Dear Diary 1: Dox Report

A navel gazing diary entry about working out my finances, Kierkegaard & Doom

I’m not a stable person. Things go up and down. I haven’t been financially stable in my entire adult life. Longest job I had was just shy of two years. When I started living this way, the basic idea was, work as little as I have to, to be able to write books. Create art. Be a poetry guy, go be a guest on live-audience comedy podcasts. Then the years went by and I discovered that I fucking hate art. I hate making it, I hate watching it, and I hate artists. I hate every little thing about it.

Having read Kierkegaard I should have seen this coming. I didn't. But you can count it as an empirical data point towards him being right. I also read “a million little pieces” by James Frey before I ever started drinking, and didn't see that one coming either.

For a long time now I’ve been at a crossroads. I can keep living like this, it is meta-functional. It’s chaotic day to day but stabilized across the time-frame of years. But, the sole reason I was doing so, “to write the next great American novel”, to become an “artist”, is absolutely worthless to me now. The reason I wanted to do so in the first place was because the kind of life that’s otherwise presented to me, available to me, was absolutely worthless and meaningless. I never wanted to write, or create anything – I just didn’t want to do, or be, or have, anything else. It wasn’t an active desire. It was just the least worst option.

When I got my first “real job” many years ago, doing manual labor – I was assembling metal furniture for a huge building project, setting up floors after floors of furniture in a hospital that was under construction – I had never done anything other than school. Academia. Went straight from high school to university. I was very young. Years younger than my peers. It wasn’t good for me.

There’s formally an obligatory military service period in my country, but informally, it’s opt-in. When I turned 18 my social environment were druggies and intellectuals. I opted out. I regret that a lot. I was a little piece of shit, and those 4 measly months of basic training would have been invaluable in beating some of that shit out of me. If you love someone, let them join the military.

Anyways, I was hanging out with “the guys” after work, after we had finished some order, like there was a narrative “end of chapter”, and we were hanging out smoking cigarettes and watching the sun go down. Summer evening. Guess we must have worked overtime.

We’re sorting all the plastic and trash we’ve made over the week to get it picked up. One of the guys, older guy, 50’s-60’s, starts reminiscing about the old days, where “you’d just gather all this shit up in a pile, and set it on fire at the end of the day. Of course it’d be all this plastic and fucked up industrial trash, so you’d have this bonfire burning green and purple and orange and bright white. Of course we shouldn’t have done that, it’s bad for the environment. And we probably poisoned ourselves just breathing all that stuff.” - but the way he tells it, you can tell that he’s romantic about it. You can tell he misses it.

I see that man, and I imagine that fire, and I think about my own self-image. Up until then I had only ever thought I was capable of “being good at school”. I’m weeks into working with my hands. I see this man, this old man, who has lived a normal life. He works construction, amasses cash, he’s bought a boat. Upper middle class guy. He has a boat for Christ's sake. That’s doing pretty well as far as I’m concerned. And I see how easily I could have his life. I’m capable, diligent, handy. Good work ethic, smart. I see a world of opportunity, I see how easy it would be to just do this. Settle into a rhythm, just do this, every day, for 40 years, buy a boat and die. I look at him and I see myself dying. I see 40 years flash by in the blink of an eye. And I think: I don’t want a fucking boat. I want the fire.

Aesthetic fulfilment is a psyop. It doesn’t exist. Artistic satisfaction is a meme. It’s the first level. You go from aesthetic → ethic → religious. Kierkegaard was 100% right. It’s just a bit more complicated than it looks, when you boil it down to that one sentence. Artistic satisfaction: small brain. asceticism-satisfaction: big brain with lighting eyes and galaxies.

Should I buy a boat, to find the fire? It seems counter productive.

I’m going to link the substack to my bank account some time over the weekend. I wish there were an option to let anyone set their own price. Work on tips, like a beggar. I feel that would be more dignified. I don’t like the systems that are in place, because they are very clearly manipulative. I will do everything I can to diminish it. Because advertisement is evil. It’s the devil himself.

I am going to post everything for free and put nothing behind a paywall. Full shareware-model. The internet 3.0 literary version of Doom. The Blogification of Doom. If I can make one American dollar for every follower I had on twitter, I would be able to be financially stable. Yeah I’m poor, wasn’t kidding about the ascetism. I really, really don’t like boats. I also want to upload music somewhere. Maybe a third SoundCloud account’s the charm.

I’ll have to present some kind of expected timeframe for posting. I haven’t settled on anything yet. It depends on a couple of variables that are still up in the air. As with working with my hands, I am immobilized by the fear of death, as it requires the choice - the will-to-life. A positively charged drive. And if there’s one thing that I’m more afraid of than death, it’s what I might be capable of with a budget. To choose to live is to choose to die. The Boomer is the ultimate samurai, he plunges recklessly towards an irrational death.

But I will absolutely insist on the shareware model regardless of what happens. And anyways there’s a long way up to making that kind of e-money.

But too many strangers have contacted me on the internet over the years, asking for ways to give me money, and I have left money on the table. Money that could be spent on burning plastic. Money that could be burned to create a wonderful, deadly rainbow.

floppy disk report