strap in folks, this one is rambling incoherent nonsense af. its 5am. nothing good can come of me being awake at this hour. the blame lies with the people who felt it would be a good idea for me to have a weeknotes style blog. there are consequences to your actions.
-
i remeber a time when i was a lil menace. a lil force of nature that was up to no good. when i felt clearer and cleaner. less weather beaten. maybe not less weather beaten, maybe i had the insides of a long haul truck driver- like an old soul, like id been at this for so long and lord i seen it all you can't surprise me now pour me a whisky and let me drink in peace goddamit. i was more vulnerable but less fragile? i must have been more vulnerable- i think of myself back then and i think what an absolute miracle this kid didnt get killed back then for all the dumb shit they pulled.
-
lilo and stitch, watching stories of little girls doing adventure things: when i watch them, sometimes i feel safe- like i remeber when things used to be like this but no longer- im on the other side of the story now, ive lived through the drive-the-character-up-the-tree-and-throw-rocks-on-him part of my story and now im in the cozy afterlife, only to be summoned back into the story [if at all] as fairy godmother or cautionary past tale. but stories are circles and they loop back onto themselves so the afterlife of the story is a new story. its exhausting. can you hire a contract killing on yourself?
-
im thinking about linear things and fractals- that i find myself in a different same place- that i am in this "phase" again. a charatcer always get thrown into the "heros journey"[in tarot its called "the fools journey" which feels a LOT more accurate] - it starts with a rejection to the call to adventure before you are thrown/forced/dragged/tricked/bamboozled into it. its scary to think that im here again. that ill be here again, again. it doesnt end but it kind of does? no man ever steps into the same river twice- for he is not the same man and it is not the same river. but also like, he knows approx what it feels like to step into a river so theres like a river experince expectation template.
-
the 4 stoic virtues are courage, wisdom, temperance and justice. i never really understtod why justice was a personal [on the scale of oneself] stoic value- and it seemed to contrast the other three- wisdom and temperance call for the ability to contextualize i think, to see oneself in the whole, to see that there are many sides to a story. i like the idea in stoicism [or this is how i understand it], that you dont really have values or belief, you have practices- ie a thing is a value you have when its a thing you practice. in practice i'm thinking the sequence is wisdom->courage->justice->temperance.
wisodm- figuring out what to do courage- i can do difficult things justice- doing it temperance- survivng it
-im watching home before dark and theres something about nosy, curious, inconvenient, stupid little girls with messy hair and toothy smiles that will have a place in my heart.
there's a scene in which she stands up on the cafetaria table and reads out all the comments written under her article. "this is why girls shouldnt be educated", "young girls shouldn't be reporters". we've heard it all before, and it still feels new? still feels relevant. as she continues, the jeers quiet down and a few people join her on the table. some mild applause breaks out. the whole thing ends in a mini food fight. but right before it she did get a moment of awed silence from the room undrlined by background music orchestra [fucking bg orchetra violins messing shit up for me irl by not existing and providing clear emotional context for things. crusade for another day] i know how this scene would play out irl- i think i know. if she had had the dumb courage to stand up on a table do this, and think that doing it wouldnt make a damn difference to anything, it would mostly end in a bleh-bleh whatever situation and most of the kids would stop looking at her after the first 20 seconds to resume their respective lives.
-ive been thinking a lot about the phrase "main character energy". outside of the "attention seeking, everything is about me" way its usually meant. ive been told i have it, apparently not in the look at me way but in the youre on your own adventre always kind of way [but either way i suspect it was def not a compliment] . i dont think i understand it but i think one way it makes sense to me is this- i dont think of myself as an npc character, in many games. in the large collective i most certainly am but in the immediate viscinity of my life, i am not. i do not get to sleep walk through a story because im not the main character in it. i have to live with whoever i choose to be in every other characters story- or i have to adopt a level of delusion that allows me to erase it.
-theres something clarifying in the aftermath of a heartbreak. heart devastation? heart explosion? heart stamp? heart crushing? heart pounding? heart punch in the face knockout. heart knockout.
in the quiet aftermath of a heart knockout, "lets-call-it-folks-time -of-death" style ending, there's a kind of cold clarity. like something cut me and im bleeding and i suddenly remember that i have blood inside me and its red.like being thrown into a cold pool of water or slapped across the face. in thappad, the night of the party after all the guests leave and she rearranges furniture- she knows, something inside her that had been asleep or even dead just woke up. and no interior decor change is going to bring back the thing that was? the sting woke me up. i had gotten comfortable here.
-at the end of the episode her dad hands her her camera [in a "sigh, i guess you're doing this and im not technically against it but god don't tell your mother" way] and says "be smart", she says "id rather be brave". me too kid.*
therefore, hence prooved, im a dumb. it may be time to revoke my custody [of myself]. plis to put me out to pasture in a field with baby goats. and chocolate.
yours weird always, akils