Dear Diary 2: AAAAAAAAAAAA
It is a Bad Thing to write a public diary and you should not do so
Had lunch with my mom today. Went for a 45 minute drive out of town to take have a 10 minute lunch and take a 10 minute walk, then drove 45 minutes back. I told her about my business and work that is going well and she was disappointed with me and not happy for me. She didn’t believe me when I said things were going well. I played a piece of piano music I’ve written for her because I am proud of how good I’ve gotten at writing and composing, and she’s the one who got me to play music in the first place, she's the one who wanted me to learn instruments in the first place, she’s the one who wanted to experience the musician lifestyle she never had through me by proxy, she’s the one who wanted me to be a music-child, and she was not impressed, she didn’t get it, and she just, didn’t care because I don’t make money of it. Because I’m not a talented little 9 year old any more, now I’m just a weirdo who plays a little music. The music no longer has value-in-itself.
We walked a bit on the beach and I thought about later I would write a short blogthing about how I’m shocked at how ugly and fat people are, and how easy it is to be above average. Then a couple of minutes passed and I started feeling weak and fat and ugly.
She asked me about the bachelor party I’ve been invited to and I said I’m not going because I can’t enjoy it, so I can’t be a good participant in it, I can’t Honor the man by partaking in the Ritual. Because I can’t drink, and I can’t be in that environment at the life state I’m at right now. And she was not proud of me for taking a choice and sticking to it instead of just doing what I’m told and what’s expected of me, she was not proud that I could dictate my own terms, and have actual autonomy and agency, but was disappointed with me for not partaking in the social event, thus by extension being a bad representation of her. All my weakness and everything I do “wrong” is doing her harm, by not being a Good Son Who’s Successful, and not being able to Party Like a Normal Person is doing her a disservice. Driving back, I sat next to her in silence for 30 minutes, thinking about eating a gun. Which is why I think I wouldn’t be fun at the bachelor party, in a nutshell.
I think about the metaphor of my imposter syndrome, waking up to childhood brain damage and memory loss, with the sensation of “waking up in a stranger’s body”, of being a new entity, a new soul inhabiting the body of a dead child. This I always meant only to represent my own internal sensation, my relation to my memories and sense of identity across a near death experience. I think it is not inaccurate to say about my wider social and familial relationships. I just never meant it like that. I think it would not be inaccurate to say that my experience of that, by putting that out there, has been reinforced by my environment.
My grandmother hung herself in her garage after outliving her husband by 10 years. She was old and weak and had a rare genetic disorder. When she died she was barely, maybe 140cm tall. Skeleton collapsed in on itself. Constant pain. She was so small. I loved her so much. My grandmother loved me even though I was poor. She supported me unconditionally. She was proud of me when I was a successful poet. She clipped out little pieces of a newspaper article she read about Kierkegaard and sent to me because she knew I liked philosophy.
When I got home I lied down and couldn’t get up. I need to do some laundry. I’ve run out of clean tank tops and ironic t-shirts. I got home thinking I’d write out an idea for an article about writing advice for the substack, and do laundry. Hyper-focused on it. Avoided meeting her eyes. Mhh-hhm. Yeah. Uh-huh. To get something productive done, to ACT so I wouldn’t have to feel or think. Yeah that’s how it is. Yeah. Mmm. Hmm. Yeah. Then I sat down, then slouched onto my lower back. Then I couldn’t get up. Ghost sat on my chest. Vampire. Depression. Being gay. Whatever. I started writing this lying down in my office chair. It helps. I’m sitting up now.
Spending a day with my mother is more physically punishing than losing a fistfight. I don’t want it to be but it is. My mother resented her mother. She would do little things to humiliate her and my entire being would scream in terror, being scared stiff and unable to do anything about it. I don’t want to resent my mother. So I let her beat me up. I have to get bigger and stronger so I can let her beat me up without getting hurt. I don’t want to say mean things about my mother. I don’t want to expose dirty laundry in public. I don’t want to talk shit about my family. I’ve raised my voice at my mother 2 times in my entire life. once when I was 14. once when I was 29.
I feel better now. I’m going to do some laundry. Maybe I’ll write a blogpost about writing advice later. Maybe I’ll lift weights. Maybe I’ll sit around feeling sorry for myself.
tw**t ideas:
"tw*tt*r is formula 1 racing. Formally you watch it because you’re interested in the race stuff, but informally/pervertedly you are just waiting for someone to miss a turn and die in a horrible crash"
"idea: I start selling t-shirts with the entire text of blogposts on them"
"To my critics who say I am a accelerationist provocateur who seeks to cause division and suffering, I say: No, I am severely mentally ill and I need help. Get your story straight, guy. You fucking guy. It’s not my fault I’m just better at it than you are at helping me. "
"henry bemis was a villain and he got what he deserved (to go to hell)"
"If you think women are winning, if you think women are somehow getting one over on the fellas, if you think women are happy. Then I think you need to stop shitting yourself and trying to read the future in your soiled pants like they were tea leaves "
"wearing shorts and particularly short shorts is memed as being “lame” and “icky” because it impacts women the same way it impacts men to see a low cut dress and a pair of huge tits, and they instinctively react strategically/competitively in the sexual marketplace sense and use collective bargaining to secure their own group-position"
"spelling errors? Needing an editor?
The only editor I need is The Holy Spirit and the real “spelling” error is witchcraft "
The reason why we have the testosterone pandemic is multifaceted. I accept that biochemical, material explanations for it have a place. And I also think the argument that men are sexually oversaturated holds water -- everyone watches porn and women wear basically nothing, and men are forbidden from consummation.
But the real reason why T levels are plummeting is because we allow the next generation of men to be raised *entirely* by overbearing, tyrannical, emotionally abusive women who use them as outlets for their own guilt, as vehicles for self-expression, as sponges who are just supposed to absorb these oceans of guilt and shame and one day convert them into plastic gold for women to spend like water, both physical gold in the form of becoming factories for USD and metaphysical gold in the form of social credit.
I'm not allowed to simply exist. I'm not allowed to be myself, in the real, true sense of the phrase and not the plastic one. I'm required by the women in my life to fit nicely and neatly into the neoliberal-or-whatever system of thought, and since white men can't really be explained by neoliberal-or-whatever thought, my existence can't be explained. So because I can't be explained, and therefore my existence isn't meaningful, my entire internal existence is based around hedging against the guilt that I cause other people to feel by simply existing.
That guilt is pacified, in part, by being performative and pretending like my existence is actually definitely totally explainable by neoliberalism. So I go and have my career, not because the career means anything to me but because it means things to my mother, because it makes her feel less guilty, so she isn't constantly causing me to feel guilty. But there's no actual meaning in that. My existence is entirely about me paying interest on her guilt, on the guilt that she actively causes herself to feel, and it's never, not ever about me doing things that actually matter, because they actually matter, because I'm the one who wants to do them. Literally nothing else about the career matters, other than the fact that the irrational amount of emphasis on careerism and credentialism can be rationalized by appealing to me being a "provider" in the biblical sense, or being "responsible" in the neo-orthodox boomer sense, and even those rationalizations aren't remotely about being grounded in reality since I'm not married (you can tell this because I'm an anon writing on the Internet) and so I'm not a provider and I'm also not responsible, not because I don't want to be but because I don't have to be.
Rather, the existence of my career is entirely about appeasing her own guilt that my existence means nothing to her. The number on the paycheck is more valuable to her than anything meaningful the paycheck could ever do for anyone in my life, because you don't need actuality to take out a loan on social credit, just potentiality. Meanwhile the money piles up in the account, left unspent because I have nobody and nothing to spend it on, because I have nothing meaningful in my life, nothing in my life worth spending it on. (This is why men give money to e-girls, because money exists to be spent.)
Overbearing, emotionally tyrannical women never raise boys to develop into their own people, into the protagonists of their own stories. I'm just a fringe character in other people's stories; my existence is just an abstraction upon which people can place their guilt. I never developed into an actual person because I was never intended to be an actual person, none of us were. I'm a recurring character on the tv shows of other women's lives; I show up a couple times per season.
We used to teach men from the beginning that there was a space for them in this world that was being prepared for them, that a place was being carved out for them to step into upon reaching manhood. They could do what their father did and find meaning that way, they could be apprenticed to a tradesman and find meaning that way, they could go off to war and find meaning that way, they could become a monk and write a book on the Trinity and find meaning that way, they could go to a university and study law and find meaning that way -- in each case, taught by a veteran MAN in the field. They'd (unironically) meet their real friends along the way, and they'd kind of unintentionally find a nice girl and marry her (because sex is a powerful motivator) and have a kid with her, and then they'd realize with a start upon seeing their firstborn for the first time that life has no meaning except in the covenants you make with individual people, and a lot of those covenants are happy accidents.
Now, they're all sad accidents. Now, it's like, I should consider moving cities to upgrade my career, destroying my covenants in that city. I should abandon my religious tradition and go to a different church, destroying my covenants in my local community. I should send my kids (hypothetical kids, that is) to a public school, so they can be raised by women who use them as sponges for guilt, so that my covenant with them can be broken too.
(There are two kinds of women-teachers. There's women who teach because they like kids, and there's women who like kids because they teach. You want to marry the first kind; you want to not have any contact with the second kind.)
All men need four kinds of covenants: someone to follow, someone to lead, someone to befriend, and someone to love. This is hierarchy. This is patriarchy.
If you think we have free will, you're insane. This is all a way to cope with not being able to create meaning and only being able to name it (see Genesis), to merely assign labels to what was already and always there. Sin is thinking that the labels are the meaning. They aren't; they just describe it, lend shape to it. You can't create money (in the true sense) by printing it or by teleporting it in from the future or by tinkering with numbers in a glorified Excel spreadsheet. You can't declare a career to have meaning and expect it to actually have meaning. Money must be baptized in the sweat of labor expended in the production of something holding actual value. You must be baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit to remove your guilt.