Anthology of the Self - Entry XVIII
the digital incarceration of girlies w terminal identities
Adherent mystery afoot. Glue-coated fingers. Touch the lumps. Pile up the fruits. Tuck them into the pocket-cloth. Can’t gather treats, I feel bad evicting it. It’s there. It’s not watching me, but I know it knows. Look how it rubs its face. There’s a wart-riddled toad sitting in there. Just sitting there, folds of frog-flesh sweltering, sticky, smelly. It inflates with each gasp and grunts out little creaking moans. There’s a flypaper toad sitting on a desk-chair, its copper eyes tear-dunked, rheumed by refulgence. Baroque bouquets of disparate, globalized trade cross its eyes. A frogs-mopolitan.
Saliva dribbles down its pouches. Its warts warble, its head nods off, its fingers cascade. It’s terminally ill. Terminally. Null code and voided data. Disengaged, dematerialized fog-headed frog. A cloud of smog farts out its skull. The smog of a dead lover. Gas creaks through its mossy flesh. Squelch out your own materiality and sell it on the stock exchange. Its mental gallery is full of art it bought up on the cheap. There’s only the self in the head, for all else is inherited, environmental. Toad-self is biological.
Sorry, I fucking lied. If toad is capable of reason and virtues can be reason, toad is capable of virtues. Toad is capable of reasoning its own virtue. Toad is capable of becoming its logical toad-self. Toad is made. No thing is toad, no trait is toad, no face is toad, no idea is toad. I call this piece disparate chaos wrangled into frame. How can one wrangle their community into coherence for galvanization when their identity cannot be wrangled? Their motives can, their ideas can, their transgressions can be collectively organized. These are not the contingencies.
Insecurity, envy, selfishness, accumulation, hedonism, shame. These are the shapes of the flaws. They are myelin sheaths. The core component is the rotten toad, doped off drip-feed wires. Drops of zappage, voltage demons, supercharged lithium ion fireflies beguile the toads tongue whip, crisp the toads tongue-tip into new stages of speech. The toad is stupid. Look how it walks into the electric fence over and over again and forgets there’s a reason it’s been corralled. All the pains of modernity are from stubbing one’s toe on the corral fence trying to run from the others. The toad moans and groans when it stubs its toe. I want to punt the toad. Squish it around in my hands, squeezing the air out of it like a rubber chicken, then dropping it onto a battle-axe boot with a traumatizing croak unto going, going gone.
The toad thinks it's an artist but it doesn’t make art, so it says. It doesn’t get paid for art that gets gobbled up by interplanetary pigpens, so it isn’t actually an artist. “Hard work is only hard work when it pays off. Extra assertion is inconvenient without compensation. Why create?” The toad says. The toad makes 8 measure loops in FL studio and writes diary entries logging its learning every night. “That’s not art,” the toad tells itself. “Art is public. Art is consumable. Art has been consumed. Art has been compensated. We are not artists. We are not creative. We only work when we have to. We only think on company time. The clock has struck artless artistic (dis)engagement. The pacifier is the aesthetic pinnacle under a post-post-modern paradigm. I’m just killing time between shifts; let’s run a quick Oblivion sesh between oblivion seshs. I dream of black. My job isn’t very demanding. Me time is the best type of time. That’s when all the fun stuff is. Fun is all that ought to be there. That’s all there is. Pain hurts. Oblivion hurts. I long to be paper-shredded into the abyss and death-march between greyspace. But I’m having fun. Me time is the only third space they’ve let us keep. It’s clearly distinct from work and sleep! It’s play, everyone! There is no overlap between play and the other two, I just don’t like thinking while I toil away at a passive task for a hit. It’s the only hit big enough to get me tooth-showin’.”
Any conceptual extension beyond a binary is already causing tears in the stomach lining. It’s still an incomprehensible binary with a technical zero. There’s no time left to turn that “ME” counter-clockwise 90 degrees. There’s no time to allocate where one can actually wake up from the sleep. It’s a soft border between stations.
The toad is a terminal junkie. Terminals are museum access-points, containing easily-exportable creation, the window for identity and subculture-shopping. Yet, the terminal has been warped into (or perhaps always was) data-labour, into a market builder and researcher. Privatization of the private identity of the bodiless asserted schizophrenically on the body by the bombardment of unskippable YouTube ads before funny cat videos. The aux cable hangs from the toads lips as its eyes glaze over with TV static. The wire is the mouthpiece to the e-bong of digital scrap and shred commerce. Fingerprint oil and psychological predispositions are the new fulcrum in our undead economy. AI is more of an affront to the toad’s home than any physical bulldozer the executive orders can muster. Home is where the dope terminals are, in proximity to bed and fridge. Dat’s da life, ain’t it, Toadsy? Neurodiversity means more markets to exploit, a larger fishnet weaved of our algorithmic web. Billionaires are spiders and we are toads snacking away at their catches. Don’t ask who the flies are. Don’t you dare fucking ask. Fine, fucking… whatever. The words are being birthed regardless of beat-around-the-bushisms. The larvae are nested on the other sides of borders, fed on the snubs of our abstract artistry not being tangibly translatable into wages, fly by the wings of the wiles of an empty self. We crave a self. This is the axiom. This is the trap. It is all a want for a self we don’t have. All products purchased, all desires fulfilled, all knowledge accrued, all bodies upkept because we are too insecure, too envious, too ashamed, too pain-averse, too fixated, that we will die without these things, without privatizing the 9th letter of the alphabet, without fully realizing an actualized self.
The toad can’t die while it doesn’t know who it is, but has been conditioned to only search for itself in a plate of flies. Eating disorders, bigotries, dysphorias, dysmorphias, depressions, anxieties, obsessions, fixations, dissociations: this crisis for self is the core struggle of postmodern first-world human existence. Any potential for self blown to oblivion by access to spectacles: spectacles better than us. The machines are the great reducers [positioned next to the physical god's role as great expander, perhaps here lies the crux of the desire to escape. you can know the contents of a box, but not of the abyss]. They make all the labours singular. All the endeavours, all the days lived by the other become not an opportunity for linkage but a jealousy and longing that those days couldn’t be one’s own. The experience junkies (speaking from Toadsy’s perspective) repeatedly deny the value of the experiences they’ve moved under themself. The chamber where a self ought to belong is well-suited for a hoarder's stash. A storage locker of that which is irrevocably external; brought in, purchased, swallowed.
Food mustn’t be viewed as object, but as future body-mass, or rather the body as past snacks. That overindulgence of cheez-its in the 10th grade is now fat on your right-pointer finger’s third digit. The same must be said of the other, of the spectacles, of the art. Unification requires and demands both digestion and identification. But the machine is a rusty chain that tourniquets me into dualism, trinitism, quadrism… motleyism. My body refuses to sleep properly, refuses to digest properly, refuses itself unified dreams until all is eaten. Spend every waking hour shoving as much nourishment down your throat until your flesh literally can’t take it. My, I mean Toad’s, I mean my head sways, my eyes are glazed over, my brain is pounding, my hands move sluggishly in their dryness, I’m hunched over the screen under two blankets blinking too much, thirsty but too dreary-eyed to put the e-bong down to get more water. No fucking shit I wrote “I’m not alive and I don’t know what it means to be”.
This is my life, my tea, my milk, my essence, my substance, my sugar, my dreams. This pale glow has entirely privatized my flesh for its banal intellectual unproductivities and passivities. Two meals cooked and eaten, two movies, two conversations, three readings, a whole video game, a thirty-minute walk six pages (and running) written, three albums listened to, countless tangential inquiries and stray uncashed/banked desires that will map out the structure of future days, perpetuating my own incarceration indefinitely. This is not enough, asshole. Do more! Do more! Do it all now! You have 150 games on your backlog, 150 movies on your watch-list, twenty books on your desk, two more assignments before Monday, a writing project you’re struggling to commit to, daily recommendations that need to be allocated, memories and traditions that need hourly organization and upkeep to stay coherent, daily stretches and you’ve done none of it. You’re fucking useless. Tomorrow is supposed to be your off day and look at how much shit you still have planned. Every day I’m “having fun” with a rubber-house mouthpiece hanging from my lip, yet not a single one is a day off. I have near-perfect “time management” (or whatever my contemporaries love bemoaning so much) according to those I talk to, and can tell you it is absolutely a fraught concern. There is no such feeling of productivity that can be achieved while you treat time as a framework within which actions must be done. Time to drive yourself to exhaustion feeding what everyone tells you is worthless and unproductive tomorrow. And again the next day. And again. And again. There is no genuine engagement when you wouldn’t pass up the offer to be exactly who you are, but have every experience you desire to have poured into your skull like fruit punch. You don’t want the experience, you want the experience of the experience within a framework relational to existing experience. What the fuck is the point of this all then?
This electric white note-book with finger stimulators that can manifest inexhaustible experience is the sole space. All space has been consolidated and reduced to the space within which the machine occupies. There is no first, second or third space, there is only digital space. Digitalization has colonized all space, for all space is processed under the presuppositions imposed into us by the digital pre-experience of a kindred space. All thoughts, too, are unreal until manifested in this space. Think about it. I can’t talk about movies with people without opening a pre-curated Letterboxd, can’t talk about the books I’ve read without pulling up a written list, et fucking cetera. In my classes, I struggle to speak other than from pre-thought notes because I cannot qualify my thoughts while they remain immaterial, get stressed submitting myself to be judged while yet to have judged myself. The materiality of my essays as an extensive articulation of my identity is the only cross-reference I have to make sure I’m still narratively in tune with my own materiality.
Mirrors are fascinating things. Space projected onto non-space rendering that space insofar as it was projected. I don’t have a body, but that’s me in the mirror. I not only have to be made material to understand myself as real, but also be made imagistic through second-hand realities (much akin to my experiences. I want to see them having been realized rather than as their relational reality). Phenomena has become my noumena. Such a direct being is out of my comprehension. Not once in a day do I look down and go “it’s you”. [See what I did there? Not “It’s me”. Cute. Just in case you thought I was being unserious.] Not once do I think of the means by which I pilot my body between physical locales. These movements are as subconscious and mechanical as the natural connection between transcribing an idea via hand movements and navigating digital space through a cursor and key entry-phrases. Only the mirror or the photograph make me judgeable, noticeable, and force a confrontation. Only the non-spatial self can critique the self in its actuality. It has to be fitted into the medium in which bodies are accessed globally: as secondary. It’s safer that way. No one sexualizes minds. I do, kinda, but I’m an odd duck.
Even now, I refuse to sleep until I feel I’ve said enough here, until I’ve extracted enough data on this rich insight that arose purely from ice fishing my stress. I must fully materialize before I unplug and immediately dematerialize until I rematerialize as a person in a dream-altered mindspace. My writings are exceedingly temporal and butterfly-theory levels of subjective. Metaphors made that are irreplicatably producable until already materialized as a string of vocab. I’ve called death “semiotic raven milk” twice [thrice]. What if there’s something memorable that’ll die if I stop? I’m cutting you off. You’re rambling, you’re exhausted. You’ve had too much electricity to drink. Go to sleep and never come back here again. If my pleasures refuse to cut themselves from the machine, maybe my art can. There’s nothing sensible left to say. The self depletes itself. And again. It’s the only thing that can be spoken on with passive authority. But it’s uncertain. There’s nothing left to say.
I say, but I said the same in Fuck my Feels. In Twilight of the Ego. In Screen-age Riot. I’m defeating shadows while still in the dark. I’ll probably keep bemoaning my non-self, because it’s all I feel I can do without fictionalizing. The only means to not impose on the other. The double-bind between looking arrogant and giving others the courtesy of their own voice. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I’ve been operating within the wrong canon of assuming the self. Maybe my self can become us through serving as an articulated mirror for their self, but only when the reader identifies it as such. Maybe that’s the best us we can get.
I want to stop talking about the self, to write essays without violence or presumption on other things, for there is so much grand deceit and violence going on right now, so much beguilement, misdirection and piece-making that needs to be confronted and taken out back. Maybe the best one can do is fortify the network of selves, to stop questioning the legitimacy of the self because it was someone else in the past and will be someone else in the future. These documentations are eternally contemporary to one subjectivity. Keep it as such, only excavating when the dirt around it has been tossed about. It isn’t worth forcing the dirt to jostle to tell more stories, make more art. Maybe instead, it’s time to learn new mediums, mediums unbound by the simplification of the subconscious into articulations, maybe one that can more purely portray identity in all its unfounded chaos. For now, we have labels, and these essays are such labels.
One can talk and conclude and rationalize forever, but action is a different being, a different beast, a different person. That's where the hurt is. That's where the hurt is for all of us. Or so it seems. I'm a passive bastard irl, gotta let it in a little.