Up to the nines in euphemisms used in conversation.
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Looking confused as the boyfriend in Sephora is a rite of adulthood.
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Don't usually do this, but TW: self-harm.
My cousin is apparently self-harming, and my mom and aunt were being weirdly disrespectful about it. Don't think they are dismissing her. At least not consciously. The object of disrespect was the fact my aunt sent my mom a picture of what she thought was some of it, and in turn, sent it to me. I got sent it mid-conversation with E--- and R-----, which completely threw me off my game. I got flustered. I feel bad for dragging them into how "actually pissed off" the "fucking weird" move made me, but both of them are "fucked up-situation veterans", in the words of E---. So, I doubt they thought anything of it. I'm just wondering if I underwent some kind of trauma-response if I'm allowed to think on those terms.
The picture I got sent was clearly cropped; you could see some of the text messages that were sent underneath it. I won't go into much detail about the wounds themselves beyond that they almost seemed accidental, which made me question my mom on whether or not she was completely sure they constituted as being self-harm. My aunt seems sure of it, though, as she is of most things. I decided on taking her word for it. I know both my cousins have gone through a lot over these last few years. My one cousin is in Arizona as I write this, and she's since cut off contact with my aunt for reasons that haven't been explained to me. She's in her mid-teens and has drawn a deep line in the sand on the side of my intensely offputting uncle in his messy divorce that he's been in the throes of for the last two years. My other cousin, her sister, apparently attempted suicide not too long ago. On top of that, I discovered over the summer that she's trans, which my family has turned into this obscurantist open secret for who knows how long. I followed the two of them through the Rockies on a hike they (with all due respect) complained the entire way through. The image of the two of them alone together in the mountains, bickering like siblings but with the pretense of an impenetrable solidarity, sticks out in my mind as the best metaphor for their situation. I know that my family, like all families, is psychotic. As a veteran of both it and other forms of mental anguish, I offer them my solidarity. From here in dilapidated urban Western Canada to their home in the zombie-suburbia of the Pacific Northwest, I am with you two.
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This semester has been rough, but I have a few ideas as to what I'll do with myself. When the semester is over, I'll hit the trains again and wander Edmonton. I'll read more Baudelaire and drink in more underground bars. I'll be alone in public for the first time in my months. I'll return to being confused by commercial space downtown. I'll call my grandpa, talk to another advisor, and have some tough conversations with my parents. I'll go to a doctor and attempt to pass as a guy earnestly trying to do better as opposed to another 21-year-old aspiring speed freak. I'll stop reading to look cool and start being concerned with ideas again: things like nothingness, subjectivity, media, capital, whatever. I'll spend less and be still more. I'll go back to the country and remind myself what it means to be a human being in the one place on earth where I learned what that meant. I'll return to the chaplain I borrowed a book from a year ago, assuming he didn't pass away, and explain what I can to him. I'll go another date with my girlfriend where we don't complain about how much we are growing tired of our one friend's shit, whether that be is dishonest religiosity or his distasteful penchant for women. I'll think globally and act nobly! I'll volunteer again. I'll go swimming.
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I have an active interest in far-left politics, but I'm totally burned out on politics generally. I'm a white university student whose parents pay for my rent. I'm in no position to call myself much of a fucking radical leftist, nor would I be particularly interested in it, even if I was in like the Philipine peasantry. I mean, in all honesty, I probably would in that particular instance. But that's besides the point. I just want people to be decent and leave each other the fuck alone, generally. I have a nascent interest in shit like tradition and classical liberalism or whatever, but none of that matters much outside the conceptual in my life right now. What's important right now is that I clean my fucking room. Not to mention my friends and family.
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The 2023 Hamas-led Attack on Israel Did Not Take Place
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I have lived these last few years at night.
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Things that interest me:
-Drugs
-Trap music
-Large, bureaucratic institutions
-Experimental film
-Puppets
-Alternative comics
-Language
-The ocean and the ship
-Empty space
-Crowds
-Market economies
-"A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia" by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari
-Homesteading
-Cars
-The church
-The nation-state
-Ivan Illich, Michel Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, Ernst Junger, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Thacker.
-Metaphysics
-Aesthetics and art criticism
-Black metal
-The pop song
-Noise, as in the music or the spectral phenomenon
-Subculture
-Assemblage as defined by Deleuze and Guattari in the book I just mentioned
-The wild West
-The Western canon
-Ancient Greece
-Xi Jinping's China
-Bladee, Drain Gang, Black Kray, Salem, Ocean Gang
-Suicide (the band)
-Pornography as an industry and as a medium
-Bitcoin
-Peter Thiel
-Obscurity
-Hierarchy
-Power
-Tradition
-The Left
-Michel Houllebecq
-Dennis Cooper
-Zines
-King Alfred
-The Internet
-Orthodox Christainity
-Catholicism
-Meister Eckhart
-Turkey (the country)
-The Wedding Present (the band)
-Sigmund Freud
-James Joyce
Freedom, as defined by Vladimir Lenin
-Cooking
-Punk rock
-New York City
-Iran
-Arabic writing
-Surfing
-Skateboarding
-Graffiti
-Southern California
-Techno
-St. John of the Cross
-England
-India
-Canada
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I can not believe I'm finally at the age where anarcho-punk starts to annoy me. I guess this is growing up.
Something about contemporary anarchism strikes me as being a really hammy lifestylism. Actually, no. That suggests I don't know what it is. I know exactly what it is: it's the entire enterprise. The clothes, the slogans, the iconography, the posters, the marches, the literature, the whatever the fuck has you. You people don't have politics beyond upsetting WASPs in public. Can you even imagine a future without the State that isn't more talking shit about it?
I haven't earned my left pessimism.
