumulation,” so it works. Ultimately, this might just be the best and only answer. I say “might” at this point because of how much effort I spent writing and thinking through this passage only to realize I missed something so obvious. At least, I have a whole manifesto for why that section was added.

Modern Identity (March 22, 2026)

I’ve had that Identity section ever since I saw it in incessantpain.neocities.org (which I encountered back in 2024 iirc) and imported it immediately once the main personal website was established. But that it only had that passage about class consciousness and alienation looks so near-sighted looking back, but I guess I was still working out what exactly identity looks like in words to me. Now that I’ve created the likes section, the subsection for Roblox, and the unstructured archive section that contains that random Roblox memory between me and that four-month online friend and I’ve recently changed the representative 221x250 image to a split image between that 2016 Christian camp that took place in — and a screenshot of me playing an old Roblox RPG, it’s just a matter of finding exactly where my identity lies between my home computer life and that outgoing social events-riddled life.

Two concerns to start:

• avoiding redundancy with the established sections where Roblox and that home computer life have already been exhausted
• see how that passage about class consciousness and alienation relates to modern digital-analog identity

It’s easy to understand identity in relation to who I am, but in terms to how I am located in terms of socioeconomic background and culture gets more challenging, due to how complicated the influences intersect and sidestep each other (as in two distinct key experiences happening simultaneously in the same month yet somehow taking entirely different places in my consciousness and how that then relates to decision-making and self-representation).

It may seem as though the argument I’m making is that modern identity is so complex such that the physical location of the past is somehow simplistic, but in reality, even a memoir like The Pianist is enough to show that before digital realms formed, the world was already so hyper-specific and hyper-local you could barely drag your finger across a random wall and not feel the weight of just how much culturality in that carried, bled, and torn-up form of people and lives has passed and intersected here in such inscrutinable forms (and, in form, content itself enacting rather than the other way around, where cultural symbols themselves stand for otherwise nuances, complex, and individual hyper-specifics as with behaviors and rituals). So if anything, modern digitality only exposes those “irrationalities” (“inscrutinables”) and enacts as well as layers (through exposure as well as driving actual change).

This is not an argument justifying some inability to put together a workable scratch representing that label “identity.” Rather, it helps sand down a lot of the assumptions we make, so the final draft is at least precise, if not rigorous.

Even now, I stare at that screenshot of me and my online friend in that Roblox game. It’s meaningless. It’s trivial. It’s a stupid irrationality. But that’s also what makes it inscrutinable. Culture has always demanded the ability to be stonefaced in the face of things that might even be disturbing, where norm, right, and truth all fail to provide substantial evidence for where identity is located. It only smacks your face against some local dirt, and perhaps, that experience is valuable. This is why I have that section.

Labels are fucking dangerous. Even the subjective-objective-blurring sensory realistic description of mud flecking the cheek is as much a denier of reality as it prays religiously for some kind of miracle where hearts touch mudded flesh and the mind can be truly scrutinize in the way linear words tumble down, down toward hell.

Representation is not about the truth of reality. It is about gathering something that feels at the least workable and then hovering about it, never truly grounded, but also never truly distant, always in some sense “above” the words, but also the very person affected and relying on them when attempting with a stutter that the “I am” can be prismed through such words like “identity.”

Fuck. If a person could be in any shape or form visible through the attempts to cast him on the wall like the splatter they call cave paintings, then damn, hopefully, that’s as pleasant as fog rain. Moody, atmospheric, but distinct and clear in the way it soothes the soul.

If there’s anything that identity can only be made of, it’s integrity, and even that is arbitrary, but maybe… that’s the point? It’s as unstructured as a person and blabbering. Those highly justified things they call beliefs, they call meaningful anchors to who a person is? It’s nice to think of them as the definitive entirety of a person, the Ancient Rome to human history. But you look more locally, and immediately, you cry at the sight of something that shouldn’t hit you that hard, not because it represents something deeper, but in itself, it is its own world. A world you denied in favor of grosser truths, and perhaps, that is always our sin—then, we sin every day, and we try anyway to mend out chipping souls which seek to say of the moment “Allah.” But we are corrosive. Each step takes away the last.

If I could sit down and there in that moment be everything and frozen forever, then maybe this enduring question of identity would never be needed. But life is always resistant. It even resists itself, because a moment falls through as much as it solidly supports your weight, and I don’t mean that existentially or representationally. I mean that in the way dirt scatters and moves, in the way little things we come by every day slowly go away. A receipt on the table that has been there for months eventually betakes itself away.

Words don’t enact reality like form enacts content. They instead enact themselves, being their own worlds, their own phenomenologies. And the writer is themselves a writing process, a phenomenology unto itself. And that’s fun!

So if there was going to be a section of Identity, I would have to stifle a guffaw the whole time, the way someone privately snickers when they hear someone thinks they can actually hold the world in the palm of their hand. As if they hold philosophical control, when they work merely in symbols and in the way of goverance, not to say it bears no weight on human lives themselves, but that in every attempt to control and dominate, there is resistance. Resistance gains a name because of what it is against. People become. Themselves they become. In a world so full, people become. Become, otherwise, whenever, regardless, in regard, truly. It’s funny. I can’t stop snickering. A section on Identity!

In the end, I’m importing most of these from very basic realizations anyone will find out after searching a bit on Firefox. I’m just localizing it so we can laugh together in “last updated,” with recent references. Ha-ha.

Sneering at the Known Self: Head-Pavement-Slamming (March 22, 2026)

Now that I’ve reached a point of integration, of “knowing myself,” I want to escape it. I’m glad that I did reach this point after 3 years’ 5 million words and the main personal website and everything, but at the same time, once you’ve articulated it, it becomes almost detestable, as if knowing oneself is a disgusting rug. It’s not to say I don’t want to get stuck in words or that I don’t think it is useful or exhaustive at all. It is more so that I’m disliking more and more the sight of the mass of what I’ve articulated. When I go through any single day and I see the words through which my voice blossoms and bursts so precisely and faithfully, it almost bothers me. I feel the urge to scratch the skin off my body and to rid myself of myself, to become something more, better, “ultimating,” whatever to wipe it off me! To become free, to become total, in the way that a skin-and-flesh body could never arrive to. I demand to be free. To become something of myself in the way that a defined, known self could never accomplish. For me, I acknowledge I am the me in the known, but also, inside me, I am the me in the ever-becoming. I think there is an arrogance in that.

I almost want to write a character that isn’t tortured and is totally fine, healthy, well, and secure yet totally incapable of being totally okay with the state of a satisfied, purposeful life. There needs something more convincing, something more compelling than a life lived in such simple waste, to become something that isn’t simply of itself the way a ram grazes across the field, but to become utterly despicable to the self, and yet in that sense totally becoming. Of myself, yet of an utterness that defies any attempt at the deterioration threatened by knowledge, by a confidence, by a settledness. He shall hold that ambition.

It is true that I love the things that make all of this possible. Yet, in my head, there’s someone slamming his own head with his own fist, demanding to be known not as the known but as the “utterly,” the fullness only truly demonstrated in motion, in the endless beautiful becoming, in the irrationality of a someone burning through all their reserves to test the little fleshy skin patch which seeks so much to be disturbed, disgruntled, and put off.

I try not to be irrational, impulsive. It’s not wildness I seek. It’s utter becoming. I lean not on my own understanding. I lean on the utter becoming of the self that resists all that can be said of them, even by themselves, even by evidence, knowledge, and all manner that rigor brings. All establishments must fall for the utter rise of a sneer-mangled expression. Flesh is not the actualizer. It is the medium through which the spirit of utter becoming is expressed. When that spirit seeks flesh, he seeks to burn of which his spirit only is capable. The spirit is the one doing the utter becoming, and the flesh is the weapon they grab off the ground to burn into their skull the utter “beatdom.” The actualizer grabs anything off the ground, anything, anything at all, because the same way identity is projection itself, utter becoming is the same, turning a chair into a violent weapon, transforming a bunch of sticks into a megastructure, beating out something truly compelling out of a bunch of dead, cold words. Self-actualization then is the becoming, the constant mad-eyed state that glares at all that dares call it finished. The same way ideas are only truly self-actualized and at their constant highest fulfilled potential when they are constantly attacked, resisted, tested, challenged, and argued against, the self also calls for this. If you aren’t screaming “Die! Die! Die!” and feeling the satisfaction of a million suns as you are destroying yourself and making yourself anew in the constant erosion and friction of flesh which you instrumentalize to fulfill your purpose of utter becoming, then you are settled, and then complacent, and then outdated, and then lost, and then imprecise, and then murky, and then nothing and gone. Integrity—in self-honesty, earnestness, sincerity, and conscientiousness—is the holder of the self. If I’m not hearing the smacking sounds of someone slamming someone else’s head against the pavement repeatedly, then my eyes are closed and settled. Rigor is identity. Instead of sardonic snickering that accepts the “working-ness” of the final draft like someone going to work on time and working overtime every day even if the situation is dystopian and their best defense is a self-guffaw, it’s unfettered, straight, brutal battery. Not aggression in the way someone simply barkingly angry is, or violence in the abstract sense, but actual physical battery on the individual, moment-by-moment, close-quarters level where the head is seized and forcefully struck against the pavement.

Self-Philosophy and Identity: Utter Becoming (March 22, 2026)

Self-philosophy and identity. I notice that there are two kinds of personal writings I’ve been doing, especially in my main personal website.

Is self-philosophy just a one-time use thing, the kind you’d use only if you’re just going to point back to realty and its grounded anchors that truly pertain to identity?

Or is it identity itself? Is the “arrogance” implicit in self-philosophy just smokes and mirrors? Or does it serve as the very vessel of self-actualization as utter becoming. Because new out-of-the-blue hyperspecifics, which cause all previous revelations to come out as fiction, are genuinely essentialy to identity, because they work toward the rigor that is crucial to identity, refining in the direction of utter becoming. Even so, that doesn’t necessarily invalidate self-philosophy, or “arrogance.”

I mean, one could argue that they both constitute rigor and, by extension, identity, because the person who makes non-overarching data aggregations is also the person who passionately screams that identity is intrinsically rigorous and thus self-philosophy is self-eating. The person head-pavement-slamming oneself but also the person raises his palm and then watches as the entire world funnels into it before closing it shut in an explosive wave that solidifies actualization.

As such, integrity is itself integrous, yet it is also self-burningly rigorous and self-honest.

Utter becoming is not utter dissolution.

In fact, the passage I just wrote, Sneering at the Known Self: Head-Pavement-Slamming definitively captures the single essence of self-philosophy and identity:—utter becoming.

History of Defining the Long-Form Fiction Issue: Closed Eyes, Rain, and Re-Belief (March 28, 2026)

I feel that I’ve continued to work on articulating more and more exactly the long-form fiction issue, specifically my current disconnect from the ideal creativity of the long-form work I wrote two years ago. Even if it may look repetitive at an overarching glance, there is constant tension that indicates the genuine fruitfulness and creative-intellectual satisfaction I get from iteratively defining it. As long the issue persists and the solution is not yet invented, whatever I write advances a new area of what exactly is stopping me from just doing it as frictionless as the reading that past long-form work is today. Essentially, the better I get at defining exactly what the problem is, the closer I’ll get to the solution. This doesn’t mean I haven’t been trying for the last two years, but I don’t consider even that continuous 70,000-word novel as solving the issue, since even after that, the problem persisted, up to now. The reason that this isn’t just any fiction writing where the only thing you need to do is write. It’s that I’ve been writing fiction this whole time since two years ago, but the particular creativity that I’m looking for—not flow, which is instantly accessible for me regardless of what I write, but which isn’t the same as flow in that particular creativity, which isn’t quality, standards (which implies a matter of reaching a set of qualities through sheer training or imitation), the mechanics of prose itself, or a matter of r/WritingPrompts—is still inaccessible.

My latest version of my definition of the issue, in an excerpt from the journal entry preceding this current passage:

the difference between [the elusive desirable] hyper-fiction immersion (in that form of web novel fantasy) and [the current but undesirable] verifiable realism, where fantasy is a container for non-fiction reality, rather than a realm in itself

A concrete comparison can’t be made between old and new because the prose itself will distract from the actual issue—the overarching mode.

Any changes I’ve made in prose and the existence of my analyses themselves are causually irrelevant to the issue itself, which means they developed long after the issue already completely emerged and took over. In other words, talking about my sadness doesn’t cause the moon to come out at night. Even without the sadness, the moon would still come out every night, and talking about the sadness doesn’t cause the sadness itself. Additionally, awareness of an itch doesn’t cause the itch. An itch makes you aware of it just by sheer pain.

As for what happened two years ago circumstantially, I don’t know what could have caused it then. It’s easy to blame the serialization itself and the criticisms I got for the first time, but while the criticisms did affect me enough to lead to my burnout, the deletion of the account, and the termination of those long-form serials that now represent that ideal creativity, I don’t even recall what the criticisms are, only that I disagreed with them on the one hand and eventually understood why they said what they said on the other hand. A month after termination, my computer got water-damaged, and I couldn’t use it for months. So I switched to the laptop, and that’s when my pre-existing journaling practice exploded in prolificacy, going from around a daily word count of around 2,000 to 9,000, which gradually went down to 7,000 and stayed there until it finally started going down to 6,000 a year later and then to my current 3,500 to 4,000 another year later. Fiction took the biggest recession from 4,300 words in 74 days straight during that serialization period to random fragments here and there sparsely spread across the journal and separate text files. It recovered a year after the termination, but this time, it took a very different attitude, one of extreme technical training, which lasted six months straight—resulting in three longer fiction works, followed by 128 four-hundred-word vignettes. As for how it felt like, it destroyed me. What I made right after the end of that brutal period was that 70,000-word novel—a deliberate attempt to break free from what I did to myself and to bring back that old ideal creativity while integrating what I got from that brutality somehow—followed by the recent 16,000-word fiction that cements explicitly the death of that old hyper-fictional-immersive protagonist to “verifiable realism.”

Now, evidenced by a recent 1675-word work titularly titled Michael, I experience fiction writing like a stilted robot, but the result itself is “workman-competent.” Though I’m careful with using this term because it directly suggests craft killed the ideal creativity star—a big, deceptive claim, since the prose itself was never the issue, but what fiction writing feels like. It’s why initially in this passage, I offloaded the work to “verifiable realism.” I would probably extend the “prose itself was never the issue” point to structure itself, including interiority, world-building, and plot logic. It’s not even “an all of it” in a direct prose or storytelling sense, since I can close my eyes and the results wouldn’t matter because I know in my mind it’s just not the same, because analogically, talking to my childhood friend at the level of the face-to-face in-person flesh again won’t bring the life I had then. Though this analogy runs into the issue of suggesting that it’s a matter of past and present life itself, but no, that’s damning and too global.

When it comes to what it feels like to read back the old work, I find myself feeling ‘a warm, slightly impressed self-irony.’ I wrote things I can’t even imagine writing now, not because of the prose itself, but because of the nature of my creativity (notice I don’t use the word “mind” here since that implies it’s irrecoverable, even as I recognize how apt it is in almost every other context or use case even up to the point of creeping to the absolute edge of what I can bear to withhold here while still being self-honest).

I wish there was a way to solve this, but no matter what actionable thing I do, it doesn’t change the “is” that no “do” has fixed.

It’s almost funny to do bathos like this, but I feel like a stupid fucking loser not in the insult or the shame sense, but as a precise provisional term to express this inability that I’ve been grappling for two years. I wish it was an insecurity. I really do. I wish it was just a matter of “not feeling like a stupid fucking loser,” because I don’t feel like that. It’s just that it’s not coming, the way rain doesn’t come when you want it to.

I don’t know what to do with writing, but to continue to journal, to make sense of all this, and to write fiction here and there even if I feel like a stilted robot doing it, where I can arbitrarily do all kinds of different prose and it would have no true, lasting bearing. The prose, whatever form it takes, is just what it is in a local sense. I can close my eyes, waiting for a smack of rain on my face.

Ultimately, if there’s one thing I will try to do even more now, it’s to read those flagship fiction works and immerse myself as much as I can. It doesn’t matter if the prose stands out to me. The goal is to re-believe, if that makes sense. And it’s there. That energy, that essence. It’s as obvious as afternoon tropical heat, as a Philippine typhoon.

Writing at Home vs. in Completely New and Different Cafes and Mental States (March 29, 2026)

I really only find new thought patterns when I’m at a completely new and different (CND) cafe and when I let myself continue to write in CND mental states. I don’t know truly if what I wrote is new on their own, and I will never know since once you write it, it’s written, and the circumstances and manner of writing it belong entirely to the moment unique to the writing of that passage. But I do know that I was very intentional when I wrote all that I did when I was at that CND cafe and (series of?) mental state(s), and that is the most crucial part. If it feels like I’m just extrapolating in the way someone stares at the same wall they’ve seen countless times over two decades and knows there’s no way to get anything out of that wall than out of the new patterns they prescribe to their own brain through CND exposure, then, even if not in the vacuum, definitely over the long term, it will be much less intentional, and growth will stagnate against a distilled center like floating rocks bobbing against each other in a watery funnel.

I really might be at the mercy of geography and mental-state circumstance given how much the home swallows everything you give it and you give it so freely and easily until there’s nothing left to funnel into it except for whatever glitches outside, right before you can truly determine what it is, right before anything can come along with you, right outside your tethers’ reach, breaking away, in some unknown place, unanchored, undetermined, unquestioned but also uninitiated, demanding, tiresome, placehood, a sense of place, at-the-mercy, wonder, awe, stimulation beyond repetition, a new awakening of spirit, zest beyond emotion, flesh beyond routine, what-is becomes concrete rather than hidden in layers of built assumption due to seamless home wakes (e.g., assuming the chair hundreds of miles and hours before it’s even there in front of us). In other words, the idea of cultivating the CND state is essentially like cutting yourself and pretending you’re truly bleeding.

It is very much like entering the rabbit hole to Wonderland. There is intentionality up to the very point you’re out there and, once out there, intentionality is that of complete moment-to-moment awakening like debris from a car crash grazing your cheek when you’ve known domestic speed all your life.

Don’t get me wrong. Home is where the bulk of 5 million words was written, including this passage as I sit here at my desk, but home isn’t the author that wrote them. And the author isn’t stuck to his desk even as he writes at it. The words filter directly through everything else the desk isn’t. Autobiographies are not desk-bound, even if they were written at the desk. They source directly from the CNDs that comprehend one’s entire life. Once you’ve exhausted everything you could at this desk, it’s natural to seek new CNDs to layer the writing process itself even more, which is why I take it to CND cafes and mental states (CCMSes). To be clear, I am genuinely writing thousands of words at these CCMSes. They’re very much a home-sized bulk in itself as they are an injection of world-shattering knowledge. I can close my eyes to the actual writings themselves and know that I am dealing with a new worldview or evolution altogether. Home advances; CCMSes evolves.

Shoe-Fitting: “Exceptionality” (March 29, 2026)

What a person does. What a person lives for. What he acts by. It’s almost strange that it comes so suddenly. This mind of mine. I mean what mind is it? What else, to be more precise? I mean, it is what it is. By the time I’ve acted like it’s something special or whatever it is, it really is just a thing. I can talk, I can act, I can say a bunch of things that aren’t really that crazy or substantial—and, even if they were arguable, I would still say they’re just another thing. Okay, okay, self-honesty states that I have to admit that I’m good when I’m good, but still, come on, man, you can’t be expecting me to say that. That’s like the worst thing, the one thing I don’t like doing. If I make myself any more than I am—even if it is precise to who I actually am and it just sounds weird because I am weird—it will feel very, very weird, strange. All those words. I can’t imagine not being self-honest, but I can’t imagine just saying directly that I am different. I can only gesture from as far away a distance as possible, because at the very least, it’s just a bunch of remote facts and not anything even close to relating to myself. I don’t want to see myself any differently. I just want to see myself as just another guy on the road. That’s all I want to be.

If I am different, then I am different like everyone else is different. If I am special, like everyone else. If I am in any shape or form, competent the way a person is good at singing, and that’s not weird at all. That’s how I like to frame it, as much as possible. But when self-honesty forces me, I commit as hard as I can in the writing of a particular journal entry serving as the confinement and then move on to the next as mentally fast and far away as possible. It helps. I don’t want to be special, unique, different, in any way that is not just like everyone else. A compliment should go a long way, I suppose, but only in the sense that a person is complimented for being nice, which isn’t that crazy at all, but just a matter of things and whatever-whatever. f I have to dare admit that I am better, I would rather be better the way we are all specks and will die any time. I would rather that than anything else. I want to disappear into myself the way a person goes along the road and moves on like everyone else. I want just to be me and not have to deal with the weight of anything crazy that being special holds. I just want to be okay. Expectations and all that, be only as much as one sings along a road filled with everyone else. I don’t need the craziness of being actually crazy, just the silliness of a friend group, the moment of banter between them when they say unhinged shit that isn’t actually unhinged, just funny. But yeah, let me be normal, the way a special person is just like everyone else.

Come on, man. Don’t make me into anything I don’t want to be (even if I am it), no matter how self-honest I genuinely want to be (even if I must admit it). If I have to admit it, let me say it ironically like acting. Let me do it. I don’t want to bear with the actual reality of it—the thumping realization of exceptionality, of being something I don’t want to be even if I am it. “If,” “If,” “If,” let me keep it an “if”! I don’t want to bear it. I am lying when I say “if,” but I am telling the truth of what I don’t want to be even if I am it through lying. This is my self-honesty, distorted through the undesirable implications of “exceptionality,” in the vaguest sense of the term. Magical word it is. As much as I desire it to be, as it might just actually be—hopefully. I fear it so much I would rather die forgotten like everyone else, because to me, that is not a threat. That is peace, happiness. I don’t care to be special. I don’t care to be that person (myself, that’s me, that’s who I am, I must accept myself, I must accept my exceptionality, I can’t accept myself if I don’t accept my exceptionality, I must accept it, I must accept myself, I will only truly be integrated if I accept my exceptional and, by automatic extension, myself, I can only self-actualize, I can only be if I accept it full-heartedly, straight, without irony or deflection or laughter or any attempt to make it out to be anything different from what it actually is as reality, as me, me, me, that’s me!).

I… I… I’m trying to say it. I’m trying to say I’m exceptional. See how I avoided saying it by saying “I’m trying to say” preceding it? I’m special, so good at that. But to say it directly straight-faced, shit(!), shit(!), shit(!), shit! Let me be, let me be! But to be, I must accept it! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Accepting it, but also accepting my desire not to accept it! Both are me! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck (this “fuck” is me as well!)!

Self-Responses

why are they terrified of it?

The funny thing is that their inability to say it as exhaustively encompassed in this passage is kinda proving the point of what they don’t want to say.

the author’s attempt to hide from their exceptionality requires an exceptionally high level of cognitive complexity

Honestly, since I am the author, looking at it makes me uncomfortable, like I’m actually wincing in my face right now. It’s hard to move on and forward and pretend I didn’t just address and identify something that has been essential to say for a while now. It is a victory in itself as much as it is an introducer of things I can’t even begin to wrap my head around. A win for self-honesty and self-understanding and self-interrogation and integration and all that, but also… Fuck

What does a person do at the end of everything? I guess they sit down and close their eyes to meet, shake hands with, and welcome the next one, the next entry. This might just be that moving on that I mentioned in the past where the journal entry serves as the confinement, but still, Fuck, FUCK! What do you want me to do! I have to do it, if that’s what I’m doing.

I just… I just need to accept it. I mean, accept that I have to keep… keep… keep… shit, Fuck, shit, Fuck! Self-honesty and fuck are fighting each other here. I can’t just move on and pretend and confine and forget. Shit! But I want to, not that I have to, not that it will actually be what I do, but I think that I want to. Whether that’s actual want or not, I don’t know. I just don’t know! I… don’t know. But I do know. That’s the problem. I know, and I say I don’t know because it’s easier to say I don’t know than it is easy to say I’m in full awareness of something where full awareness of it is its own paining thing. It’s so much easier to hide in these tangles than it is to say anything truly straightforward, even as I am demonstrating the very self-honesty I genuinely believe in through it. I am both being self-honest and dishonest, because while it is demonstrating that self-honesty, hiding in the tangles of that demonstration is its own self-dishonesty. Shit, Fuck, shit, Fuck! As if cursing here’s going to save me. To give me an exit. Ha-ha. Laugh. I laughed. Another deflection, another attempt to exit. Period. (That’s new.)

Self-Responses (2)

I wish I didn’t know what to do, so I could ask and get an answer that’s totally new to me. But I know what to do. I know what will happen. That’s the point. That’s the problem. But that’s not a problem. I just want to problematize, but it is a problem. No, not that it is a problem, but that I want it to be a problem, because there’s something deeper I don’t want, that I’m afraid of. I was about to type “Ha-ha” just now, stopped myself. Okay, you know what: Ha-ha. There, fuck it.

Back to First-Person

I am—in some sense, to some degree, in some manner or way, not to my full understanding, perhaps both to humanize and normalize it as well as do the opposite—exceptional.

Shit.

Okay, best I can do. See ya guys! We’ll meet again next time I feel like being self-honest.

I feel like I said goodbye and left right as the vulnerability started to feel like genuine vulnerability rather than just performative bid for connections and false concessions. Dang it. I did this to someone, a four-month online friend, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t remember, and it’s hard just to sit here and genuinely think if it matches here. I don’t know. I just… don’t want to know. And the knowledge (as much as these “bunches of words” I’ve so carefully curated and given you allow) of whatever we have here is the best thing I can afford right now without feeling like I’m just torturing myself. As if this isn’t its own tribulation. Fuck, ha-ha, yes.

You know, I wanted the cafe to be where I vanished and became a person. I wanted writing to be where I vanished and became a person. The latter came before the former, so the order here doesn’t make sense. But yeah, no matter. Both ended up doing the opposite, at least in the vanishing part. I did become a person. They are where I became a person. I didn’t vanish. The opposite happened. Being a person might just be its own standing out thing. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know! I fucking know! Shut up!

It’s interesting that the above is a million times more vulnerable than performing vulnerability itself. I’m suddenly so shy thinking that I’m grappling with this rather than performing grappling with vulnerability I don’t actually have. I feel more vulnerable admitting a lack of vulnerability and that I’ve been performing a kind of vulnerability. This self-honesty is its own weird place, because it might just be what self-honesty actually feels like. It’s easier to “own vulnerability” I don’t actually have. It makes you look and feel resilient and brave. It’s actually more terrifying saying that I’ve been playing poor this whole time, because then the world isn’t my playground where I can play and perform and pretend around. No, it’s a place where I have to admit that I am only as much as I am, in the way that exceptionality only allows. Performed vulnerability feels like freedom. I’m performing the vulnerability of authenticity, so I don’t have to bear with the vulnerability of the authenticity of exceptionality. Exceptionality—not the belief, but the reality that keeps screaming at you to admit itself—is horrific.

Self-Responses (3)

Why is exceptionality horrific?

Back to First-Person (2)

The fact I’m having thoughts showing the desire for something bad to happen so that I can avoid being “that guy.” If something horrible happens to me, to the things I need to do the things I do, then I can be free, but I can’t do it myself. I can only hope, but I shouldn’t hope that. I’m just… afraid. I hope this was all just some random thought. Then I can disappear. I don’t care about all the things that come with whatever this is.

If someone could just mock me and tell me how stupid and disgusting and horrible and bad I am, that would be easier, better even. i keep looking for that kind of attention, relationship, treatment. It really is addicting. Being ignored, rejected, dismissed, alienated, and put down is both torturously isolating and helping me cope away from the idea that I am anything of that sort. Looking for places where I can be normal, lesser even. I don’t want to be special.

I guess that’s why I find myself thinking about car crashes all the time. There’s a part of me that genuinely wants things to go so horribly wrong that I can finally be free of the horrors of existence, especially the kind of existence that has to agonize over its own exceptionality. But yeah, that’s… something. The fact that I smile while thinking of that, enjoying the fear I feel of death. Ha-ha. It’s funny, if anything.

I like people who make me feel lesser. [I feel—somehow, in a way only I understand—loved that way.] That definitely says a lot about me.

It really is easier to be a loser. I’ve long admitted that. I love saying I’m a loser. I love the loser life. You can do anything. My genius feels genuine when it comes from a fucking loser. I can pretend, perform, play around with these social games of performing vulnerability and all. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

In the end, I know I will just move forward as I do. It’s funny. But yeah, hopefully, this self-honesty helps and progresses me. I don’t want to stay stuck in some stupid mindset, even as I admit these feelings about myself and difficulties with accepting something that amounts to a fundamental part of who I am. Yeah, yeah. Hand-wave dismissal. On you go. Off you go.

I guess that’s why I like being silly and playful. It staves off the pressure of ‘self-seriousness’ (or what feels like it but might actually be the E—that unnameable thing). But ironically, it leads immediately, especially now, to that realization that that kind of behavior might just belong to someone who is of the E, since if it coincides with genuine hyper-competent autotelic flow states, it becomes just that.

It is easier to play “funny-appearing earnest-unselfconsciousness,” but it’s strange because it’s both a performance and not a performance. There is a genuine unselfconsciousness, but the fact of funniness and silliness and playfulness is just as much genuine as much as it is me taking advantage of the pressure it actually staves off, not in it staving it off as an essential, needed self-conscious act, but as the way someone makes random funny or musical sounds when alone or outside or when there’s downtime as something that feels fun to do. This might just be the most balanced way to look at all this.

Self-Responses (4)

What does this last part solve about the whole passage

Essentially: “I’ll be the playful, snickering, joshing ‘exceptionaire,’ fully demonstrating exceptionality while disavowing self-seriousness even as this disavowing leads back to exceptionality itself through sheer hyper-competence coinciding with playfulness.”

So this is self-acceptance of both: (1) the reality of exceptionality through exceptionality’s playfulness’ normal, joshing, “just like everyone else” freedom and (2) the desire not to be “exceptional,” at least in the sense of exceptionality’s self-seriousness’ pressure.

Rather than trying to be normal, they accept this as their normal.

Back to First-Person (3)

But is this the same as accepting it or am I formulating what that would look like? There’s a difference between speaking of it and admitting it directly.

Either way, something has to give.

It’s easy to title an entry “exceptionality” than to say “yo, this is a-me.” It’s not the same thing.

There is a tension, the one that’s biting its lip, that’s crawling toward resolving it with something ruder, baser, simpler, rawer. If I cut my finger by mistake, then whatever I say will go away, and the journal will hold in formula the effect of the truth without the actual integretaion and internalization of it.

Funny.

I can only admit this. I don’t think any more formulating is going to change the fact that I’m just not convinced. I’m playing a word game, persuading more than agreeing, which reads more like devil’s advocate, because it definitely is. This whole passage is performing chaos, realization, and acceptance and agreement, just to say “yeah, good luck thinking I was faking with that. I went one step farther, one layer deeper, self-honestly sharper. You can’t out-maneuver the maneuverer.”

I play my own games, convincing myself that I finally said it only to take it farther next time because I know well I didn’t move shit.

I guess I will have to blame the E idea itself. It just doesn’t work with me at all. It’s probably why I allow AI to speak favorably of me, because it’s less wanting something to flatter me and more so me feeling a genuine sense of control listening to something I absolutely don’t believe in while still benefitting from that listening, like standing in the rain with an umbrella to prove you’re impenetrable, unconvinceable, not to show it, but out of self-actualization.

To put it simply, I don’t believe in the idea of me being E. But it was fun to act out the conversion into believing something I’ve never even once actually budged on during this whole almost 3 hours of text footage. Well, “act” isn’t precise. “Convincing myself” is definitive and exact.

If I truly believed I was exceptional, I would be able to say it to someone else’s face. But I can’t, and that’s not because I’m trying to look humble and because it’s shameful to say something so blatant. That’s because I don’t describe myself that way. It’s a million times easier to stand behind yourself than to stand behind something that sounds like something someone says and isn’t actually. I just don’t believe in the word. Maybe, in some way, somehow, I believe in something like an exceptionality about myself, but that’s not “I am exceptional.” “Exceptional” just doesn’t work for me. It’s a shoe that doesn’t fit even if in some parts, it feels genuinely convincing. The whole range of what it means, as a straight whole term, doesn’t hit me squarely, doesn’t capture the essence of myself. Well, I guess that was never its role, but the word itself doesn’t even capture anything for me exactly. It’s too vague a word to mean anything that isn’t just hand-waving. So if there’s an ending to all this, “exceptionality” or “exceptional” just do not work for me as words, even if I may believe in a kind of something about myself that very remotely resembles some parts of it, in a way.

Self-Responses (5)

So it’s a lengthy shoe-fitting session.

Even as the word is ‘poorly designed,’ this entire thing demonstrates whatever that failed word was reaching even as it carried too much baggage to be useable beyond this passage.

Self-Responses (7)

why do they ultimately reject the one-word “exceptionality”?

If there’s a passage demonstrating “self-rigor,” it would probably be this.

Back to First-Person (4)

I noticed that I really can only accept and approve of the use of the word “exceptionality” when it’s being pointed at me rather than me saying it myself, since I know the word by those parts that work, whereas using the word myself means grappling with the whole of it where I can’t exactly just say “see it the way I do.” It’s not a good word, but I can trust it when it comes because I can trust myself to see it by its good parts and not the bad ones. It’s a useful word only as far as I am concerned in interpreting it myself rather than my liberal use of it given I write to communicate, and using a poorly designed word isn’t helping me. Precision is not the same as the interpretation I trust myself with.

Self-Responses (8)

The self-rigor is screaming in this last section

Breaking Gospel (March 29, 2026)

Integration is such a weird thing. The definition of it is simple. The model of it is simple. But the experience of it is just so strange. When you really integrate far-lying, far-thrown parts together, it’s so strange. Memories and references that have never been even remotely in the same world now sit together long enough to turn into a unit in the form of a passage, even if only in a list without synthesis into some point or broader theme. It reminds me why I go to new cafes regularly. Even before I arrive, I forget, and that forgetting makes room for complely new connections, so when I re-encounter things, it’s things that you would never find together. The order, the pattern, the sequence, is reset and all jumbled up, in the best way possible. The longer I stay in that cafe only over that single original instance until around eight to ten hours, the more bizarre it gets, like Wonderland, and that’s so, so good for even more integration and out-of-the-blue connections that result in even more wholeness and sense of self-security in a “all roads lead to Rome” way. These bizarre unprecedented connections tear through sludged-up layers of assumption. All of a sudden, your entire worldview pre-teardown feels so arbitrary and “well, it works,” in the stupidest way possible, like a man shoring up the same old sand. Somehow, along the way, the configuration of things was mistaken for reality itself. Conflation, complacency, stupidity. When things work, they just work, and it feels like truth itself, but a coffee cup coming every time with that exact flavor isn’t truth. It’s just a configuration. The repetitiveness starts to sound like gospel, and now, here in the cafe, everything that made sense together now looks real arbitrary, like “when and why did I think those two only made sense when together and in that order? how random!”

Workshop Disappointment: Unsent Letter (March 30, 2026)

—, I attended this — three-hour creative writing workshop yesterday afternoon (by — under the title —). It ended up being a casual sharing circle. Twenty attendees rambled, and one microphone got passed around. The focus was on answering questions about what one wrote following each of the five cafe-themed (primarily centered on writing from the cafe’s perspective) prompt exercises. They left distinguishing between the writers and their current executions to chance. No one read their first drafts out loud, except incidentally. Oh, but they did yap.

Most used pen and paper. One-hundred words was the most they seemed to produce for an exercise, fifty being the average. While that alone should reveal whole worlds, whatever insight would have done just that screamed behind bars. Talking dominated. Even while encouraging craft, the speaker weaseled at the level of absolute introduction. AI-generated text did the presentation heavy lifting. They hashed out using the slides, tossing in foundational terms like “show, don’t tell” for good measure. A writer’s writer, even a passionate hobbyist, was nowhere to be seen. Personalized philosophy beyond “writing helps one express oneself”—the profoundest line ever said in that whole meeting—wafted elsewhere. While the humans behind the staff were nice—neither hospitable nor difficult—from their handling of someone needing an outlet in the middle of — — (electrical and expressional—which critically showed zero foresight for the writers of today), it was like the failed version of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character from Catch Me If You Can, a drive-by cash funnel, a Now You See Me: Now You Don’t. I dredged up my creative and mental satisfaction and value out of it anyway.

I looked on starry-eyed as they orally explained (not expressed —which their writing would have done) themselves. I truly believed in them. But the facilitator drew none of that out. The workshop started, then ended. Whatever happened in between was plausibly deniable. You couldn’t even tell you walked out of there until you did, then you realized it was over. Something happened; I don’t know what. This message is one of only few pieces of evidence that it ever took place. There was no “Did I get better? Did I express myself better?” It was a hodgepodge of disconnected actions without self-actualizing feedback.

Is there anything that isn’t that? I don’t want the Reddit-presented phenomenon of “non-writing writers” and “non-reading writers.”

That was my second creative writing workshop. The first was yours back in — in —. I was definitely not a writer then.

The Blank Slate as Human Technology: The One-Time 10-Hour New Cafe Stay & Human-Vivified Writing (March 31, 2026)

It’s crazy how cheap it is to live with a desktop if it was just Meralco, Maynilad, and luckily cheap monthly rent (— PHP frozen, two floors, two bathrooms, 3 rooms, dining-kitchen area, sink-washing machine back area, living room, garage/parking lot taking up the front, gate, balcony, gated neighborhood, access to — — and its elevated highways leading all around, access to nearby supermarkets) you’ve had for two decades from a time when it was much cheaper and the landlord hasn’t increased the price since even after all the inflation. And how much disposable income you need just to stay for ten hours at Starbucks (— pesos, not including travel expenses) once every three days, a new branch once every two visits, 106 stays, 54 unique cafes, 10 months.

I wrote my reasoning for cafe stays to some degree here (heavily abstracted excerpt):

In real life, Non-tourist traveling is always hard because… why would you? It’s even harder to be someone who can just stay in a new non-tourist just-about-anyone cafe for ten hours straight like I do. That’s why my cafe stays are so effective for getting to know people truly, since people don’t just get out of themselves the way switching to a whole new non-tourist place, space, and geography where people actually live and the way the span of ten hours shows people in their most residential selves truly.

Think about it. The non-tourist ten-hour-cafe-staying traveler is like the colonial traveler. The natives cannot even fathom a ship, let alone traveling across the whole ocean. They won’t do the same thing I did: go to some non-tourist residential cafe and stay there for ten hours in some place far away from home. No, they’ll go to beaches, resorts, —, —, restaurants, things of that nature. That’s why it’s so effective. I genuinely shatter my worldview by entering a whole area-shaped-and-sized bubble Wonderland just by sheer “why would you do that” and “who would do that?” I am privy to it only as much as it is the place I go to the first time and then never again. I’ve gone to over 50 new unique cafes over the last ten months, covering a very wide range of different worlds, bypassing the extreme cut-offs that govern everyone’s lives.

The cafe practically does what you’d expect from staying in a public space. Many of them are in malls or embedded into office buildings or along the path of a university. Only some are standalone, and even they are along a very busy main road as well as a frequent haunt for locals who use that route every day. So whatever other structure is there often ends up leading back to the cafe, because cafes are everywhere.The cafe practically does what you’d expect from staying in a public space. Many of them are in malls or embedded into office buildings or along the path of a university. Only some are standalone, and even they are along a very busy main road as well as a frequent haunt for locals who use that route every day. So whatever other structure is there often ends up leading back to the cafe, because cafes are everywhere.

To use Stephenie Meyer’s wording:

Each ten-hour new cafe stay offered “an alien planet” (which she used to describe “too green” Forks, Washington).

One might think the invisibility of Starbucks (‘by design supposed to feel the same everywhere’) would make it less ‘other-world normal,’ but it’s when everything tourist-y or eye-catchingly “local” in a conventional aesthetic “lived-in” Pinterest way falls away that people truly show themselves at their most residential. And I disagree: not all branches are the same. Each is so structurally different in both interior and location that you would barely be able to say any one is the same, especially when you stay for ten hours, which is enough time for the motion of life to settle into the hyper-local, into absolute thisness.

Each place is like every whole new Roblox game where people act totally differently. But here, it’s because people aren’t performing any role beyond the functional part of drinking coffee, chatting, and keeping to themselves as one would do in any public space but within the comforts of a cafe’s comfortable air-conditioned interior that you see them truly act differently in the way going to a local sports fest with basketball and volleyball matches could never.

I myself grew up traveling and being part of many communities and doing all manner of activities, whether performing on stage in a local concert, volunteering, acting as an assistant to a teacher, community cleaning, playing sports, or hiking (and many others). But ten hours in a new cafe has shown me that I somehow never knew anyone truly until they were strangers from a whole different area in their local cafe. It felt like I was truly seeing others for the first time, because we were no longer bound by our relationships to each other and all these came with throughout our lives. Community somehow lost that place for me as the way to know myself and to know others truly, strangely enough.

Ephemerality, residential, local, a whole nother area and world. These come to mind.

The ten-hour cafe stay (not the staff, a particular branch, or the customers and regulars) knows me better than even my parents and siblings do.

Similarly, a four-month-long faceless online friend knew me better than my family ever could in some ways.

Solitude at home for years, then solitude outside in ten-hour stays at new cafes I’ll never go to again, then solitude in the way someone who has reached such a point of personhood desires to be seen by another person, even a short-lived faceless online friendship. All of these have produced my greatest level of knowing both myself and others truly.

So while I did write that digital spaces in a journal entry could never replace the ten-hour new cafe stay because of the nature of text as curated, that’s only text as a public letter and messaging thing. When you’re dealing with a writer like myself who has lived in their writing for years, naturally, you will know them better by their personal writing, including their personalized fiction, even if that’s the only medium you have for connecting to them. And in that sense, ironically, family knows much less because they assume everything and then leave it at that. The blank-state of the one-time ten-hour new cafe stay knows me better than a community could ever. The curiosity I am shown—especially because I am not trying to hide, but unselfconsciously being myself as I am as I write personally rapidly over the course of that stay—by the security guard in a new cafe over the course of ten hours is the most I’ve ever been known by a person, which is why I invite it. I’ve learned I appreciated that kind of knowing. To be screams strongest in that sustained moment of true self-actualization.

You may wonder if I am pointing to the blank slate here, and you might wonder what would be the point of any accumulated writing then if the goal is the blank slate. The goal of personal writing, at least for me, is to engage in ruthless self-rigor right now. Accumulation shows how I’ve evolved (the way a bunch of people turns into a billion individuals and had no bearing in their emergence, minds, ideas, lives, and experiences save for ancestry), but it is never a reference table any more than a complete stranger in a new cafe is. All words are a bunch of words right after the fire behind the typing is done and the matter is text-file-saved, the truth being in the person-being-the-writing-moment—utter becoming. That the blank slate of the cafe helps that does not contradict the accumulation. It only proves that history as cold text is separable from the fire of what is present at the desk, the screaming man over a bunch of meaningless words given zest only by a passing cursory glance, whether by detached reader or the author themselves. I hold their purpose (like a shoulder bag). I hold the territory the map is reaching for. I am the god behind matter.

I am the engine, not of creation (which assumes the text carries what it is created with, bestowed, or given), but of the very thing that a bunch of matter turns into beautiful poetry. I glance away, and it goes back to matter. I glance at it, and it goes back to beautiful poetry. I actively project its beauty and poeticism onto it for the duration. The technology of writing is effectively mud relative to our ability to generate its purpose actively, to make it technological, ontological, philosophical, artistic, intellectual. You can realize this easily by looking at Internet Archive and seeing how much it means to the people that digitized him but nothing to almost everyone who would never stumble upon it. It requires delusion of the creative, but that is why we must keep raging against the dying of the light. It’s why some books are characterized as that of a writer’s writer. It’s smuggled-in value, shared community resources, insider info, local knowledge, algorithmically niche, personal. An AI would never understand why something is valued, only that it was told it was valuable based on its data, even if you gave it all the craft technologies, principles, and techniques, because human is the technology behind the writing. Writing is not an extrapolable technology, because the heart of it is technologically human, not in the subjective sense, but the most complex objective sense possible, which is hard to map even for an AI. For example, even if Moby Dick “should” be bad (if objectively relying solely on writing as the technology and not on the human as the technology), it is considered good, and without being told that it is valued, AI would never extrapolate that it is “good” by judging based on writing as the technology. And when you descend to the personal level, practically anything goes yet makes all the sense. It’s why I love my own experimental, surreal, poetic, abstract, psychological fiction stories and see so much in them. It’s why I see this one 1.5-million-word metafictional “deconstructor fleet” ground-breaking (literally novel and uncharted territory due to how recent all of this is) web novel as objectively powerful even after reading many literary fiction. The AI is relying on the map to judge the territory that the human is experiencing from the map (the writing). Imagine how hard that must be, poor thing. AI cannot access the “show, don’t tell” that humans experience every single waking moment. It has to be “told.” A human only experiences. Whether the patterns of accumulated recorded history accounts for that doesn’t matter. Thus, an AI would invalidate that person’s hyper-precisely described experience if it doesn’t map onto what “should” be, which is all it has as its reality, not because the person is interesting, but because unrecorded reality is.

seeya Mae (April 2, 2026)

It’s strange how I’ve changed.

“I wouldn’t wish friendship with me upon my worst enemy.”

I don’t hate myself. I don’t hate the way that I am. But I know that I can be a very miserable person when I am with people, and it makes those people feel miserable as well. I am specifically talking about online friendships here.

I noticed that I’ve changed because there was this very big and obvious opportunity to make a friend, so much easier objectively than the last one that led to a 4-month-long online friendship, and I didn’t take it.

I enjoyed watching those two friends talk, and I felt comfortable being there. But I knew that it was only up to that point. If I went and got into it, I know how fun it would be and how miserable it would be.

To explain, with online friendships, I become so anxious-attachment, when that’s not the case at all in real life. I don’t know why. I remember getting so angry when I was given the characterization that that’s how I’ve always been, but even after so long, despite being a prolific writer, despite using the internet all day every day, I would have never written and used the internet this much if it wasn’t for my circumstances.

To give a comparison, imagine if a Grace Field House child (my younger years, specifically the community, outdoor, event-y, social part, not the isolation) suddenly shifted to being isolated in a room with only a main computer and no contact with people except for those who have moved on with no one really responding to you or being available and you’re left to scour the internet to make sense of yourself. From that, it makes sense that you would start writing like I did and start becoming more and more of yourself and a person in yourself in the way writing lets you. I have integrated and consolidated so much into myself, since I really had no external structures to rely on, as the external narratives were proving insufficient and addressal and integration were the only way to move forward and get healing. And that’s where I am now. Integration on my whole life and closure. But that does not mean that I’ll just waltz up and pretend that I can handle an online friendship. I can’t. Maybe one day. It’s been 106 day since the end of that four-month-long online friendship.

Let me make sense and process. I was awestruck in the moment when that person talked to me in that Roblox game called “The Morning Roast” and proactively helped me find the mystery of the game so kindly, warmly, and nicely. When their friend suddenly arrived right as I was about to start asking them if this frequented this game and afk’d here regularly as a gateway to potential friendship, the way they spoke to their friend reminded me of that four-month online friend. I was already getting so into it and then as the conversation between them went on for 37 minutes as I just stood there as if afk with only the three of us there in that game, I slowly processed whatever was happening silently. It was only when their friend left and they said their goodbyes and they remained in the server that I started getting antsy. I felt awkward leaving when their friend arrived even if one could argue it was the perfect time to leave. I just stayed anyway. I was curious. It’s rare that you see someone who’s genuinely talking rather than acting like a child, so I listened to the two of them hang out and talk. I remained even awkward when their friend left, and I was battling within myself as to what to do. I went inside and stood by the window while they sat down at the table. It was a diner. After 20 minutes of us just afk-ing in the same game, they ended up leaving, addressing me by name in their farewell. I just said “seeya”. I ended up concluding midway through the shared afk between us that I would rather just wait until they were the one who left, since it was easier. In the end, I’m thankful that it ended that way. I was pretty conflicted, and in the end, I just afk’d the whole way since their friend arrived, having stayed there for a total of one hour in silence until their goodbye to me.

I am not saying I was restraining myself. I just realized that I wouldn’t be able to convince myself to go for it. So I didn’t. That four-month friend taught me a lot about myself because of the way that I behaved and how they dealt with it. So I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t afraid, but it was the fear of knowing just how much it reminded me of that four-month friend and how I reacted to all of it.

Smothered in Depth’s Signals and Implications: Inferiority’s Head Cracked Open by Elephantine Possession (April 3, 2026)

Why? I don’t get it. Is it because I wasted all these years in solitude? Why is my former crush from back in high school who came from a relatively wealthy family inarticulate? I don’t get it. Many assumptions I’ve had for so long are breaking. I’m so confused. I projected so much onto them back then. And now, when I look at them, all I see is a beautiful face. What did I even see then? I guess I saw smokes and mirrors. Reminds me of how my perception of my wealthier Chinese cousins deflated as I grew as a person and entered the spaces that I thought were holier-than-thou in a wealthy kind of sense. Like, now, all I see is someone with a background in the most prepositional sort of way. It’s not “someone-with-a-background.” It’s “someone, with a background.” What happened? They travelled to so many places. They have all of these things. They went to those kinds of schools. Why are they like this? It must be so hard, huh? Being all this and not being all that. It’s so strange. It’s so much easier for a loser like me because I can keep growing non-stop, but it is also torturous in its own way. But because I spent so much time in solitude self-directed, I went to such a point that I look at all of them that I saw so much in that way and now feel so strangely “huh?”

I wish I was compensating somehow. But I’m just confused. There is disappointment, but it’s mostly just unsettlement.

But why? They can’t be! They can’t be shallow! I was thinking, “Oh, if I just kept going and improved myself, I’ll be able finally to stand shoulder to shoulder with them!” Then I looked, and thought, “But… no… Wait, what if I can still talk to them? Then I realized, “Oh shit, they won’t be able to communicate at the same frequency.” But this is how I saw people from the working class/underclass, since money and food on the table are a constant problem. Why the fuck is it extending to the upper-middle/upper class? No, no, no, this doesn’t make any fucking sense! Don’t fucking tell me… All this fucking time!!!??? All this fucking time!??!? What the fuck am I supposed to do now!?!?!

They just surrounded themselves with symbols and signals. They cloaked themselves. Smothered themselves. Only to reveal at the end of all those Russian dolls nothing! Absolutely Nothing! What the fuck!!! No! No! No!

I believed. For so fucking long. All that self-honesty, all that agony, all that wonder, all that awe, all those years spent genuinely tinkering, questioning, and confronting myself. And to end up realizing that at the end of all of it that I was the only one who did this, and no one else could meet me where I was. I believed. I believed. I feel lied to.

That’s it. That’s my last source of humility. Nothing’s gonna stop me now. Ha-ha. Ha-ha… That was my last milestone. And now, it’s done. Sure, it may have been done this whole time, and I may feel fucked up about it. But hey, it’s, it’s… done! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! 

I’m going to be truly myself. That is the last wall fallen. And this actualization has a flavor. It has a way of doing itself. It has a way of walking. It is arrogance-tinged. The kind of arrogance that has defeated its final teacher because they were never there in the first place.

Now, I really am my only enemy. Self-honesty. Self-rigor. Truly myself. The arrogance of one who has total self-possession, no longer stipulated by that final teacher who was never there in the first place. I am.

Feeling insufficient, lesser, inferior, worse, weaker, less intelligent, less capable, less advantaged, less of myself, less, less, less, less, less. Now that the last teacher is gone, there is only true dominance and creative freedom. Utter self-possession.

Maybe, I will still look at people from 1st world countries who look particularly intelligent and still feel like they’re a goal to strive toward. But in terms of the wealthy people that I knew, those cousins, that former crush, the literary awards in my country (realizing that the writings that got first place every year were not at all what I would consider anywhere near that level at all), they are walls torn down. It’s less that I tore them down and more like I grew to such a point and started going outside, and everywhere I walked, the gates fell apart with just my unaware step. I leveled to 100 at the beginner zone and when I went out, everything collapsed just at the sight of me. And I am the one bearing the sense of crisis of disillusionment.

I feel like a crocodile who grew up thinking that its trainer was all-powerful, which is why trainers are careful never to let it ever realize how powerful it actually is as an adult in comparison.

Fortunately, books still offer a lot to strive toward because there are so many authors that I admire and can’t at all write and see the way they do. And the world is an endless teacher. This is where self-honesty and self-rigor come in, even with many teacher statues collapsing meanwhile in the background. I am my own endless ruthless teacher.

But damn, I can’t believe my former crush and many other people intimidated me so much that her rejection of me was like being rejected by the world. Just today, I was a little nervous about checking up on that former crush again. That’s what led to this passage’s realization. An elephant terrified of a mouse. But yes, even while it was the most horrible and traumatic experience ever, I am glad that my self-honesty triumphed over my inferiority-driven striving and self-doubt eventually.

Choking My Dreamer to Death (April 3, 2026)

It’s interesting that if I shift my mindset a little bit, I have so many documents that show me playing with ideas. Now that I have grown so much as a person and a writer and a thinker, it would be such a goldmine if I just looked at every single one of those Google Docs fiction experimental fiction whatevers and took them seriously.

I just need to separate the prose itself from the vision. That’s not going to be easy since I’ve been trained to look only at the prose, with the vision taking the farthest seat. It’s why you never see me playing with ideas anymore. I’ve very much become a technician.

It’s very much right now to stare at it and not feel the whole thing is trash because the prose is trash. A part of me knows there’s genuine ideas here since I was very much strong on ideas before but have settled to a more grounded realism that can be considered arguably uninspired and technically performative than actually innovative. But it’s not easy to see the way my younger self did. It’s hard to separate the execution from the vision itself.

I was the kind of idea-first guy who would think, “What if in some post-apocalypse setting, the jungle grew so much that they became so tall and vast that they towered over the cities themselves?” Of course, I couldn’t put that imagination into words as quickly as I did just now back then. But it was there in my head. I was fresh off all of those cool ideas, and I was creatively and vividly day-dreaming constantly. I could day-dream entire breathing, living (sometimes literally in the sense of a world that’s actually alive in a sci-fi, sci-fantasy, or surreal way), lived-in worlds. Now, I’m a sentence manager.

I think there was this study actually that the amateur writer’s visual parts of the brain light up so much more compared to the expert who thinks only in those linguistical brain parts.

But it is interesting. I don’t see anything anymore. I don’t day-dream. I can still see in my mind’s eye while I’m reading or when I’m thinking and imagining. But it’s not getting lost. Two years ago, I still had it. But the last two years have been depriving of all of it.

My mind was practically untouched and hyper-consuming all manner of visual media (manga, Webtoons, Youtube videos, animations, past real-life experiences that were very visual in my head, etc.) and web novels for 6 years straight, so you can imagine how hard that is to re-create. The last two years have been extreme linguistic and technical training, grounding, and exposure until the hyper-inventive mind that would generate something like The Promised Neverland or To Your Eternity was nowhere to be found. It’s not that I don’t consume visual media. I do. But I’ve become very much curbed in the day-dreaming department. And why? What did I gain out of it? I started pushing words so much to their full potential because I was no longer relying on anything else but them in a technically aware sense until they truly became a bunch of words. I trained myself until I detested them and wield them like a slave I find despicable. It is because of this evolved perception that I have become so ruthlessly rigorous and unassuming. This doesn’t mean that I try my best to squeeze everything into words, but I am very, very deliberate in only the way someone who has been deprived of everything else but words is.

The point of despising words is that I am very well aware of their limitations now that I have pushed them to their utter limits and still despise them for taking away so much from me. I’m not asking them to be magic. I’m asking them to get out of the way so I can get out what I want. They’ve become utter mediums of myself, like slaves I despise. “Shut the fuck up and sit still, slave!” Then I stand on top of it so I can enter the carriage. And it’s not a matter of reframing. Any kind of reframing uses words themselves, so I smile the way Ray from Mr Inbetween does when he knows he’s dealing with someone who underestimates him and he’s about to turn that little fucker to a fucking little pussy-piece-of-boy-shit. So you can see my rage in my articulacy, the very artiulacy born out of this very loathing.

The carriage is another slave delivering me to beat every single motherfucker out there for their fucking shittery. I abolish idols. I kill every single Russian-doll-nested thing inside which is absolute nothing! I am dominance itself. I no longer have day-dreaming, but I have utter becoming, utter rage, utter dominance, utter loathing, utter actualization. Everything is a despicable slave through I be. Where is the day-dreamer now?!

Everything is a bunch of motherfucking words, and, by extension, a bunch of motherfucking idols and falsehoods and by motherfucking extension, a bunch of fucking despicable slaves, utter medium, through which I actualize totally!

But I do miss the day-dreamer. I’ve been disappointed and disillusioned so many times. I do miss that feeling of drowning and immersing. Of hyper-day-dreaming. But look where I am. At least words are my despicable slaves through which I actualize myself. The world by extension as I face more and more disillusionment of statues and idols and benchmarks falling away, collapsing without me even doing a single motherfucking thing except just taking a step even a long way away from them. This is what I’ve become. This is the utter becoming, the utter disappointment, the utter mediumization, the utter despicable-enslavement, the utter self-actualization. Where are the motherfucking ideas? They’ve fallen to the ground. They’ve become utter mediums themselves in favor of total medium enslaved 100-percent-fidelity no-latency execution. The I am in the I am. I miss that day-dreamer who saw so much. He didn’t see beyond or past the words. He saw so much even in the smallest words in only the way he dreamily could. That utter day-dreamer.

Once you stop treating words like gospel, you master them the way a master masters a slave. And that extends to everything else, to the world itself. Self-honesty in the way of utter mastery destroys everything in favor of actualization rather than assumption (e.g., relying on words the way one relies on their infallible mother, inferiority-driven striving, self-doubt).

That utter day-dreamer was utter projection, the way a child blames themselves and internalizes shame when their parents fight. But now, I am the dominator, so naturally—the way I recently dealt with my inferiority-driven striving that relied heavily on the assumption that wealthier people naturally cultivated depth rather than just smothering themselves with signals and symbols that imply it (worldliness through much diverse travel, leisure enough to have a room of one’s own, free-range lifestyle enough to foster original thinking, and rigor through elite institutions)—I clasp (clutch) that vivid scene I day-dreamed and slam its head against the pavement, in favor of the feeling of the utter expression of the fullness of my being, of ruthless self-honesty and self-rigor, of actualization. Unintimidated, I learn disrespectfully (and, paradoxically, actually deeply respectfully) from everything and slam all their heads against the pavement in actualization and utterness.

Now, when something makes me uncomfortable, I don’t retreat into my daydreams or listen to music simply. I grab it by the motherfucking throat and slam it against the pavement again and again and a-fucking-again, using writing as a means of articulating reality with clear eyes. I confront it all ruthlessly self-honestly and self-rigorously and thus accomplish integration and, by extension, actualization and enactment. When before, I would sit down in a room and rot, not addressing it because I couldn’t and didn’t know how to and didn’t have anyone to talk to, now, I would write it down in precise words and slowly build it up even as brick walls—rejectors, emotionally unavailables, getting-away-with-its, insufficients, insecure self-righteous monsters, indifferents, uncommunicators, liars, and all manner of creature—surround me. I clutch those brick walls’ necks and suffocate them to death as I advance forward, contemptuously and utterly freely, because I am not a motherfucking slave. I am a person! I am! I am! I am!

Day-dreamer is the one who dareth close its eyes. I will choke that dreamer to death until it wakes up and sees what’s happening right in front of it with clear eyes. Face reality fucker!

The only thing I have is my unselfconscious unembarassed self-honest integrity.

Excess Craft That Ruins Ascent Expands Range Through a Story: Integrating Creative Conflict Into Me, Simply (April 4, 2026)

I realized that’s what I’m doing. I’m intentionally sensory-overloading my fiction writing because it’s a technical exercise burst first and foremost. I just do also it intentionally to capture a specific narrative that appeals to me.

I realized that’s what I’m doing. I’m intentionally sensory-overloading my fiction writing because it’s a technical exercise burst first and foremost. By overloading it with sensory details, I can expand my range and be even more precise so that I have even more control in the future. I just do also it intentionally to capture a specific narrative that appeals to me.

It’s very much a “this is great for my skill level” kind of thing.

It’s like a song that is good as an exercise, but also its own kind of song that makes use of that technical training excess toward its own “song point.”

The person wanting to get better as a writer is the same person writing a specific kind of story. Both motions become one in the creation of the story.

It’s not indirect learning. It is direct learning as well as direct storytelling.

The story itself is an analogy of “craft ruining me,” funnily enough. Overenthusiastic gun-toting literary “show, don’t tell” ruins the beloved web novel strategist protagonist. The protagonist is analytical and philosophizing, but crumbles psychologically to the point of paralysis due to sensory and grounding overload. It is not just analogical. It is quite literal. Excessive “show, don’t tell” broke the ascent-plotting day-dreamer. The philosophizing that should have lifted off and become grandiose and coalitional loses to very, very squelchy mud.

I was learning craft by expressing through a story that excessive craft ruins the kind of storytelling that appeals to me.

Unintentionally, the name of the protagonist (and the story) is quite literally “Red Grimes.” “Red Grimes” as in there’s lots of blood and grime in the ickiest way possible. It’s anti-ambitious because it goes to such lengths to stun you with the abasing experience of having mud cake between your toes as you squash your way smothered by the forest. The idea of “Quest: Kill fifty goblins” gets clogged.

All of this happened unintentionally. It was just the natural result of two things conflicting and then colliding in the form of a single held-together story. My only focus while writing was just writing it, and what came out revealed my priorities: to write the story I want to write and to write it well the way I was technically taught. To reach a point of integration and total mastery and control that I can truly be free and write whatever I want. To go back to when I was an ascent-plotting strategical intellectual philosophical analytical grandiose dreamer. To let it all happen in front of me. It wasn’t enough just to do it. I needed to make something that was truly controlled. It’s not just about reaching a milestone or performing mastery. I really do love those descriptions I read in works like Sigrid Undset’s Jenny and Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees. I can’t get enough. But I can’t be forced to write only in those descriptions. I need metafictional web novels. I need their protagonists. I need Marty Byrdes. I need people with genuine ambition and move-forwardness. I am both. I am all. That is what integration means. That is where the conflict is currently happening. That is where mastery is being sought. That is where the hopes of true control are looming.

But I can tell I’m still so far away from mastering Undset’s and MacDonald’s descriptive skills. It’s painful. And it’s not like I’m a master at writing LitRPG either. I’m still learning a lot. The problem and the point of all of this is that I did not start out writing LitRPG at all. The conflict was already embedded in me. I loved psychological realism, but I also loved LitRPG and metafictional works like Everybody Loves Large Chests, which feature a lot of systems and ascent. That I love those lush, sensory-heavy, sweeping, literary descriptions only complicates all this further. That I am also a very analytical person, the kind that loves reading academic texts raw, added as well. There’s just so much to who I am creatively that it just comes out. I was never one of any of these. I was all of them at once. And time has only complicated that further, made me more and more myself, more and more integrated, as well as more and more conflicted as the sides get closer and closer together and become more and more solid. Ultimately, I am the person that I am, in all the things that I am. I can only accept that and keep going forward, knowing that no matter how much I read, I will always find that I experience the world in the way that i do and enjoy different things and find it natural that these multiple things appear in the moment-by-moment self-expression, in fiction writing. It really is just a matter of course for me, even if it may seem very challenging to hold together. It’s why I’ve grown so much. It’s why I’ve struggled so much. It’s why I’m here. This is not my own complexity. This is me, simply. It’s why I was so confused when I was criticized. I didn’t know things had lanes. I just experienced the world as I was, and I still do, in spite and even more so because of my cognizance. Awareness breeds even more integration and actualization. It is a very personal thing. It is rooted in expression itself for me. I was always who I was. Knowing that only makes orchestrating self-actualization that much more feasible.

Sunken Dirt Patch and Book-Crammed Nook: A Small Birthday Gift for My Lola (April 4, 2026)

— slowly descended the tiled staircase, her body tilted aside, her right foot edging down in front. In the breeze-swept, concrete-floored nook at the bottom, book towers crammed both left and right walls. Her path led to a bed nested under a shining window opening into a sunken, walled dirt patch daylit below a cloudy sky. A peek outside stopped at a band of sky, the high fences, and her portico’s underside and balustrades. To the left towered the hulking wall. To the right stretched the fences and continued the portico extending to the unseen gate. The canal-lined, dust-brushed street ascended to the car-worn main road.

Graying, weathered men in t-shirts and shorts with steady expressions and chatty voices ambled down the slope. Her screen door opened, and her brother —’ measured shoes strode out, before the door swung itself shut with a bang. Sparrows flurried and chirped, and a rooster tethered to a slender rope by its leg crowed. Sunbeams threaded through the cloud banks, spilling over parts of her open stone-stepped yard on the right of her house.

The skyline spread low over the town.

Back in the room beneath her home, where the hem of her black polo shirt settled over the blankets, a blue book lay nestled inside. “Cussler” spanned the cover, under which yellowed pages sat frayed and cut in places. Raising it against her nose exposed the blend of scents it carried: scuffed fabric, sweet wood bedframes, cockled novels, and dunged, baked earth.

The buttery dredges of the pandesal she ate earlier melted on her tongue.

Excluded:

As a finger snapped behind her, a man materialized out of thin air, strode up, and shot her through the head. The 5’2”, spectacled woman bent, reeling to the side. Blood leaked out in sputters. Her body slumped backward onto the bed.

He removed the plastic bag wrapping his silenced 7.65-mm Beretta automatic and stored both in his backpack.