Go back to Personal WritingDrama-Masked Maestro
Written from April 10 to 11, 2026One
It’s not just “copywork & emulation: craft” anymore. This is a conflict between two instinctive philosophies and how they both appear in me. I hold now the instinct for objective prose and “unjudged precise sensory detail (UPSD) being the meaning,” but I wish for metafictional ascent-plotting, even if it means subordinating grounding to flavor.
So if I want to do it, it should just be a matter of writing “I [violent act] these goblins” and go along from there, right? It should be. But ambitious desire is fighting constraining instinct. Even now, the “what is a dog” mannerism in me serves this new master—philosophizing comradely with mud, sitting together on a hilltop edge, arms over shoulders, guffawing, pointing together. Where are you? It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t wrath. It wasn’t even fury. Though it takes these forms. It was narrative control. Storytelling where UPSD isn’t ranked the same as the protagonist themselves, where it felt like there was actually storytelling beyond just a series of events [where] the reader had to throw their hands up and say “the meaning is the UPSD!” because whatever that is, it isn’t going to satisfy the Cale Henituse kinds of characters I want to write. I say all this while having four different 19th century texts on browser tabs. I barely defend my recent journal entries anymore, going from giving up doing it exhaustively to leaving it as they are altogether, even if blatantly wrong since the text isn’t me anyway. (I changed my mind already. I learned my lesson. I said something wrong. I know it already. Writing it down just becomes performance at that point. Though I did write for the longest time anyway to continue the work of self-rigor anyway. But in this phase, it really is groundbreaking.) I know how contradictory and honestly dumbfounded I am in this current whatever-this-is.
I just gotta brute-force it again, like slamming my head against the same motherfucking wall. If there was head-pavement-slamming to represent ruthless self-rigor, there’s this to represent this inexhaustible frustration. But how many times can I write “I [violent act] these goblins” before I just scratch my head in disbelief and start rolling around the ground like a father who just lost his child to a gunshot? (Yeah, I watched that video on Reddit earlier today. Revealing this makes me feel shitty about its use as an analogy here actually.)
At this point, this entire passage is the only satisfaction I can get from this plight. Just the sheer articulation these last several months has been its own entertainment and analytical fun. It shows a whole new side of myself. Not tortured the way I was during those four months of submission to critique feedback loops. Not delusionally free (at least that’s what I feel it was in retrospect) the way I was two years ago when I was serializing those enviable web novels. I’m just sitting down and grabbing the equivalent of Plants Vs. Zombies Sunflower’s sun from this situation, even as I do crave and covet that euphoric orgasmic release of drowning in the hellish fires of pleasure, of fiction writing that can be only described as “utter.”
At this point, I’m just rehearsing myself. Ha-ha. Even that laugh I’ve laughed before already. (I mean, I’ve literally written this same characteristic laugh many times before. Funny, right, that a person can have a signature laugh in what is effectively premeditated text?)
I wish something screamed out of the muck of life. (This phrasing isn’t true. I don’t think of life like that. If it’s muck, it’s the most beautiful muck in the world, quite literally. And at this point, the use of “screamed” here is just tastelessly overused.)
I know what I’m going to say next. At this point, it’s just front-loading the context “we” all already know just so we don’t get any repeated interpretations and suggestions. But in the end, I will get the same stuff. But at least, I get more and more effective over time. All this frustration of articulating to the beyond is its own improvement chamber. But yeah…
Frick this shit.
I could list them down:
I’m probably at my 107th eight-hour cafe stay or something in the last eleven months. I’m at a point where I’ve gone through all the ranges of what a person could be in here, at least for the person that I am now in all the ways I’ve been in those eleven months. You’d think that with all this, something would change, and yes, everything did change. It completely shifted my perspective and added a whole new layer of reality that being in a room all day every day for years didn’t. And there’s no stipulation to it, no “but at the same time.” It really is. It is what it is. In all the good ways that it is.
But why did you mention it? Well… perhaps I was hoping I could blame it for everything or find some thing about it that reveals everything. But in the end, this current “philosophical” plight of mine really is just that, in the ways that a whole integrated (in many ways than just one) life can only contextualize in an ongoing especially modern life.
I’m searching for that “arrogance” that could lead to “utter,” and all I’m finding is a life, in all the ways that it now appears to me through writing as a means of bringing together everything that I’ve been, am (which wouldn’t be possible through sheer unassisted consciousness due to the nature of compartmentalization or multiple sides), and will be (through sheer integrated breadcrumbing, like Git-synced files at home and then now here at the cafe). I have become an apostle of realistic, grounded, biographical, historical context, a master of scuffing my orange-lit fingers against brown cafe tissue that I then take the time to dawdle around squeezing under the bottom left edge of my USB-C monitor (since it’s propped on my laptop), a priest of “this guy plap and dead” (where it zooms out of that street-level car collision homicide with my corpse so utterly “plop” and up into a panorama of the sky).
I’ve even recently lost that craziness that “required” me to post those “good” entries on Mataroa, which tracks given the disinterest in defending myself in my journal entries. Though as seen in this passage, the absence of defence might just be an internalization of the rigor, such that it comes out as just someone not needing to write even, which sounds implausible at first, but writing was never the true site of change. I’ve come and gone. I can go on and on with synonyms and polysyndeta to max out the precision of every single clause I make, but in the end, what proof do I need? I’ve fallen away into my own life—I have no fucking clue what this has to do with the issue at hand, but whatever, hope this helps.
Where is it? Where is it going?
You can really see it. The last ten days have been the lowest daily average word count (2,659) I’ve had in three years. But that was because I was focusing on the website. Even then, I can tell whatever I’m doing with the website isn’t just its own separate activity in a vacuum. It’s a task reflecting this late period I’m in. The website itself had its one-year anniversary 8 days ago. You would think that’s short, but that was the culmination of so many attempts at making something to hold my whole self. And even during that one year, everything came like Noah’s Ark. It really is the end of an era. I denied it. I denied that it would affect the word count. I mean, it’s just a number. But it does show in the way I can’t just summon that “wrath” flow that got me writing so prolifically before. “I don’t need to prove myself.” I wish that was complacent. But no, not this time it isn’t. I accomplished what I set out to do. It wasn’t an external goal like “become the best writer.” It was personal, so it makes sense that I can’t even argue myself into viewing as mere complacency, because I’ve been the one carrying myself so manically this whole time. I got here out of sheer “will.” And now, whatever will I have isn’t that. It’s quiet. It’s settled. It has lost those attachments, not that it doesn’t care, but it used to get so caught up and bled off it, making enraged creative fuel out of it. I hate this common narrative of healing curing the creativity that came with All Of The Shit. But maybe fully admitting it is the first step. But no. The only reason I can confidently say it’s not complacent is that I have never once relaxed and removed my index finger off the table. This tiny finger was enough to summon worlds, and it still can. But its eyes look on, not distantly, but in the way someone’s eyes just go about, in the way that only exists in this “transcendent” state. Oh I wish I was playing! If only I could snag them and squeeze out the juices that have formed in them. If only I could break them and swallow what beauty I can only guarantee from the wealth they now store. If only I could destroy everything that supports whatever this is and make out of it something of myself and become even more than I am, even as I am already who I am, in all the ways that I am and am already breadcrumbed (prepared) to take on whatever else that could be considered even more than I am. It answers itself, so whatever solution I have left is already intrinsic to it, embedded in it, part of its development, part of what made it what it is now. I can’t circumnavigate the very thing designed to be uncircumnavigable through alle-integration, alle-absorption, and alle-acknowledgment (or the more precise synonym). This passage it eats, (even while) unproven. It’s barely done anything to save its own face. Its “arrogance” is default functioning, not even a matter of stamping itself any more than a person standing “stamps” the ground below them. It is, and by that, it is behind already what tries to consider it first. It meets them where they are, not just halfway, but its very essence is to go forth. Because it’s not a fortress, you can’t fly bombers over it.
Whatever I do is just a matter of punching the wall it has designed for me to punch. It’s 1984’s birth-assigned limited range of self-expression within that local chamber where you think you’re free.
I rage against the machine that absorbs me and my rage and my consideration of it as a machine.
I can barely be, because I already am.
If only I could thrust my arms and hands out and have them search outward. But I have already made the path for their “self-expression.” I am my own master, and thus, I can’t search for what lies beyond myself save for what I’ve already “corrupted” myself into premeditating. I want to see the blank page as a place of total freedom, but I know myself. I’ve written 4.5 million words in a thousand days, if that helps. You would think a whole new worldview would have destroyed me, but I collect my Sunflower suns out of them. I squeeze the most golden juices out of the soil. And in that, I am. In that, I have already. I hope something shatters whatever this is, without taking writing away from me completely. I still want to see that blank page. For others, it’s the problem of having nothing to say. For me, it’s that of having said everything and saying even more that doesn’t really feel like a blank page but like that pink elephant that’s been always there, never erasable. The progress can’t be fucking reset. I don’t even need to write, and I am already here. The chair that I am is already there meeting me as I sit down without even bothering to study its dimensions and soundness fully. I go out there, and I am what I am. I am who I am. And that… that’s like a hole that’s already dug and already filled. Once that happens, you can’t undig it, unfill it. You are who you are. And at that point, you can only excavate out of who you are, and who you are out of the world in who you are. If only talking to others and reading books and their different worldviews was enough, but the person engaging with them is still… Me. ME! The person behind these 4.5 million words cannot erase himself. I can only work off who I am and in that work off the whole world and then some, in all the wealth that foreshadows. And that’s great! It’s fucking great! It’s just that… I’m just going to have to start getting used to this feeling. I’m not sketching myself on the page, discovering the drawing with construction lines. I know myself so thoroughly I can draw myself instantly and know where the lines should land and where I have already so many times drawn out of the line to the point of absolute absorption and mastery of even messiness. What the fuck is the point of that? To shake the hand that belongs already to myself? Fuck me, man. I’ve already beaten myself so much through ruthless self-rigor in an attempt to squeeze out that ambition, and I have already exhausted it so much that I don’t even know. What more can I cut out of myself? In what more ways?
When I do get the urge to write ambition and utter again, I immediately stop myself, because it’s practically noise at this point, in the embarrassing way, even as I say that I thirst for it all this time when the urge is absent. I want the satisfaction of actually saying something with the fulfillment of sketching myself actively on the page, and a version of that only happens in passages like this, which isn’t really sketching in the way that writing from that fiction blank page is. Maybe, it’s just not who I am right now. Who knows? I’ve said that before even, but at this point, you can trace everything I’ve said and point at each of them and say they’re the reason.
Intellectually and creatively, it was two years ago, literally. This is the blank page, even as I say that I am just rehearsing. I am writing this, which means that this is it. I just… have to find a way to come to terms with what in the world… This very plight is probably why this current thing I’m doing is the answer. That discomfort, that whole different worldview, this might just be it.
If we’re going by that framing:
The fact that I’m thinking I have to believe it reminds me too much of what life was like two years ago, so yes, I believe it. I will just have to accept this new state of my life. I mean, I always do, and I said I would. I did already many times. This is just another one, even further. Advancing step by step. I go, and go, and go, and go. Man, I really do feel like I’m back to that speechlessness I had when I was still beginning to write: when 500 words took the world to do. Maybe, this feebleness is where the shit’s at.
Back to experiencing new things again. Now that I’ve processed the past, it’s really just a matter of consuming new material again, which I’ve already been doing, but which is becoming more and more deliberate as I evolve into and come to terms with this new age.
I will never truly know. I can’t dismiss the future just because I’ve already reached this point of integration. I will have to experience it all for myself. Let’s see. I have gotten frustrated many times, but I am growing to make sense of all this and what to expect and how all of this will unfold in terms of how actual growth will look like, counterintuitive to all I’ve ever known and come so far as to predict and feel already a sense of having come.
It’s strange. I feel like a man in a soft Violet-Evergarden kind of grief, as if healing was its own bittersweet goodbye, where nothing bad and only good things happened but it still aches to see them leave. This has been the case for the last 3 months, and I feel it will only be the case as I come to find new ways of interacting with, responding to, interpreting, and growing from this.
In the end, I really am always here. I have never truly dissociated as a consequence of healing. It has only planted my feet on solid ground. All my emotions are new. I really am like a child again.
(I have always been myself. [Seriously? At this point, hang this “Love Laugh Live” on the wall… But yeah, I mean I placed this in parenthesis, so what can one do? It had to be said. Affirming the obvious sure it was, but still, necessary. Yeah, yeah.])
(I know I said this three months ago, but…) The world really is beautiful. I only feel an immense contentment that swallows my entire being. There is nothing left but that. Whatever else is the range of emotions I know, even as I don’t know them because they are new and novel as today’s childishness permits.
Where does one go when he’s answered everything? At this point, is this me journaling, or is this anything that has to do with a whole nother character? It’s not like Matthew and Mark weren’t their own self-inserts in a way, but still, at a certain point, it’s blatant, no? I mean this is literally me journaling, as funny as it is. Just to be funny and to keep the context of this passage, I’ll leave it here in Fiction, even though I know it fits in Journal. I’m just going to have to accept what I’ve been dealt and all that I can say about it, even if it’s only statements.
I can really only snicker, if that wasn’t an answer I’ve already given many, many times. In the face of articulacy’s “speechlessness” toward whatever this is, what’s going on, it’s back to that sardonic chuckle, the same one I gave when I could barely even write. Now that I can, it plays a very sweet meaning on my face.
At this point, I haven’t progressed at all. I haven’t said anything new. I’m not really adding. Just rephrasing at this point. Or at least that’s what it feels like now, even if I know that every time that I write, the words carry so much more than what they look like as rephrasings, since context changes everything behind the words, and the more that I write and time passes and I grow and evolve and put myself in new places and situations and environments coinciding with all of these concerns that I am writing about even in what seem like rephrasings, I do progress and advance, even if it’s not necessarily to the fulfillment of what I wish.
It’s its own funny productive futility. I’m not saying anything new, and because of that, I’m saying everything new. This becomes the new container for change. It may be still and unchanging (as per being a medium/container), but it’s where the tornado rapidly evolves. I’m just going have to take this as it comes to me, and there I go, stretching across, farther, farther out, until “until” sounds like a funny conjunction.
I’m just going to have to carry the meaning the words can’t (which means LLMs are no help either and are practically just reinforcement of this very axiom). <--- Not exactly true, given that my articulation is different every time, indicating evolution in words themselves, which means meaning isn't at a static distance from it, just a matter of slamming one's head against the wall and taking off a chip each time, until one gets a breakthrough. Slow but steady.
It really is true. I don’t exhaustively defend my entries anymore because I don’t need to. I’ve internalized a lot already in a positive way. Now, it’s just a matter of accepting the growth and complication (immediately contradicting what I said just hours ago) that comes so rapidly even by myself with my own journal entries. Articulation really isn’t fighting with more words. It’s saying it, letting it go, and choosing the better battle. It’s very much internal, rather than getting roped into an exhaustive defensive posture in response to provocation or offensive misunderstanding.
It really was this. Reaching the point where I just say what I say, as this true private conversation with myself. But it’s only because I internalized the mechanisms that allow me to do all this by myself without constantly checking my answer with external systems just to be sure. The absence of defence proves this. It’s a sheer unprovenness. The words mean what I mean them to mean. That kind of “well, here it is.” At this point, it’s just customary or convention to have it be read and checked, a vestigial habit that doesn’t really add anything except point vigorously again back to “yeah…” the way a mirror reflects your own appearance, drawing your shrug. By the time I’m done, I’m done. That kind of thing.
This should be its own private, euphoric, giddy, super-relaxed “taking a dump in the bathroom in your big home all alone with the utmost level of the whole place to yourself” self-security, and indeed it is. You have your own crib, in a sense, in the way your integrated portable self allows you to go just about anywhere and still be anchored in who you are given you know yourself and have taken the time to arrange it all together so you can see things about like a director points and gestures to his actors and costume and set designers and whatnot.
But I wonder if this giddiness is fading as this whole thing is becoming this thing that is just a fact of my life. This whole integrated knowing-yourself thing that I am now. There really is this giddiness, but that giddiness might just be a remnant of that past self who didn’t have himself and didn’t truly have a self-privacy. Once this current who-I-am has settled, the giddiness about having the remotest toilet ever might just go away. I don’t know. I guess it won’t have to as long as I continue to expand and put myself in situations and places that really make me want to take giddy remote private pleasure in my own whole self whom I know so well now. Man, I really want to keep this creative euphoria I got from this newfound “privacy.” I want to feel the weight of all I’ve become in all the ways that I am and have integrated and continue to do so in full ongoing all-things-at-once simultaneous absorption channelling into the palm of my hand as I stride along this world and speak in hushed tones with a cheeky grin, going about chuckling and guffawing as any ordinary man, but yes, with the integrity of a person-in-(self)-power and the whole in the palm as I creatively collaborate and concede and conduct. The hand wields the whole of the self. I hope that shockwave that my hand sends into the ground totally commands utterly its own vehicles. Total full self-possession.
I will just have to conquer the way that a person who knows themselves can, taking full advantage of what I know to do and how to exploit myself best and explore farthest reaches and fullest capacities of my potential. In such a way can I truly grow out of myself.
I wonder. Have I come to overturn that statement?
I have already lived a life.
Can I truly reach escape velocity and get away from it and leave it as just backstory, formation, developmental stages, upbringing, or background rather than the whole life that I have long held to be so? Can I say I am not just an articulation, performance, composed orchestrated rehearsal of who I always was? I mean, I did say “I have always been myself” earlier here at the cafe. Then, in that sense, can the two phrases be separated since one could say that this latter entails the former? One could say that I can’t say that I have always been myself while denying that I have already lived a life in the way that “myself” implies of a life that started and extended to the present in uninterrupted continuity. That is that “lived a life” in the way that “myself” becomes already that “I have already lived a life.”
All three feed off each other in the same person, perhaps the same illusion. They are contradictory, 2 and 3 being so despite what was said earlier about 3 entailing 2 because you can’t have been always yourself and say in past tense that you lived a life, which implies that the person beyond the point of ‘lived a life’ is another life—which assumes a different myself reacting to this strange feeling of already having lived a life.
Expanding from 2: Is there true novelty?
Expanding from 3: Past the point of integration, is it truly just “myself” expressing himself totally?
Expanding from 1: Am I not the pink elephant? How can I reach integration (a) and go even past that integration (b) and then say that I can go beyond even myself (c) in the way “growing out of myself” only implies?
Once I go home hours from now from this new cafe (assuming 107th cafe stay in the last eleven months) and, on a separate note, if the giddiness goes away, what will be left?
In the end, the only thing that’s truly left is my own confusion and my increasing ability to articulate it. Ha-ha-ha. Best I can do is read books, take active notes, observe, write book reviews, journal, and work on my website and continue this work of articulation and integration.
Let the contradictions sit, the intro end, and the new era begin!
What will this “new era” look like for me? If I truly start over with all the skills, abilities, and pure knowledge resource I’ve obtained and honed to mastery?
I feel that this “new era” thing needs to be enacted since I wouldn’t want to have it blur in the journal structure itself. I need a way to do a big break, not just a scene break or even a chapter break, but a whole… well… era break. Well I guess it’s less a new era and more what one can call a maturation. It’s methodological rather than anything philosophical. The philosophy is in fact catching up to the methodology that is reflecting me months early. It’s just a matter of accepting and coming to terms with who I’ve become (intellectually, creatively, methodologically) and where my spatially erudite feet are taking me. My typing writing hands and creative-intellectual instincts have already long known what to do. It’s just the head saying “yeah” left. That’s where this conversation is.
I say this, but it’s not out of sheer denial that I’m struggling with this. It really is taking that much time and putting myself in a wide range of situations, places, and mental states (SPMS) to ensure that this new reality and all that it is is fully processed since I have no true idea what it is to begin with. While I do say that the hands already know what to do, the understanding of it entails enactment. Enactment only truly happens when it’s conscious and deliberate instead of instinctive merely. So it’s more precise to call it “going around the elephant and finding out what it is in whole” instead of just experiencing very obliquely. Similarly, the fact of the loss of a loved one only becomes truly completely real once you’ve gone through a full range of SPMS in which the fact sits in the corner as you swim through the boggy fog that is processing and understanding, but infinitely more unknown than the fact of loss since I don’t even know what the fact is. I’m essentially someone who went to a new cafe and knows no one who goes to that cafe and is trying to guess a stranger regular’s loved one’s absence due to loss when I have never met this stranger and their loved one and never gone to this cafe before.
It’s sort of like staring at a specific object in a cafe in your 107th eight-hour cafe stay. It is there in every cafe. More than 800 hours outside. Yet I only notice it now. It’s not as instant. But it’s trying to see something that’s been there for so long and isn’t just there only now or for no reason this whole time but has been actively been functioning the whole time. That’s what the instincts are here vs. my own understanding or noticing.
It’s probably why I am defending myself so much less. It’s already there internally. The words are not matching yet matching, if that makes sense. The content of the words don’t correlate with any understanding, since I really don’t get. But the new instincts that have been there for months now have been slowly guiding my creative-intellectual-methodological articulation and integration. Very strange way to put it, very complex idea. But this is it.
Can even a writer who journals rigorously about their thoughts, feelings, memories, experiences, and ongoing changes, contradictions, influences, and states of mind still find those instincts and mannerisms elusive and hard to track especially when they reflect a whole new way of doing things that they haven’t fully mapped out consciously like a brain being transplanted into someone else’s body with highly developed muscle memory (structures) they have no conscious memories of? Apparently.
I guess it can take years to process consciously fully things (not even including the articulation part, which nevertheless is crucial to full conscious processing) that your mind has already known since forever. This is especially the case when those “things” are not past life experiences, but vast changes that happened through writing (the same tool they used to capture and process those past life experiences). This entails its own childlike speechlessness, because while writing is separate and outside those past life experiences, it is not outside itself and the vast changes engineered internally (instinctively, creatively, intellectually, methodologically) through it. Those 800 hours of cafe stays were not containers, nor was writing. They changed me. Strangely enough, (now that I have reached that point) integration is struggling to integrate itself.
I can tell I’m confused by how I’m improvisionally singing while playing guitar not to express anything that’s burning to erupt from inside me but to search what I’m feeling by going through many different sounds, lyrics, and feelings, only to come out basically speechless. The only wanting to get out is utter technical playfulness (having fun) and reinforcement of who one is and who one already knows one is through SPMS, which mirrors the current the way that I write fiction and journal. It’s searching… for even more intentionality, control, and mastery.
Maybe that’s it. It’s not “myself” in “always been myself” and “grow out of myself” and “life” in “already lived a life.”
It’s quite simply total self-possession in the way full-advantage-taking self-knowing only does. I’m just in the process of through through SPMS (e.g., the continuing cafe stays, the improvisional singing with guitar, the journaling, the fiction writing even amid the concern) to notice and understand this state, only after which I will truly enact and embody it.
I’m essentially the grieving bereaved looking everywhere for them and finding that no matter where they go, they’re no longer there. But in my case, it’s positive. I’m going through all manner of SPMS and finding that it’s always there in full force. I cannot escape integration. I can only integrate integration and fully enter into total self-possession. But give me some time to go through as many SPMS as I can until I fully come to terms with it in noticing and understanding. Let me say a full goodbye in every single possible SPMS. Journal entry after journal entry, improvised song after improvised song, cafe stay after cafe stay, fiction passage after fiction passage. Let me. Let me master mastery itself. Let me integrate integration.
I don’t care about being right anymore, because I am already internally all right. I just care about throwing everything I got, even if it’s all wrong every time, entry after entry, until I have fully settled myself in this new phase.
I want to be who I am.
I’m trying to problematize my own wholeness. I can tell. But I’m doing it for my sake. This is part of the SPMS. When I direct my attacks against it and they fall like all the rest, again and again, entry after entry, slowly but surely, I will evolve to come to terms with all this that I am already. It’s not enough not to fight back. I will only complete this processing and “grieving” if I throw everything I can at it, until I finally say, “Yes, it is done… Let there be light.”
It’s crazy that I say shit. It really does feel like I just get things out, not that it was anything other than just something to get out. I may invest 2 hours and 30 minutes on one entry, but in the end, it really is just a bunch of words in the end. I spent the last 9 hours writing, and in the end, I only stand by what I wrote as much as articulation, but not really anything beyond that after the fact. I carry the life that my words can barely indicate. I don’t really care to defend myself by words. I am only as much as I am as the living, breathing person who has already reached a point of carrying it all internally in the best way possible. Writing at this point is just a fun activity, a way to put out a torrent of words that don’t really reflect anything except my ability to digest into words my experiences and the capacity of my consciousness to keep track of all of these nuanced experiences and the proof that I am indeed just writing with none of the craziness I used to have.
It makes sense. When you have written 4.5 million words in 1,000 days and done 107 eight-hour cafe stays in 55 unique cafes over the last eleven months, you don’t really go crazy over being sleep deprived and then staying at a new cafe with many people where you read, write, and study for ten hours straight.
Life is very mundane post-closure as well. You can invest all you can into an entry in a flow state for 2 hours and 30 minutes and then just move on as if nothing happened, without anything much save the complete satisfaction of articulation and putting and puzzle-solving (since every new entry is an opportunity to try new word combos, analogies, metaphors, figure of speech, images, concepts, phrasing, structure, and all that fun stuff) thoughts, feelings, life experiences, and ideas on the page. It’s a fun, interesting game that’s practically a sandbox for me. The meaning at which the words are pointing is important to me of course, but because it is a complete satisfaction and I’m not really pointing at anything that isn’t already this whole self that I am after integrating my whole life, it is practically just someone with their hands in their pockets sauntering in the cold early morning an hour before dawn probably around the neighborhood park. It’s a very fun, enjoyable thing where you can really immerse yourself like you’re reading an intense, thrilling web novel and then come out feeling totally renewed, fresh, inspired, and accomplished (not in the sense of showing to others, but in the sense of engineering and orchestrating the way those web novel protagonists plot their pleasurable ascents—fun, fun. fun!). The world becomes this fun, joyous stroll with a joshing simplicity that isn’t exactly sincere in the way a person belts themselves out, but in the way a person just goes around and is just as it was as they are (if that makes sense). If sincere, they wear it like a scarf around their neck. The world is so beautiful from here. The smile comes unhurriedly in brief glimpses in sparse sunbeams. And it is a very happy private one, the one that would laugh so loud they hug their belly and get all their wind from that, but keeps it to the most restrained grin where you can see the eyes really gleam, not out of some inability, but in the way only someone who has that world of their own can (have). It is a simple precious joy that lives on in that daily come-and-go of vignetted life.
It’s fun to write.
It’s not “you get to say what you feel.” It’s not “you get to have a voice.” It’s not “you get to express yourself” in that desperate weathered manner. It’s not “you get to say hi to a world that would otherwise shut you out.” No, it’s “flow,” not in the way of forgetting the world or the moment or everyone else or even yourself or even anything at all. It’s that feeling of dancing and knowing exactly what you’re doing and even working and puzzle-solving throughout it in those little tiny micro-movements that only you are privy to. That special private joy. That place where all of it goes along. It’s a special place. To feel that and to feel that even ws the world goes on around you, you can thrust your hand in what looks like a desperate maneuver but is the expression of a soul (not out of this idea that a “bereft soul must find an outlet or a means of declaring itself true, valid, and existing,” but in the way of waves and perfect places and pictures, the way things roll along, like tires humming against asphalt). You feel it thoroughly and you feel the little things and the big things and the way people move and express themselves in their tiniest movements and in the uniquest ways they “portray” themselves through having their body operate and make way in physical space. That total identity. That wholeness in the self. That feeling which is only privy to the observer who is also the experiencer at the same time. That feeling of being totally inundated in that joy, in that moment, in that being, with both a capacity for analysis and a zest for life the way the body trickles along and scuffs along the pavement and gets its limbs sent through the air. It’s a perfect coordination that exists only for its own validation and after that, totalitum. Somehow, the clumsiest walk and thrusting of the hands serves the highest delicacy, for even in that moment where all things flow, alle is flow. Aliveness, breath, the signs of being a person, how a person thinks, ponders, and slips into a labyrinth of imaginations and goals, how their soul bursts in rage, sadness, happiness, and momentary mundane blisses, how they move on concrete, how their eyes flit and dart, how the soul lavishes the earth with perfumes that can only be inhaled by those who have taken the time to permit, to be sensitive, to be the most delicate, even the most fragile, so that in that moment, purity in the way of what it means comes down to a simple series of steps heading outside.
It’s elusive to describe.