"EGG FILLED WITH MIASMA"
[26/11/2024]Radio silence. All is quiet on the Web1 front. What is going on over there? Well, as it turns out, that last post about worrying about rent came with incredibly bad timing on my part; my landlord had to do some renovations that required they cut my ethernet line, and the maintenance person in our building didn't repair our internet for nearly a month. So, in retrospect, it looks like I went "I feel like I won't have a place to sleep!" and went and disappeared for a month. Not that I think many people read my posts at this point to worry about my well being, no: I just think it looks hilariously unfortunate!
As well, since we're on the topic of being "in retrospect," not having internet access came with incredibly good timing based on [RECENT EVENT] and the ensuing [RESPECTIVE CONSEQUENCES]. Fill in the blanks as you will. But remember: I won't ever be like "oh, thank you to my incredibly gracious landlord for making me have go to the library just to be able to submit job applications" because I'm not an idiot. Internet is always nice. Just gave me an excuse to log off is all. Log off and play way too much UFO 50, that is... and what a damn great game that is, by the way.
But hell, I'm on Bluesky if you can believe it. I got access all the way back during the private beta days. Did I use it? Nope. Not until this month actually, because that new-world urge to scroll overtook me. I'm only human, and that urge gets stronger the colder it gets outside. What else to do when the first snow of the season hits, and hits hard? And fortunately, Bluesky is a much more positive place... theoretically. I ended up following a lot of new artists I like. I also ended up seeing a lot of old artists I liked who frequented Twitter, followed by a slew of artists I was not as fond of. Then, comes the bait-replies, and the deliberately abrasive posters, and the chronically online discourse... on and on and on. Almost instantly, I felt the same way I did back in the day online, scrolling through Youtube comments I hated reading, on videos I didn't particularly care for, then swapping to a different social media platform full of slurs and the arguments of strangers I shouldn't care about, but did. If you can believe it, all it took was one single poster to say something that I would hear all the way back in a 2016 Twitter thread for me to say, "it never changes here, and I learn nothing; I don't want to be here anymore, I cannot grow." (EDIT: by "here" I mean more specifically "internet-centric artists' circles;" I'm sure I would actually learn something if I followed like, I dunno, community organizations and charities and whatnot. In fact I'd probably have a much better time if I had some kind of professional account I strictly kept clean, but unfortunately for myself I am a silly lady who cannot resist the urge to see cats in bodegas.)
I suggest most others do the same. I managed to convince a good friend to get off Twitter last year: they keep telling me that they feel more enriched from doing crossword puzzles in the same morning timeslot they would've used for Twitter for some morning brainless content mixed with the occasional community-organized event. I think most people see it as a catch: it's where the people are, and where the news is. In a world that requires connection, this feels like the place to get connected. In most cities, it IS the place to connect; Facebook groups replace paper pamphlets, tweets replace flyers for charity drives and punk shows. In a sense, when you log off, you cut the cord to the outer world.
But that's the catch; when you care about connection as much as the algorithm wants to keep you on there, you lose the self. The love and respect held for one's self is supplanted with only the thoughts and arguments of others, no matter how banal. Most people (especially including myself) forget how vast their inner world is, I think. They forget to care for it, tend to it, and let it flourish. Its vastness can be terrifying, even if they do recognize its presence. It can be populated with any measure of thing, any idea or concept, or perhaps even be polluted by it. Even more, volunteering is ALWAYS going to do more good for the world and your own mental wellbeing than liking a post and scrolling on.
My partner made me think a few weeks ago about what my "mind palace" looks like. Not just now, but historically: what does the house inside my brain look like? Do I even have one? Do I actively wander inside my mind, like it is a tangible place? I don't believe most people truly conceptualize it actively, consciously. The "mind palace" concept itself has, in recent times, been more associated with those people who love to go on Ted Talks and ramble on about "good habits for building short term / long-term memory" and "knowledge recollection skills" and the like, just a complete overview on how important it must be to be able to recite the words on a page after having only seen it for half-a-second because they "pictured an elephant next to the paragraph" or whatever. (Note: I'm paraphrasing and I couldn't give you a source since I, rather ironically, don't remember what it is; this weird example is from an assignment in an old Communications class I despised taking.)
But the Mind Palace, as an abstracted concept, has become more and more fascinating to me as I dwell on my partner and I's conversation about it. I'd put it like this: I remember that one episode of Spongebob ("Sleepytime") where he rather abruptly infiltrats the dream of Gary the snail. In that dream, Gary took on the form of a sorcerer-like cloaked figure, wandering the halls of a grand library of thoughts and knowledge. To Spongebob's great surprise, he learned something rather strange and intimate about his animal companion that day: where he feels most comfortable, and that he thinks rather profoundly in these quiet moments, saying, "did you think my shell was full of hot air?" This extends to most of the other characters in that same episode: for Patrick, an open space with nothing but a horsey ride where even in his dreams he is held back by the limitations of money, and for Sandy, thrill-seeking on the edge of death.
This rather silly example makes me remember my most recent lucid dream as well, my first that I can remember in many years. I was on a peninsula of some sort, in a hutch with a family. After we ate dinner, I went outside to the taste of tropical air. I realized then I was dreaming, and what I had decided to do was to just explore this space and see how far it went. I conjured a shabby little hippie van, and drove down the dirt road across many bridges and islands, just to see it for myself.
Listening to Hiroshi Yoshimura's album "Surround" as we talked on and on about our internal worlds into the night, I pondered more on my own mind palace. In days passed and gone now, I felt like I wandered among the wilderness. The world was new to me, and so I walked it freely and openly in my mind. I daydreamed a lot when I was young, never settled into my seat in the present. But the freedom of hiking new horizons reflects an internal and external sadness. I could never settle, even in my mind. There was no mind palace, no home to call my own. I would often wander into the traveller's cabins that dotted the wayside of these hills of my knowledge of the world, sleeping in them for a time, but never growing too comfortable. The presence of others littered the inside, the feeling that it was not somewhere I could stay for too long. And so, as my mind's avatar, I frequently floated from place to place across hills and valleys, much like my mind in daydreaming, and much like my real body in moving homes and houses.
Now, as I grow older, I grow more comfortable being content and in-place in this ramshackle body of mine. I've built a little home in my own mind. A wooden cabana with an open floor plan, sat right by the sea, with a cobblestone path in-between. It's small, but comforting. Imagine the orphanage from Yakuza 3. Something quiet and roomy. The only big difference being that it's only me in there, in that whole big little world in my head.
Oftentimes, it's been only me in here. The one me; the present me. But other times I retreat inside of myself, I find others in there too. Or, to be precise, other versions of me. They are usually occupied by their own worries and routines, or maybe even their curiosities every once in a while. I find myself at age twenty sitting in the den, alone. Or myself a little older than that, trying to make some new dish in the kitchen (and oftentimes failing). Myself, age seven, playing in the yard; or myself, age four, sitting by the beach in the quiet with feet in the waves. The curious ones are rare, but I often find them in that quiet back room, where I keep those files I don't look at often. The old photos, the sad memories, all in a filing cabinet I no longer keep locked. They look in there freely, and I do not stop them. I join, I reminisce. If they cry, I may cry too. It's better to let the emotions flow.
No one else visits this place. I have no qualms with describing it so freely. I lay my heart and mind out bare in trust. But no one can visit, not really. It's only me that can cross that short wall and enter the territory of the mind. I wander its hills too, when I can. New emotions, new thoughts, new wells of knowledge are scattered still in those valleys, often untouched and lost. But no one knows those hills like I do. I seek no ego-boosting when I say this: my mind feels vast, and it is filled with much even as quiet as it is. The trees rustle in the wind even when I am not perceiving them. This space is as comforting as it is challenging, and I will accept it all the same.
Yet I think, much often to my detriment: do the people that surround me on the street, people that I will never talk to or possibly ever see again, dream of anything more than a suburb in a cul-de-sac? An apartment in the city? Are their mind filled with paths and roads, or locked doors and dim rooms? And then, I correct myself: is that my business to judge that dream? How could I ever know, truly?
It is so sensitive a thing, people's dreams and minds, and the spaces they aspire to feel most comfortable. Even a dream and the internal world, locked behind the iron door of memory and subconscious thought, can be vastly different if one is not in touch with their own body and propaganda that affects how one thinks.
Even to the people on Bluesky, if I think too often and too hard about it, that online world dissipates like smoke and mirrors. The internet is not real, but the people on it are. It becomes a scary and insurmountable thing to give tangible to the intangible, to try and wrap one's mind around the miasma and poison of social media given life by every user that types thoughts into its gaping maw to be destroyed again by time. "This is not music you hear right now; you hear only your mind." One's soul and will can barely handle one's own thoughts; to enter the mindstream-of-consciousness of a million users at once is to get lost in it, to drown in it, to live and then die in it over and over again every day you log on and log off.
One of my favourite phrases that floats in the front of my mind often is from Eliana Manticore's "THE HOUSE IN THE OCEAN." It goes: "Your brain is suspended in fluid: you are the house in the ocean; you are the only house in the ocean." This phrase contrasts with another thought gained from the description of Jordaan Mason's album, "REWRITE THE WORDS AGAIN," saying, "The body's all there is. It's our only field of contact with the world, the only matrix that can form experience, and we chafe against it so readily." Our bodies are present; they cannot escape the world. Yet it is oftentimes the mind, not the body, that bears the brunt of storms and disaster, and it does so truly alone. Even though my body breaks down over time, even when my spine gets tired from hunching over a library desk, it is my mind that feels the weight. I describe it, I imagine it, I know it so intimately, my mind, and yet the describing of it is not true knowing for others. No one can touch it but myself. To each person, our own little haven, with no one else inside but the self, young and old in all its forms, shapes and versions.
When I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place in trying to choose how to learn of the world - between the stark, open, unending roaming and rolling hills of that intimate internal mindstream, and the egg filled with slime and miasma that is the modern internet and discourse, I find these days that the hills call my name. I will walk them with an open heart, and on the two legs that have carried me around since the day I was born, to discover the things inside that surprise me every day. I have a strong enough self-identity now - a roadmap, sketched crudely but kindly - to know I can always come back home again.
P.S. Man, that new King Gizzard (Phantom Island) feels way too safe. I know, weird to say, especially for King Gizzard! I think their fans really burned them every time they do a long song that's not Head-On Pill, and now their songs don't feel long enough to get really interesting, y'know? Maybe I'm talking out of my ass here, but I really enjoyed IDPLML, and it was really surprising to see people hating on the studio album versions for "being too long and meandering." That's what I like! So the new single doesn't feel like it gets enough room to breathe. Really unfortunate, but I feel less and less interested in new Gizz the more I hear.