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Snack Essays Issue #1: (1.20.25-1.25.25)

This week, I tried to get something down each day. As time's been sparse, rather than committing to some grand thesis that eats up a whole eve, I've been prepping little snacks. Not meant to be munched on passively, but as micromeals to keep myself satiated in these trying times. Enjoy!

i. How to conduct divorces + fireworks

[Context: transcribing a meditation]

I lounge by my window, drowned in rolling duvet, admiring from warmth the bouquets of bokeh, the glowing mist, the tickled spatterings of pale effulgence searing the tar and interloping. I am trying to think without words and have come to the conclusion that I’m an eager beaver. It’s an impossible task, for as soon as I reflect on the wordless moments, words trickle in. My mind is too insecure to let a sight be a sight. It eagerly wants to tell me that the little neuron fart I get when I see a bus does, in fact, correlate to the word “bus”. There’s little bits of yarn and twine that travel between beauty and language, fundamentally inseparable and probably fucking. I do a little bit of violence to my authenticity by editing the last sentence. I think stuff like that’s a sign that the word and image ought divorce. Not all, just those two. Fraught friends.

I’ve been sitting here for a while, long enough to pick up a pen for a greatest hits collection, mulling over my strained yarn. How pathetic is it that if we sit for too long our ass gets sore? Is it working hard or hardly working? Anyway, I’ve been mulling in pursuit of deep-seated sincerity. True to the heart, unpoisoned by caustic put-down ideas are ripe little berries. Sincerity is a sweet crop, secreting sap when ripe for the harvest. Frees the tongue, expunges the mind, loosens the gall. It feels like I’ve run out of sweet little therapeutic soundbites to learn, so I’m doing a bit of spring cleaning to make sure the candies I welcomed into my mouth weren’t loaded with razors. I suggest we all take some time once in a while to conduct tentacular divorce between the neurons that are evil little cacophones.

There’s so many windows out there that it’s hard to believe each one is a unique person’s life. Their home, their office, their kitchen, their soul. From this high up, I would be able to see thousands of bodies, mounds of pheromonal flesh snoozing, working, smoking this sunday down to the filter. That is, I could if concrete weren’t such a fucking pig about letting light in. I wish we each had one little spectral neuron of unique appearance that glowed through walls and told people “Here I am! You’re not alone!” I think suffering would hurt a lot less if a bunch of little christmas lights kept us company.

Did you see that sick little divorce I just conducted? Untying the immediate absence of little pedestrians from the truth of the matter? These are the games my brain passively plays in the background of every activity to become a better person. She’s awesome for that. I just wish she could be as sweet as she is without holding onto all the smelly bits of trash she blurts out. Let me go fishing for one, brb. Ah, caught one! I looked at the snow and thought how the city salt will make it patchy, how ugly it’ll look in a few days. Like, come on, bitch! Snow is, like, *the* pageant queen of winter’s “desolate cold”. So I sit, I watch it, I live with it’s freshness, I embrace the patchiness in all it’s yummy aestheticisms.

Hate, dear readers, (I say in my own stream-of-consciousness. I can’t turn the performance off) is something we must steady. There’s a lot to direct dissent towards right now. Politics, noise, absence, my impostor syndrome, bigotry, indifference, exploitation. I could sit at this fishing hole for a while, but best I don’t relapse into headachedom. Point is, why is it people? Things? The natural world? Why do we turn our dissent to the indifferent natural world, to the passive agents who mean no harm, to something we like working as intended? It’s such a fucking waste of energy. I want to look out this window and get lost in it. The physically visible is the grandest reverie there is! It’s so beautiful, we construct life’s meaning out of it! Look again to the bouquets of bokeh, pillows of mist and resplendent effulgence. The world is so fucking beautiful, even the parts of it we think we hate.

As a kid, I hated fireworks. I thought I was above them. Why would all these people gather around and look to the sky, drool over rainbow explosions and flashing lights when there’s so many grand ideas just rolling around down here? What makes today special to endure thunderous noise? Why is our definition of a party blowing up dyed bombs where they won’t hurt us? Is this really the height of human advancement? The hill we bond on, the tradition we find community in? Over big dick noise, small thought colours? I can still access the logic with a passion, as you can see, so though I speak with distance, “It’s Complicated” is an apt description for what I think of fireworks.

Fine, I still don’t like fireworks, but I don’t want to type it, to codify it into the realm of fact? How many calories did it just cost me to ponder and type out a screed on fireworks? A cracker’s worth, mayhaps. But why? I know it’s easier to type with lizards than with a mirror in front of you, but how many days could I have made with that same amount of calories? How many old friends could I have reached out to? Could I have written a convincing email to a local politician to make life better for people in my community? If I was motivated enough, I think my rhetoric’s good enough to say I could have!

Expenditure. It’s such an abstract currency, isn’t it? No one ever says “nope, not doing that, not worth the calories”. It’s always time or money or ataraxia that we hoard like november squirrels. We like to be productive, like burning off calories, so stewing a bunch of little dissents in your noggin becomes an acceptable expenditure.

But again, where is the harm? How do we measure harm that these things get registered as “bad”? Why are we passive haters of so many insignificant things! My resolution for today is to stop hating fireworks, so let’s try a pinch of romance and metaphor:

Neon pustules whistle through the air, sparked up morsels of ash cometing across the twilit firmament, coast across the breeze, burn out into propellor seed rain. What are these polyps of light? Projected paper shreds from bursted whistle-rocket? Impossible artificial insects, methinks. Beneath, the faces of onlookers glow by myriad tints of candescent aplomb. Two of them hold tightly, meld cheeks, impart warmth, smell skin, tickle with breath. They’re so happy to have a moment to kick back, a moment of difference, a moment to be dazzled by a sky made lustrous. They’re so fucking happy that the world of strife sinks away. Look towards the sky, towards the future. Someone has set it off for them, how generous! Fireworks are a community event, no paywall, no enforceable entry fee, just sharing a cool little thing you bought with a whole city. It is the little glowy neuron in how its sound travels through concrete, conquers the airway, commands the world by its spectacle and grace. It’s illegal to sell them here! The government doesn’t want us to have them, have us making noise and risking damage! But we don’t care. We keep finding them. Keep fighting to show off, to display our power in a way that brings joy to entire communities. The fireworks mean something. They are memorable, unforgettable. You know where you were each and every time you saw a firework. At [amusement park], Standing on the banks of the [hometown river], coming from [nearby stadium]. Bad, privatized examples, but still, residuality! The issue was I never chose fireworks. Never chose to see them, to hear them, I was always just there. There was no freedom in it, no sincere engagement with the fireworks. I resented them because they came to me. I feared their might. But listen! Look! See what they represent! Defying regulation, community bonding, unforgettable experiences, brilliant aestheticisms, universality. That fucking rocks.

I’ve made a convincing case, and I certainly feel a lot warmer on the whole affair, but until I again encounter one, the results will not be discerned or codified. At least now I have an open mind. I believe that’s enough divorces put to pen for today. Tomorrow, maybe I buy a bell pepper. Take little nibbles out of it until I stop calling it my least favourite food. That’ll be fun. Talk to you soon!

POST-NOTE: I find it fascinating that my means of growing to love something is by using colourful words, creating an artistic event out of it, manufacturing a feeling. Inauthenticity of experience as a tool towards authentic personage. I’m too art and spectacle-brained to see things as anything more than the subjective framing of taste.

ii. Meditations from ETCETERA hangout spots

[Context: ETCETERA is a ynfg by slitherbop]

- We've aimed, as of late, to de-visualize and de-lingualize our cognition.
- The fruits of the eyes oppress, reduce, make commodity and object of.
- We think and understand beauty almost entirely via the eyes and ears, and so much of our art and language circulate around these two senses. Imagine smell art... feel art... describe a taste or scent without relational language.
- The word "perception" has practically been redefined to refer to sight.

- ETCETERA (as she calls herself) is probably seen as "bizarre" in the reactionary Twitch Streamer dudeisms because it resists immediate perception, easy swallowing.
- Yet, a life bound in symbols, signifiers of the real has grown creatively exhausting.
- The function of escape or creating another world, in a lot of interpretations, is just reiterating ours but you have more power, more confidence, less responsibility.
- It fantasizes freedom within an unfree condition.
- We admire how boldly she resists consumption, transmogrifying the visible into its true abstractness beneath the objective gaze, yet still bearing the emotions and comforts of its kindred spaces.
- Hanging out in some of these halls is an exercise of discomfort.
- Why have the oversaturation of rhythms and sweetisms in most art lulled us into viewing all else as emotionally disruptive?
- Why is stopping to smell the roses in our favourite virtual spaces such an exception? Why fear betraying the consumption cycle? Fear inefficiency even in recreation?
-The music here scares us, yet we type, force ourself to sit with it, not until it made sense, but until we felt it.
- We need to get used to being uncomfortable... get comfortable with it.

- We keep pursuing unconventional movement; joining dances, shyly approaching entities, keeping lonely ones company, feeling out where on a couch to sit, loitering against walls until attached to the room.
- Unconventional for a game, yet hyper-conventional for our real life body.
- This isn't a product or project, but a small little life we're forcefully injecting ourselves into to enact our will over them.
- How we act in a space without inhibition, as most games are, speaks in an existentialist sense to who we are.
- By treating these incursions as snacks, I worry I've lost so many good opportunities to discover myself through games beyond limited moral agency.
- We've realized how rapidly disillusioned we've grown with engaging with the status quo and our reality of spectacles + its simulacra being echoed in revered media. Also with spending our time on something that mocks our presence as an agent and drowns us in a flurry of its own ego and fantasy.
- We want to seriously confront our relationship with games, both because of our emotional reliance on them and due to the conditions which they're produced under.
- We want a will to power in our games, but not through dominating bodies, slaughter and superior capacity, but as a means to liberate ourself from all that and just live and experiment with the person we want to be.
- Pipe dreams only pacify, for which we are victim.
- In moving from passive observer of a space or host to actively engaging and becoming a participant, rather than experiential conquerer, of a space. Questioning "what do I want out of being here and what am I feeling here" rather than absorb, absorb, absorb.

- There seems to be nothing more counter-culture than sincerity right now.
- Idk, but watching our rights get stripped away from a system we now so clearly comprehend the motive of has been simultaneously maddening and radicalizing.
- Plus third spaces are harder to come by and gentrification is taking away all the places we felt ethical going to. These digital pockets are life-preserving amidst swelling swill.
- We look at a painting in the factory until we see something: flesh sculpted into unit. Rorschach tests are very interesting artworks.
- In that sense, viewing art as space, t'seems there's a duology of explorations: that which is curated and that which is interpolated.
- Another painting: a woman being harmed by a few former humans. Masculine. Insectine.
- We keep trying to hug the entities and wish to start giving this much energy to the colleagues that make our days IRL.
- Another painting: a poor fellow fallen in the woods. They look comfortable.
- We think words are an insufficient medium for our art; we can only speak in other people's meanings.
- You have to be here, to meditate on here, to get these things beyond reactivity.
- And you also have to authentically be the person.
- Video Essays are just the "perceptible" game; the visible and hearable, imbibed with other people's meanings.
- Fast travel is an option, but we walk. We think of ourselves as thorough, cohesive, licking our plates. Things like this for the authentic individual are opportunities to question ourselves.
- We think we've exhausted ETCETERA's vistas and our IRL physiology is pleading for a snooze. We walk back to the mattress from the start and lie down. We'll wake up maybe in a dream, maybe in a nightmare, but nonetheless carrying these jewels of ponderance.

iii. unpainted sincerity (bc it's punk 2 b real)

[Context: read society of the spectacle + trump ai grant]

I’m not gonna snub myself, I’m miserable. I’m suffering. My rights are being stripped away, the collective attitude towards me and my community is caustic. I’ve started travelling further from my own head than even [before I was myself]. The degree of depersonalization I feel is crippling.

I love the work I’m doing, the level of knowledge I have, but this is the first time it’s felt like poison. Watching political news everyday, readings in my class further and further cement how disgusting, racist, disempowered, banal and repugnant every single system is and has always been. It’s not just capitalism and AI, it’s law, science, all forms of employment, art, internet, media, music, games and film. Every single place I found respite in has been poisoned. I just want the freedom and possibility to be ethical, but it is physically impossible. I want to suffer by my own hand, live off the land, live with people, love people, do chores and mundanities, work my ass off, have fun, but not for a fucking system. Why does everything I do have to line the pockets of some smarmy scumbag and quite literally fund my own demise. What the fuck. All of our survival has become a commodity, a contingency, a profit margin. All our humanity has become a fault, an obstacle, spiritless clay under the malaise of product.

I see everything, literally everything I need to see to know my place here. The jig is up. I’m staring into the abyss and it has no eyes, no soul to stare back with. It is pure, yawning dread, pure air unable to be built on, pure vacuum unable to be bridged over. Absurdism only works if you get to live. I don’t get to choose to leave. I don’t get to choose alternatives. I don’t get to choose the ethical option. I don’t get to choose whether I’m raped by bigots tomorrow. I don’t get to choose whether or not I get to be present in reality, and thus I don’t get to choose how I am. I am pure commodity, and as soon as the powers that be decide that commodity ought be discontinued, as soon as they trap me in my home, deny me all opportunity and outlet, deny me my fucking body and gender, I am functionally, and probably actually, dead.

Oh, I’m so smart for seeing the wool pulled over my eyes! Good girl! Have a treat! Next year you’ll see there’s two sheets of wool! The next you’ll see the whole world is made of wool! The next you’ll see your body has always been wool. I’m not fucking smart for pushing myself into radicalism, for seeing all the strings of the marionette in excruciating detail. I’m not clever for getting it all so young. All I am doing is cursing myself with more time left alive in which I am destitute and powerless, am perpetually victim, can take no joy in anything, for all have been compromised by hegemonic rape. I’ve had to erase all my memories, they’d all been compromised, but accidentally also erased all the times I’ve been loved. It’s not cool to know more than other people. It makes every conversation with those you’re closest with that don’t see things as despondently as you do an exhausting argument. I don’t have the fucking energy to coddle a white liberal right now about how this isn’t normal and how their exact privilege loftiness, their puerile view of good and bad and their years of supporting themselves on uncritical, military-industrial earth is exactly how we ended up in this cultural cesspit.

Five-hundred billion tax dollars from private citizens trying their damnedest to fight through this malaise (because we all know the wealthy aren’t paying them) were just funneled into three private tech companies for AI development. Five-hundred FUCKING billion. How many hours of minimum-wage labour is that? 30 billion! 750 million full-time weeks of crumbs. But no, it’s raising the fucking MINIMUM WAGE that causes inflation. Go fuck yourself. No one likes AI. Uncreative fascist pigs with no soul, no heart who view body as nothing but profit and emotions and suffering as nothing more than things the weak go through, rather than the very FULCRUM of why most people create, the very livelihood of tens to hundreds of thousands reduced to a fucking product. I can’t live, can’t work, without crushing my prospect as a zero-budget creative into scrap.

Every morning, I take a new black pill like I’m prescribed it. I’m not even crazy. None of this is conspiracy or speculation or lies. It’s just how fucking rotten every single thing is for anyone not a white supremacist millionaire. I despise, out of my axiomatic principles, every single thing our government has enacted. I’ll be glad to suffer if it’s another country sabotaging us for making life shit for them. It’s karma. I want utter implosion. I’ll smile as shit gets so absurd that the curtains are utterly drawn out of incompetence, that democracy melts. That’s my pipe-dream, but you can’t wake up from the experience machine.

Days are disparate. You can’t build routine on a marshland. My identities are temporal. Names flee me. Body parts and cravings and disrepair run amok. Work is my only stabilizer. That’s how they want it, right? Economically productive fun. Too bad my work is galvanizing, not placid. There’s narrative in radicalization. Joy in passive growth. Writing, expression, listening and such. Ephemeral accomplishments that I can’t do violence to and do no violence to me. Or maybe they do, codifying my sufferings in ink, making accessible my rot and decline as a papertrail of treasons. Got to at least look cool as I get executed by the state.

This idea that I’m somehow punk needs to be dealt with. I run contra everything the institution currently stands for. Fuck all that. I’m learning more and more stones to throw at them, unlearning all the disease they injected me with. I disrespect them, though within the bounds of prosecutable law, for imprisonment means social death, means rape, means insulation and exploitation. Do cops even go after the white and highly-educated, those without economic hardship? I had it all lined up to pick up a silver spoon, really, to coast through life on a cushy military-industrial complex job. I was born in the safest part of the country, have all the resources to be awhat I am, to be a leftist, to push back. None of it is dissented here, the worst here is micro-aggressions and gentrification. Is it punk, in this climate, to say “fuck that noise” and agree with all your friends that capitalism fucking sucks? Is it punk to be the status quo in a free, better world? Is it punk to live as an insular fragment, only occasionally swimming out to play pattycake with horny liberals? I don’t follow trends, I guess… I dress strange, look androgynous, read outside the box, seek situations, value self-allocation and reflection, shell out scraps and leech off the plump. Is that punk? Do you know what’s not punk is fixating on labels.

I ask all this not for faux-admission into a subculture, but because I’ve this image in my mind that rebels don’t cower in fear. Rebels don’t stay quiet, let the masses go unorganized, only keep themselves fed. I feel like a piece of shit that I’m not able to do more, do better, given my advantages. I don’t “work”, though I read for several hours a day, write and accumulate. It all feels like work, all drains my energy so completely. My eyes have a screen fetish. They can’t kick the tragedy long enough to address the tragedy. All tragedies can be solved with enough strokes on one’s keyboard.

I don’t know, is the truth. I’m so tired, so unable to do anything without condemning my whole community to deeper hells, so unable to more than “focus on my work”, stay alert and maintain my sanity. I have no optimistic spin for this, no hope things will get better this year, this decade, this lifetime. I won’t kill myself yet, but by the time I feel like I must, hopefully I’ll be punk enough, rebel enough, in community enough to keep on rowing. Let’s live in a compound, grow each-other food, cook each-other meals, fuck and not worry about interpersonal drama, labour without worrying about inboxes or bureaucracy. I’d like to cook for everyone, make art to entertain them and make agitprop. That’s my station in life. That’s the brightest future I can envision for now. I hope it’s not gone by the time I get there.

iv. computer smut

[Context: nude for xbox game cover]

you hook up with a computer-woman over the internet.
you meet in cyberspace and lock carbon-fiber pistoned elbows.
she leads you to a server room, where you press against a cool cabinet.
you stare at each-other, blinking leds framing each-others silhouette.
you run the back of your hand along her silicon, wireframe back
you spiral your fingertip around her cold, metallic cochlea in a hypnotizing wag, her black wire hair wrapping your finger.
distorted comets warble across her neon-grid lcd skin with your pressured touch.
you playfully plug cords in each-others ports.
wires like lolling tongues roll down her shoulders as locks of hair.
you run your fingers down their rubber insulation, lightly greased with a fruity shampoo.
you pinch the lips of her usb mouth, plug your finger into her cheeks.
her microchip teeth leave your finger sopped with battery acid drool.
she hangs out her disk-drive, receiving and swallowing a dosage of malware. you swallow some adware.
her eyelashes spark up, her iris blooms lightning blue, her skin prickles you with a vwoom.
her monitor starts distorting, dead pixels freckling her face, desktop files corrupting.
you clean her face and drag some of them into the recycle bin.
you get caught up in caressing each-other by cursor, rubbing all the right software.
you’ve primed each-other’s command consoles and begin.
you plug each-others motherboard into the server and do computations on each-others network.
you math so hard that your fans start heaving.
your cpu are warm to the touch. you slide your finger between them.
you can feel an excited voltage coursing down your cables, deep in your stomach.
you stick usb sticks in each-other's mouths and your hdds start whirring really fast, getting hotter.
you're getting so hot that you start dripping data onto the network.
you plug ethernet cables in each other's receptors and start spilling out all over the bandwidth.
you're so hot you can't keep your monitor open.
you let out a sticky-keys moan.
you're both overloaded, overheated, about to crash!
you bluescreen, all your processes freezing, your fans reeling in, sweating crash reports.
you print out a papertrail of your love as you both reboot.
you hold each-other tight and slump against the server, heads pressed against the glass, and finish downloading each-other.
you draw each-other ascii art and upload an ip address to meet again next week.

[no joke, my computer crashed like 2 minutes after writing this! she was def into it!]

v. [removed]

[Context: Was a 10-page documentation painting my grandmother's moved-out-of house.]

[Context: if you couldn't tell by 10 pages in 1 night, I was not alright. I hope you'll excuse an illegible slurry of data like 10 people can properly make legible without violence not being included in this collection.]

[Context: the vividity was blinding. i went to the fridge for a snack and only saw her fridge. Her window. Her counters. Her oven.]

[Context: it seems like my only real memories from childhood were in that house. everything else I had to kill.]

[Context: I have more dreams in that house than in my parents house.]

[Context: Nightmares too. I've dreamed twice my grandmother died, twice my grandfather.]

[Context: They're both alive. I think they're 81. They live in a corpo condo now.]

[Context: They aren't doing all that well. No diseases, just... degeneration. My grandmother seems different each time I see her.]

[Context: My grandma was my favourite of the four as a kid. I started to snap at her, ignore her, insult her when I was a teen.]

[Context: I still do.]

[Context: She's very liberal in all the derogatory ways and refuses to see the people around her change.]

[Context: She was the first one I told. She offered to take me shopping. I refused.]

[Context: She dead-named me at Thanksgiving and has never used the correct pronouns. I have used the same nickname since birth, so not only was it a dead-name, but a deliberate unacknowledgement of all I have been through. She never changes even though constantly asking me to be patient and explain things to her. I always do. She's the same with tech. I don't have the energy for it anymore.]

[Context: I think I was trying to reconcile these two realities through the vacations, the every-day-an-event, the holidays, the games that occured in those walls. She was perfect back then. Untouchably generous and kind. Anything material in her means to make us happy. Trips for ice cream, the dollar store, the zoo, chain-restaurant dinners. I'm sardonic now, I hate those things. She's still that person, but I'm not. And now I'm losing that person. Slowly. Flickering. Further away.]

[Context: I wrote all my direct family poems for Christmas off words they valued. It was in part to spite her philosophy of drowning us in material and thinking products were a display of affection, when all it did was make us spoiled anad jaded. Her word was family. I thought I was snarky and insincere in writing it. Thanksgiving was still on my mind. She cried when I read it out loud.]

[Context: I still love you, Mimi. Thanks for making my childhood. As seeped in spectacles, privilege, unhealthy habits and products as it was, you were trying your best.]

vi. twin armies of a dissected identity

[Context: no.]