You got to really remind the possible. Date the ultimate service top a moment - what is your day looking like? You wake up, your hands raised to the ceiling. You're lower than your lowest and the lowest you ever get. Put this day in the world as one you broke down into moments your elements are made of.
A♣️
Your hands do come down. Slow and coordinated, like your body knows more about what it's doing than you'll ever know, like you were never going to live this fight out. Like you suffer the dementia I was left caregiver to, and tend. And do.
3♦️
You forget the first star that dies. It's the, perhaps sadest, thing. You held every star in your head for so long a streak the universe was your body and you were the universe. You were this end of all beginning life is that to. And, slowly, as though dawn remembers it's not-knowing before it has any brightness, a third star dies - your shame at forgetting which of the other two was the first causes you to forget which of the three holes where stars were supposed to be rattle your bones. "What the fuck is that," as the song goes. You're going to have to learn to speak nebula. You feel like you are going to be very bad at this.
8♦️
Poetry tends to entropy tending to infinity - remainder makes you: parents failed to be one hundred and fifty people. Forgetting couldn't keep the death of stars in order. (How do we ever go back now?) It's a creature - stepping out from behind you, making out shadow. We don't have to know which of the twelve dead the first is. We already know the first is forgetting.
So of course, we are: Birthday, was it? Or puberty. Or water notice, sky burial, earth sweat, fire name, quarter grace, whatritualdoiperform, plume walk, ...breakfast? Find your first forgetting, math it carry the rest of the way back to one. Without walking away, it's not movement. What truer stroll is there than one through the path forgetting takes.
Through embodying the first death, the first chord of the song, the first sip, progenitor burnt, the clearing the forest forgot (to eat), the place holding, the place holding, the place holding. How many browser searches for a place so gone there's no mirror, wiped from existence? How common? Since the third star; Ever?
7♠️
How often, for your neighbors (if you do know) are you choosing to avoid the pain of proving they wouldn't kniw what you're looking for so this goaround? Is the pain in your body rejecting that idea? Is there more going on than your saying "forget it" to let the world realize? How is that going? A song - how sad? A poem - how felt? A walk - how empty? A tour - how drunk? As the song goes,"did I make the demons in it," a loss - how true?
This pain asks you, if longing is all the West can produce. So much, that after a ninty-minute presentation of ancient Eastern practices of ritual vessels, a western audience finds two questions to offer in thanks: "what do they do?" and "are they booby-trapped (to which the translator has some struggle relaying). A flat, resound, and frankly a bit terse "No," is handed to both, as though no function, no trap ever be needed. Leaving the audience, palpably, empty of further question: full.
Perhaps the "why" behind how replete the world is in three-body problem-esque origin stories leaves those who have been governmentally defined as "consumers" leaves any societally- defined humanity without access to the forests always accepting them. To the woods always taking their bodies and feeding them back into connected networks. So thoroughly they are acorn and boar, child and milk, container and the rest of the ritual, in the blink of an eye.
9♥️
Perhaps asking for what the ritual vessel "does" or how to "protect" it is akin to asking the library staff what your pin is: they "don't know" (and that's perfectly perferable, good day). And you have to imagine they aren't being transphobic; the question is just that silly - they just didn't recognize your question was of the contextual frame "is my pin the last four of my phone number associated with the account, the last six digits of the card number, or some third thing" - how could they?
An entirely different life, the question you have has no further-away context. In this way, forgetting is self-perpetuation - start again, start a new conversation, ask anew. So much our questions decompose in our mouths before we, as consumers, can even form them. The consumer mold no longer serves as a vessel - it has been drowned.
Take every letter through all of time, imagine the beginning of time blitzing onto the screen. From singularity to this moment, *phlom, phlsh-phlsh, phlot phlop phlon* - each another photon. Crash them over the surface of your understanding, through toe crease, armpit, into this word, this letter, this moment. Present, remarkably in this event, with me. A rush as deep as it can get, as 120p as it arrives, as gritty and particle as it looks to the compression algorithm your person is leaving them. You are not rich soil, but longing's never choosy. The words grow.
K♠️
How tight a rope does this make - is this matter being hawked up by the social immune system as some simulation bro-speak? Reality asks you get a little perspective, hi, "feels good g-d, it feels good, oh to be alone with you," as the song goes. And you are brushing the words off for the convenience of dulling senses on intoxicants society names rent, jobs.
All that keeps you from unionizing data with your community in solidarity against big data - you would rather join a discord server and be the end of your immediate surrounding, tuck into an isolation tank, and log in than form something that is just yours. Just you and the rest of everything? Can't ask your local newspaper to build a server for you to talk on? Your local queer group to make you one cell in a body of movements? I understand. I'll be here.
You rather civilization's lack of existance the first 196,000 year history of human condition to matter more this moment than your reality thses invitations to feel this expanded experience invoke. I understand. I see civilization the way you see webpages that load slower today than they did forty years ago. Every sound touching your body given name, story, place, presence, and meaning the moment you two collide.
Negative latency - arrival, reality's service top.
4♥️
The solo ttrpg of this moment, that soundscape of "right now, ctrl+f for 'as the song goes' and build your playlist," but its sounds that reach you. What story do you end up with? Is that a sober story? Or are you drunk on the story that forced you to be an individual and then told you to not exist? Serve *that*? You are always the untimate service top of your body's experience. Why do you think people who feel so out-of-alignment with that feel so good? ...Because they're mad?
"Stories have a best-by date," has such a clear response that rivers of bad-faith best-by dates mythbusting ensue. Perhaps more abundance in in the world, more vessels cupping this story is possible. Find company in the cupped hands whose best-by dates are tokens of their love: "best by the river," or "best by that ticket stub," or "best by the end of the day," to keep your community, your scrapbooking this pressed flower, your resolving your rage into the question it is asking, respectively.
How many layers of my experience are you seeing, this penultimate solo journaling entry to Part 1? How many times has this moping been done? How many suns, how many planets, how much pottery did the ashtrays children once made in pottery class sixty years ago break down into a pottery class meta today? Are you even interested? What are kids making in pottery class nowadays? This is a captcha on your humanity, asking not "if you are," to "see papers," but if it's gone - that humanity was never about the paperwork but the question.
10♦️
How are you integrating every moment, today? Are you starting small? Are you looking in, are you setting up a thought to see now grow into? Are you cupping dreaming from the night prior? Or are you setting others up just to watch them choke on their words, keep rage and shame feeding the same old stories.
Bad stories palatable to the rage machine, to a world today couldn't keep burning if it cut every tree and fed it into the algorithm. Where people can go home for thanksgiving break and find the family in that home chatting it up with the phone assistant. "Is there something I can do, can I make it up to you," as the song goes. How is this going, dear cell tower?
7♣️
You're looking for the teacher who asks each child who they want to sit with (who they think contributes the most) - asking this just to find the lonely child. The one the social circle their class dynamics genernates. To lean the lessons into that child's strengths. To have kept up the practice since Columbine. You just now hear about that, from a solo rpg playthrough. How creativity has to break itself into so fragmented an experience it reaches you here, of all places.
It asks how you are. Finds you a stray. Brings you into this expreience. Bugs you. Leave food in a bowl outside on harvest, in effort to make a connection with the greater effort. Not even taking the food down to the apartment sign alongside the pavement where you dig cans out from their dumpster. Just right outside the door. How are these rituals not your resistance? Is it they aren't meant for you? Or is something more going on? What story you tell yourself, this read.
Addicted to the attention, ashamed of the addiction, tired of the shame - black hole of use - we can fill that. It starts with "wow," a mirror to the shape of a hole. Where the laughter to realizing wee move through space means any time anyone ever says "wow" a huge worm of a hole form in the space their mouth passes, this surface of open vacuum we share. There always will be another clever line ruining, as the song goes, "it all by saying something stupid like" wow.
6♥️
Wowing you - love, attention, a constant sense every experience ever so full of photons to receive you could make a person, forget them, feel shame, and not only are you left to that, you are practically the most recklessly-shipped distro in all the world.
Every word you speak edits directly the kernal of your belief, down to the epigentics. This isn't what yesterday promised - scroll through your browser history, something from yesterday shocks you forgeting its experience. Until you see it, and it all comes back in a rush. Vessels, vessels everywhere.
How you can replace checking your phone come morning with an equally enthralling checking your browsing history. Maybe get wild and run an audio recording while you do so. Listen back to all seven recordings each week. Make a religious practice of it. How wild the phrase "religious practice" remains relatively secular in today's hyperideolectualized world.
How you can take that made-up word, not find a definition for it anywhere, and know for a fact if you fed it to a model, asking it take a stab at defining it based on this paragraph and the ones above and below it. And you already feel confident it will give you a convincing answer. The answer even feeding into a question you care for. That forest of feelings you nourish with glares and anxiety and shame, shivering to a new saying-speaking. Our shared context so clumped up a journal entry like this resonates?
Hold that moment, if you feel it. Seen by a post so milquetoast every feeling transfers, some neighbor in your thought circles. So small steps away from stories we were forcefed thier best-by dates predate the dawn of oxygen, continuing to be told ("have to" make rent, "must" find a job, "will" donate money), when these very stories have the opportunity to break down, today. Imagine fighting to keep them alive when the light you could be fight for is right here.
9♠️
How are you this transferable, this shareable? This knowable? Still feel isolated, out of distribution, caring for this question: What mystery is this? ...What in your body just said "let's split up, gang"? What is feeling so in tune with what is actually going on that you didn't die when you turned eighteen and didn't have a thousand followers? How the hell was "1k or no way," as a standard belief across society, and ever to work? So "debut" syndrome that there's bots meeting that need! Map kettle territory.
Clenching this belief until a community member in touch with reality comes down, says "will you close this lottery ticket counter you ahve open?" You oh-my-gosh-yes so hard the booth crumbles and you walk away together. Process you built to satisfy every fantasy condition: how to get exactly the response you want from the casino of an attention-maximizing algorithm. Is reality "leaning on communal anger and anxiety as cash crops"? A worn rope snaps to attention.
Where is the shout of delight from those recognizing your voice?
Humanity to be tethered to legacy? "And I cannot change you, so I must replace you, oh," as the song goes? Or do we forget the plants we ate, these timbers we sleep under, these photons they grow from traveling 7 minutes finding you petty dismissing the recognition you receive in abundance. Collection of cells so hungry to speak with you they're still here, still reading these words, still looking to welcome you back into the process, the conversation, life you left them to and they carried on for you.
5♦️
How much of a crecendo are you looking for? Has anything felt so identified and seen just to let fall as far as you have since November 2019 (or whenever you, the living, started believing in CoV2)? How miraculous is the phrase "it's all my fault" coming to lips so much easier than "I am what I want"?
It's the same matter, the same atoms - hell, the latter's less letters and you're "just a body, what can I say," as the song goes.