notes on a brief virality

How to get to new york, part twelve

we’re all silhouettes against the blinding white light of the digital — photo taken at my friends’ wedding, seen in the background down there, and the cardboard cutouts are of the couple’s two pets

So I may have stumbled into a little predicament. 

NOTES ON A BRIEF VIRALITY

~ Wednesday, September 18th ~

When I set out to write my two-part brat green glasses series a full moon before last, I had in my mind a seven-part drawing of a muddy line between the international repression of progressive activism in the twentieth century, the stinging loss of a singular revolutionary dream that’s plagued us since, and our current backlit depressive dream in which irl spaces have seemingly disappeared overnight and the failed promises of Web 2.0 became fully, unequivocally realized.

Anyways, I was driven a bit manic by the thought of trying to pull off this little feat in writing,—this is the type of pretentious thing I’ll go haywire over in private, as anyone who texts with me regularly would tell you—and having taken perhaps one too many bong hits in my room alone at around 2am, I clack clack clacked out at a long list of potential talking points, and by the two hour mark I had accumulated such an ungainly and unhinged list of names and topics that I couldn’t help but laugh and make a joke out of on Notes,—mainly because, you know, Notes is fun. I feel like the people on Notes are a good crew. Anyways, here’s the post (I still think it’s so stupid and funny ngl):

And… well… unfortunately, the black pilled nihilists of twitter found the post sometime in the first week of September and they (well) freaked the fuck out. A screenshot went somewhat viral, blew upwards, skywards and groundwards, took flight like a barking squirrel posed like its ready to pounce off of a treebranch, hit 12k likes and fizzled out, and somehow (somehow) it became the very first thing that anyone I know who still uses twitter saw when they opened the app on Sunday morning. So of course they all texted me about it before I knew what was going on.

I was walking around the Logan Square farmer’s market and receiving a lot of texts about “the post,” and I assumed it was some crazy political thing that had happened so I didn’t read into it too much, just texted back that the twitter discourse sucks right now. And I wandered around, drinking out of a half gallon of apple cider, found my friend Darya’s comics pop-up and she said something about “all press being good press, I guess.” I said “what?” and took a big long deep chug from my half gallon of apple cider.

It felt a bit like an apocalyptic moment. When I met with

ft cald

and our friend, Owen, I said, “I guess I went viral on twitter.” And they both said, “Oh, yeah…”

And of course John Goodman’s adage’s from the Big Lebowski still rings true, that “these men are nihilists, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” so I didn’t take any of it too badly. The original post was funny enough. To a certain extent it understood the gag, right? Even if it didn’t understand it was a gag. The comments were… um… a small bit brutal, though. But hey, that’s just Twitter being Twitter. Or X being X. Or whatever. Here’s this gem:

But then a funny thing happened: when I sat down to write the second post to my little series of overly political posts about Harris leftism, GLADIO, and neoliberalism all through the lens of brat,—still an absolutely insane thing to write, I think,—I found myself incredibly stressed out by all these newfound eyes now watching my Substack. Commentators on Twitter had been posting screenshots of my typos and I felt that I really had to make up for that. I had to prove myself somehow. That pressure turned out to be too much. There felt like a lot of bad faith. I spent the day pulling out small hairs and pushing myself through it.

And the product itself came out bad enough that I rolled around in bed in agony, not thinking in complete sentences, until around 3am when I sat up, grabbed my laptop, and edited the piece upwards to thirty times in a half-sleep doze until I finally fell back asleep with my laptop still on my chest.

After this I more-or-less scraped my plan and, you know, to be honest, I do think the two parts of the series speak well enough to at least the intent of the series, even if I can’t find the effort inside myself to put all the pieces together over another five posts I’m comfortable enough with what I had.

And thankfully the virality cycle on Twitter is so rapid that its sweaty, nervous eyes moved away from my substack by Tuesday morning, and I got off rather scot-free in the end.

Also on Tuesday I had an Amtrak ticket to Northern Wisconsin,—a little escape of sorts,—where I’d visit family. It was a nice little break and I got some time to think. Spending time walking nature trails really gets a person’s head out of their own ass.

On Thursday the 12th in Eau Claire, about four hours before I had to catch the return train from Tomah to Chicago,—so I could catch a ride back up to Minnesota on Friday with my friend Eli for our friend’s wedding,—I found myself sitting outside with my copy of Céline’s Journey in the dewey grass of the backyard and drank coffee and smoked a cigarette while my mom was still asleep, and the morning air felt refreshing and real. Her cat had slept on my face the night before. My mild allergies went wild.

Earlier in the morning I had sent out a piece on the ‘Stack about having a meet-cute with Borges in a dingy old library; but by this point I felt a baffling guilt develop in my gut without really understanding where it had come from. A blinding white anxiety took hold of me. I couldn’t shake it. The last thing I wanted to do was open an app to try and drown out the feeling. I wanted to feel the feeling. Full feeling.

Because I could have sworn that I had been joking when I sent that original post on Notes,—yet there still remained a part of me that wondered if the twitter mob was right, had I been genuine about it? But no, no, it had been a joke… but maybe? Why am I making the jokes I would make with my friends who know me with internet people?

Earlier in the day, too, someone random had started commenting on all of the pictures of my own instagram account with “I hate you,” and that had been bugging me too.

Then, like a flaccid sort of lightning bolt, I realized that my tendency for falling into a manic libidinal ~urge~ to communicate, when paired with the instantaneous communications technology I always have around me, is a self-reinforcing cycle of mania and guilt.

And if that is the case, and it’s the copious amounts of communication, the sheer bucketfulls, that are to blame for this massive, strange feeling of guilt,—the digital landscape and digital voyeurism paired up with these past mistakes of communication on the part of my juvenile passions of inadequacy,—then the only solution I can think of is to exorcise this digital demon from myself, its guilt and its reveries, by removing the online renditions of myself that I’m uncomfortable with entirely.

Well, I should say,—I’m not leaving Substack too much. I love all of you too much. But I disabled my personal instagram at least. The "profile,” of instagram at least, which worked as my lens on the world to way too much of an extent, that “profile” which kept me contained with the same people I see on my feed where everything’s performative and nothing matters. Even more than that, though, my “profile” was me in the eyes of the people I used to know and the people I still know who live far away.

And besides, my instagram had been curated by past renditions of myself, those countless stages of growing up, and still continuing to haunt me today. Without eradicating that lens in and out, I would forever me stuck, to a certain extent, in a past self. Deleting an old Instagram can free you to become the person you feel like now, is all I’m saying. It’s now been six days since I disabled the app and I have no inkling to reactivate it anytime soon.

Because what do I feel I really have to gain from digital spaces except for an intense and never-ending sorrow? I don’t know. Seeing people I knew and seeing people whose impressions of myself I worry about, I couldn’t help but wonder if I can keep on like this. It was clear: I cannot keep snorting up these digital spaces like I have been. They’re not a substitute for a social life. I felt all too out in the open. I don’t like the feeling of eyes on me, especially when those eyes are looking at versions of me back when I was more of a petty, insecure child. Like Tim Robinson says, “I’m not a piece of shit,—I used to be a piece of shit.” I probably wasn’t that bad, of course, but God, sometimes I just want to put the embarrassing moments that still keep me up thinking behind me.

Princess Babygirl

dm’d me some advice to stop posting too much on substack notes and let the pieces speak more for themselves. Good advice. Thanks to everyone who checked in on me. The writing practice is still going good, clearly.

Anyways, that morning in the dewey grass I deactivated my instagram account. As of this moment, I don’t think that I’ll ever redownload it as I have too many other things to get up to.

NOTES ON DEACTIVATING INSTAGRAM

~ Written on a Train on Thursday, September 12th ~

Just climbed aboard an Amtrak train heading down to Chicago from the Tomah, Wisconsin. I was surrounded by Mennonites in their fly little outfits at the station. Mike and Mary drove me down to the stop and waited 45 minutes with me while the train made its way over,—the air felt perfectly warm like it still held onto the dreams of summer, that summer sadness,—and now I’m aboard and discovering that I’m using the capital I again instead of the depressed lowercase i. Huh. Isn’t that interesting.

I’ve felt in myself a strange wellspring of boredom, the feeling of withdrawal but acceptance, since I removed my instagram account from all eyes except those inside Meta’s servers. I spent a whole three minutes looking at the stitching in my sock. Now I’m looking up from my laptop to the trees flying by by bye with their slight red frosting coming down over their leaves from the far reaching branches. Wide fields of late summer golden grass.

I think I understand now why Lot’s wife must have felt,—why she turned back to look upon Soddom & Gomorra, an act which turned her to a pillar of salt. The desire to redownload is real. Remaining tied to my garden of eden, my place of formation, I feel like I too have to turn back into a pillar of salt to be dissolved with the rising tide if I want to go back to where I was. I cannot go back. Not without facing Uriel’s flaming sword of annihilation. So be it. I won’t. Fine. Whatever.

The life I’ve lived on Instagram has been a false one by all accounts. It’s been a life of curating the way I’m perceived, trying to force my image into something I’m satisfied with despite social media having never been all that intuitive for how my brain really works. And I never came to terms this, I only employed a knee-jerk reaction trying to shove it into form, and that shoving it into form broke my brain, I think, at least to a certain extent.

If I’m to do anything about the way I’m feeling right now, I should never return to Instagram and let the messages people send to me go unanswered. They can find my phone number. I don’t want my Instagram to exist anymore. I don’t want instagram to exist anymore. What if it stopped? What if we pushed for it to stop? Crazier things have happened? They stormed the bastille once.

Anyways, I’ve had enough with it. I would rather be mysterious. I will use my briffin glue instagram to post about my substack posts because if substack’s to be my career, and I should just simply accept that doing this will probably be the most notable thing I do with my life,—I turned 25 and it is time to set myself along some tracks anyways so I can be somewhat successful at something by my mid-30s.

Back to the subject at hand: I find myself agonizingly bored. There is so much to do and there is too much value in merely sinking back into the reality that exists around me at all times for me to spend too much more time looking at endless stupid memes. And yet at the very same time there’s such a struggle in detaching myself from my phone and detaching myself from the dumb ecstasy of seeing all of the most braindead memes imaginable that I find myself twitchy and quiet, navel gazing too much without a single thought in my head.

I worry that my biggest fear associated with quitting Instagram is that I might actually feel too much relief, might feel too good that I let down my guard. It’s a fear that in that detaching myself from Instagram I would lose all the friends I had from Madison, all the friends I’ve met in Chicago this past year, losing what they’ve been up to and what they’re doing now, but I think that if I’m actually to be a person with real things going on for myself that are not just simply longings towards the past, of agony over a missed moment of opportunity felt once I freshly emerged from college two and a half years ago, longings based off this envy machine which holds my eyes to the fire of self-comparison, so bubbling up inside me when clashed against the digital heat. I’m going to need to detach myself from social media. 

The feed induces a repression of passion that only comes out, I think, because real world people are transformed into parasocial relationship,—maybe they should be termed semi-parasocial relationships. The only way I engage with some friends who’ve moved far away is through a light tap of that like button.

It’s a following around the kitchen table,—or is it a chasing around? It’s a hamster wheel of images of people you know and people you once knew in High School (who now for some reason have four kids), a racetrack for emotional outbursts and burnouts, communications all of course centered within the constraints of the platform’s format.

It’s hard to be defined by how you were five years ago when you’re attempting to be fully who you are now. That’s the key, maybe. Instagram and Facebook are a trap keeping us as people we’ve grown out of, reducing us to stasis. Most people’s grandparents seem to adore Facebook, and I wonder if that’s because it’s the best place for pictures of grandchildren. It’s a photobook similar to the polaroid photobook of instagram.

And so the Who of Who-You-Are is kept firmly in a box and not just in terms of how you’re perceived but also in terms of how you perceive yourself: none of us exists in a vacuum when our phone camera watches us as we watch its screen; all of us know how intimately the personalities we present are connected to the megatrends in which microtrends emerge occasionally, those celebrating certain personalities and rediculing others, blossoming out new ways to be cynical, either confirming us to ourselves or encouraging us to change to conform to the megatrends based off of who we’ve presented as in the platform space for upwards of ten years. We do live in something of a digital state of dead communication. I’m not sure what that means. I’m not sure where the power lies anymore, really.

~ Written in a Hotel Room on Friday, September 13th ~

It is a convenient thing to be born in 1999. My age plus one matches up nicely with the names of the years. I don’t have to think about it too much. In that way it’s a relief, but of course at the very same time my seeing the name of the year startles me into a droll realization that my ticker is also moving forward towards the end of my being definitively young.

2024 has been a long one so far; it has most definitely not flown by. A lot has happened. That much is true. But I do know that as soon as the clock hits 2025 in the corners of posts,—the only place where the date really pops up in my day to day,—I will feel incalculably old, as old as the universe itself. In a way won’t I be? If we are all made up of the same stuff, which I suspect we are, who’s to say that we’re not all the same age, that of time itself, placed by those who’ve studied at a rough but murky estimate of 13.7 billion years?

I worry sometimes that this type of cosmic babble is no better than religious faith and I pace back and forth and look at the carpet in this hotel room where I’m writing and the carpet’s pattern looks like rain falling down in a torrential downpour. Deduced scientific knowledge like this: the facts and the math may be backing it up, but our lived experience can only be applied to it in the way of a secular sort of faith. In reality here I am sitting in a chair with words in front of me and a mason jar of tap water to the side. I can’t possibly comprehend 13.7 billion years but at the same time, I don’t doubt it.

//

Going forward I’m going to try and not self-promote in such a snarky self-depreciating way on Substack. I feel as if that maybe came off too strongly when I was striving to make something of myself in that first two months of success. I was trying to do the nihilism dance. I certainly thought it was funny but it’s attracting too much attention from people I don’t really want anything to do with. Slow and steady growth is much better, especially in this new internet. Virality has become a deadened curse.

And it’s almost been a full week now since my viral moment: the consequence of leaning too hard into a stupid, winking self-promotion strategy. How’s the abandonment of Instagram worked so far in terms of my mental health? Wonders. I think I’m far more aware of myself and how I think without the lurking specter of who I represent myself as and have represented myself as looming over my shoulder and surveying my life into a presentable mold for others to look into to see how I’m doing, and more often than not,—if we’re being completely honest here,—it’s not super well. I think I’ve always wanted to be an internet celebrity, deep down I thought vainly that I deserved something like that. Obviously this is not healthy. Obviously it’s not true, either, and yet Instagram’s implicit promise says otherwise and here I am after ten years of using that app, feeling as if my brain’s been forever deeply scrambled. I have to imagine my brain will take a couple years to untangle. Unfortunately, I spent ten years on that platform. Thankfully, I’m off of it. I’ll be lucky if I’m alright in the head by the time I hit thirty. I would rather untangle myself, though. I don’t mind taking my time with it. The years will pass anyways.

For some reason I thought that my life would figure itself out. I hang out with deeply cool artists. I’ve played in a band with some excellent musicians. I know cool people on a first name basis who are making giant strides with their art, selling out concert halls, etc. That’s cool! That’s so sick! But I want to be in a far off part of the world, far from eyes. I want to be in France. I want to be smoking a cigarette among people who are fascinating and wonderful in new and exciting ways. I never want to be here. I want to be seen, but elsewhere. But the here is always here. Is there anywhere else? I can’t seem to escape from myself; and I can only escape through these self-prescribed fake means (re: Instagram).

And speaking of getting older, my friend is getting married tomorrow. I’m in a hotel room right now, pacing back and forth while everyone’s continued arriving in their little cars. The wedding and the reception are to be held in a winery in Eastern Minnesota where the grasses have become golden and where the. hills in the distance are fogged out by the smoke pouring down from Canada. 

Eli drove, gave me a ride up to Minnesota from Chicago in his two-door Honda civic,—thank god for him. We listened to all the songs either of us could think of with the windows rolled down.

We left at 8am and arrive at 3pm. I got in a quick hello in to Santos and Abe. Lizhou was taking a nap when I arrived and he seemed somewhat anxious about his 45 minute Princeton lecture on Monday. It sounds like quite a bit to handle. He let me eat 6 of his McNuggets in the hotel minifridge. Mcnuggets are such evil foods and the 1 packet of honey mustard only helps a small bit. While he napped I went outside to finish reading 24 pages of Céline and smoke 1 cigarette (20 class-A cigs are incredibly cheap in northern minnesota, fun fact). And 5 flies were furiously checking out my 2 legs. They poured out of the 100s of wildflowers nearby. I tried to ignore them. An elderly couple (2) came walking out of the hotel with 2 shitzus wearing 2 small tie dyed sweaters. I couldn’t show any weakness in front of the 2 retired deadheads,—I didn’t swat the 5 flies surrounding my legs. I remained perfectly still. I was 1. Perhaps they wouldn’t see me. I counted to 100.

How to stop thinking about numbers, I wondered. Subscriber counts are hard to excise from my brain it seems.

Fighting against the tide of the algorithm for viral success has broken my brain a bit, or at least it’s exasperated my problems from childhood, obscured them over mountains of small itemized distractions filling a feed with posts like spells being cast all the way down my feed like a ladder to the very bottom of the shallowest basin of hell.

Anyways, I got out. My past had huddled around me and squeezed me into a corndog. I don’t want to be a corndog. God please don’t let me be a corndog. But a corndog I am. And my past has moved on to think about what other shapes to form me into. But there’s no consent here! I don’t want to be any shapes! I want to be myself!

My path feels charted and restricted by this peephole into social reality. But I closed the peephole. Thinking about myself at all, in any way, during any part of the day would turn into a thinking about my image, a neon color sillouette of myself.

And also I think it’s fair to say that everyone’s an asshole at some point in their lives and I’m certainly no exception to this,—I wasn’t ever terrible or manipulative but hey, I was a child at one point. I did childish things and I didn’t treat relationships the way I should have. Who hasn’t? Sometimes lessons need to be learned. That’s part of growing up. People who are growing up hurt one another emotionally. It’s part of the process of learning how to love, how to be intimate, how to experience beauty. But there’s no moving past the lessons that had to be learned with an instagram account because you’re still presenting in the exact same way to the same people, you’re a continuation in self-presenting but without the humanity that can prove change. And besides, it’s hard to forgive an instagram account.

~ Written in a Hotel Room on Saturday, September 14th ~

Last night everyone returned from the rehearsal around 9:30. We drank, played a get-to-know-you drinking game hosted by Bella. Eli became too drunk. I got him some water and he went to bed. We listened to some Country classics and then switched to IRA music and Santos and Brian began to wrestle on the hotel floor in their underwear. All in all it was a good little night and everyone was having a blast though I’m still hungover and accidentally overflowed the toilet this morning in the same hotel room as everyone else. Thankfully room maintenance was fast to come up with a plunger and plunge away all the damages.

Talking to Matthias, the groom, last night, near the end of the night, I said this was a nice moment. He said, “it’s crazy how this is a point in our lives.” I said, “yeah.” He said, “it’s a small point, though.” I said, “it feels a little bit like an end of an era,” but he disagreed, saying it felt more like a small point in our lives, a small moment in a whole contiuum of change.

“It feels like the future,” he said. “The new era, not an ending.” And I agreed. Not just to agree with the groom, I really agreed. There was some beautiful spark last night. We’re all people now. We weren’t really people yet in college. It takes time, I suppose, to get one’s license to adulthood, especially considering it’s feeling rather than a certificate on paper. 

Anyways, my nose is so full of snot. I missed the complimentary breakfast by waking up at 10:40 but then again I don’t think I’m the only one, — and Matthias’s parents ordered us all Jimmy Johns sandwiches. “Woke up this morning, got some Gabagoul,” I said.

I feel a small bit like there is me here and there is the most annoying person (also me) who won’t leave me alone. But, oddly enough, I felt his hold over me waning. For the wedding I only had one real dress shirt and no jacket and my ties were nowhere to be found so I packed, balled up my dress shirt and a nondescript pair of black pants, shoved them into a backpack between my digital camera and a copy of Céline, — it took me about an hour to iron out all the creases on the day of, but it’s fine, — And I was ready for the wedding. But at the wedding I would have to sit there with that old idiot, myself, whispering doubts and everything when this day isn’t even about me. It’s about the bride and the groom, you idiot. How remarkably petty I am; I’m the most self-centered person I know.

~ Written in a Honda Civic on Sunday, September 15th ~

Feeling pickled. The month is halfway over. I’m in Eli’s two-door honda civic mario-karting back down the chicago over six hours with the windows rolled down, blasting the new MJ Lenderman album under Toy Story skies. 

The ceremony was wonderful. It took place in a wooden structure on top of a hill with flowing white drapes, overlooking the minnesota hills beginning to redden with the fall encroaching.

The reception felt like a blur like any event with an open bar. Massive cardboard cutouts of Matthias and Angela’s pets were passed around on wooden poles; I snapped a good picture of Eli and someone who’s name I can’t remember with the faces of Meeks the cat and Mr. Chameleon the (um) Chameleon tucked into their suit jackets.

I told Eli this morning, “I feel like a used band-aid.”

He said, “you look like one.”

Everyone was pretty wiped out at the hotel. This is what the morning after a great battle must have felt. After the battle. Would be a good name for a post. Everyone crawled out from their corners throughout the hotel. I sat in the breakfast area of the hotel, quietly avoiding eye contact with the extended family that had all gathered down there eating old yogurt. I spent a good part of the morning, before anyone I knew had come down to the lobby, reading some substack post about the 2016 post-left instagram (um) mess. Kind of remarkable looking back to how strange instagram was for two or three years there,—like why did I even know what anarcho-primitivism meant at one point?—and I drank my watered down coffee and ate my danish.

NOTES ON PERSONAL SPACE NEGOTIATIONS

~ Written in My Apartment on Monday, September 16th ~

The engine wheel of the internet is moving faster. I suppose this is in part due to its gradual optimization coming to a head.

Keeping any and all internet connected devices firmly outside my room has been beneficial, I’ve discovered. My laptop and my phone are only allowed to enter my bedroom when I’m working on a post like this. When I sleep in my bed now, my bedsheets feel all the more real and I feel in my dreams that I’m able to float off into the stars, having left my tether to the discourse behind, to see what lies beyond the moon. Only I always wake just before the revelation happens.

It was nice seeing so many people at the wedding. There goes a door squeaking on its hinges in the distance. It was nice seeing so many people. A person steps into the house across the street. It was nice. A light turns on over the front door, now closed. It was. A light, a lantern, a lighthouse above the door,—steer clear, it says. What? I ask myself. What is this dream trying to say?

~ Written in My Apartment on Tuesday, September 17th ~

To properly grasp at and hold a nugget of an idea in your head and to polish it into the gold that it could be, there has to be a certain level of detachment from the constant connectivity. Maybe that’s the big lesson to capstone this way way way too long Substack piece. Just like when selling your labor you have to negotiate the space in your life that connectivity takes up, you have to consider the fact that you’re selling your attention,—you can’t be purely interoperable with reality if you fall too far to android side of the half-human, half-machine cyborg spectrum we’ve all found ourselves on.

Many of the people I know have their phones constantly on Do Not Disturb, especially those who do freelance work. Others simply don’t have digital presences at all. Their image has to be seen in real life. Therefore it’s sort of an intimate image. The separation feels stark. But it feels good.

Most of the fodder for these posts will now come from my small 90s era electronic typewriter I found on eBay in 2022, which I couldn’t find a use for until these past two weeks, and its use case is now that I can type my heart away and maintain that negotiated distance from digital spaces that want my attention, including Substack. This keyboard is a separate space. It’s not bound down to the wholeism that’s taken over all of the objects in our home. Thank fuck that the Internet of Objects craze has died out. If my lamp had Alexa functionality I think I would die.

As Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space:

“the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind. The binding principle in this integration is the daydream. Past, present and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another. In the life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies, its councils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being’s first world. Before he is ‘cast into the world,’ as claimed by certain hasty metaphysics, man is laid in the cradle of the house. And always, in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle. A concrete metaphysics cannot neglect this fact, this simple fact, all the more, since this fact is a value, an important value, to which we return in our daydreaming. Being is already a value. Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.”

And so we must take efforts to protect our daydreams now that our communications technology threatens to cast us arms and legs forward into the world, into the commons where there is no shelter from the digital light. And that requires figuring out how to make your house into a home. Think about what’s been getting in the way of that.

I’ve thought a lot about why I write in the past two weeks,—what value does it hold? What did I start writing to do?,—and in the quiet moments when I find myself protected from all the eyes of the universe, hundreds of people peering around my space all idle and defensive, separated from everyone else by the prescribed personal digital solipsism of social media, I find myself protected from that singular room. My bedroom is mine again without a phone or a laptop inside it. The question of why do I write, in that space, alone, resolves then into a simple desire to explore my daydream, solitary as that may seem on its surface.

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It’s crazy insane nuts wild that you made it this far,—thanks so much for sticking through for all that sometimes incoherent rambling and occasional tangent. If you really enjoyed what you’ve read so far, feel free to buy me a cup of coffee or subscribe for future posts like this to show up in your email inbox. And also feel free to shoot me a DM; I love to hear from you all. And while this isn’t a reader supported publication, it may soon be. I haven’t started writing paid posts yet,—I plan on doing so in the next two weeks,—but your support would mean the world to me.

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Anyways, that’s all for this week! Hope you all are doing well,

Here’s a song to close things out:

Until next time…

Xoxoxoxoxox,

briffiniffiniffin