紅葉月

---


" I really hope that it resolves soon..    yeah.   I know that   when I'm feeling.. super stressed and anxious and overwhelmed... for some reason it feels like I'm never ever gonna feel good ever again...     do you- do you get that too?     It's so weird... brains are so weird like that. But then it- it always comes back - it always ebbs and flows and -    no low lasts forever... no matter how much it feels while you're in it like that's your life now - that's how it'll always be - it always comes back around again."

clay pigeons

Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

---

Animated, huge eyes deep with sensitivity staring straight at you. into you. Empathy, warmth, sadness also. Expressive eyes. The feeling she could break into a genuine smile and also burst into tears at any moment.

The thing about her going quiet and pensive and choosing to tell us about her childhood and how she still feels guilty over the incident - she didn't have to keep that in. She could have edited it out. Edited it to make it look like she didn't care. Edit out the way her voice trembled - the long silences, looking down at nothing, avoiding the camera, choosing her words carefully as she spoke. But she kept that in. And people responded to it positively - speaking for myself, that moment of honesty alone - that occurred across oceans, miles away and temporally remote as well, recorded and edited and uploaded probably a good 14 months before I stumbled across it - this rendering of a stranger from somewhere in the globe who doesn't know I exist - What I'm trying to say is that it felt real. felt like being spoken to, being seen, understood, accepted, trusted. That moment supplied more human warmth and genuine connection than I had received in a week.¹

Is it like in the movies? When the actor portrays an emotion so real and authentic that the audience feels it too? Maybe portray is the wrong word. Feels. Embodies. Exhibits. Makes you feel it so visceral and immediate as if it's actually happening to you.

Requires being open and vulnerable. Recognizing that both the good and the bad have value. And understanding that displaying virtue can be construed as boastful, and public sorrow can be considered performative, insincere, obnoxious, false, fetishised, and yet daring, being willing to navigate that middle ground, to walk that tightrope of broadcasting your feelings in a raw and visceral and unpolished way. Attempting to be really truly vulnerable instead of trying to seem it. Attempting to offer something real, to try and connect. To risk the sneer and ridicule and parody and condescension. Requires an odd mixture of honesty and exhibition, of interiority and presentation. Like writing publicly about your struggles or difficult moments I suppose. Like any kind of writing - any kind of art. For it to work on any level and connect and affect a stranger you have to be incredibly authentic and also preternaturally self aware. Skillful in managing how the other perceives you. Skillful in perceiving yourself accurately and acutely. Skillful in interrogating yourself for falseness and truth. Requires you to possess all of the innocence and none of the naivete

---

1 sad, but true ^↩

proserpine / elysium

on my chest
naked and crouching
panties on
the dresser, laced
a stranger
a catholic imagining
yeah
show me some skin, girl
show me under &
beneath
show me what's within

if only my body
knew what my
heart believed
was true

so warm, you are
delicate, bouquet
undressed
your hand on my chest
then you are blood,
a scream thick
and terrible
the release, the desire
the pain

and natures askew
all hell broke loose
so return to
your natural state
you were daughter
of the soil, now
you are also
aflame

Pagliacci

"... that really good art comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable"

---

people keep asking about how the joker movie was but 
really it's not a movie you can talk about meaningfully
to someone who hasn't seen it yet
it's that involved and tightly wound and self-contained that
to discuss it you need to go into detail and dissect
which 1. would involve spoilers and 2. some experiences just
aren't really translatable in words, especially if you're
trying to avoid spoilers. 
it's like if your dog has been shot,
or you've had a leg amputated you 
could talk to someone else whose dog
was similarly shot or wounded, or had
lost their leg as well, you could
talk to them about the experience
and compare notes but to someone who has never had their dog shot
or never had a dog or lost 
a limb it would be pretty difficult to describe the experience
qualitatively without disclosing that your dog has died or that you are one limb less now
it's one of those things
you have to go through to understand
and here's the thing, everyone will have 
something different to say about it
and that's part of its genius and intrinsic value
is that it will be polarising 
and stir up dissent, it will start conversations about
topics we usually avoid. it will make us ask questions
questioning others, questioning ourselves, evaluate our paradigms
it leaves us with questions
and the value of it stirring up unique and wildly differing reactions from different 
people is that you can learn based on your reaction to the film
something about yourself. it can
tell you something about yourself
you didn't know before.
that's a gift. something rare. not every film can do that, you know

fall record 2019

1. bon iver
2. soccer mommy
3. ben howard
4. paper kites
5. fleet foxes
6. little wings
7. (broken social scene / feist) - either, or

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"i mean it's pretty but it doesn't mean anything, you know? you switch it off, it ends and you immediately forget about it. but if you turn it into a song -- then it stays with people, you know? it maybe changes the way they feel about the world, the way they think about the world. Right now it doesn't mean anything - but if we work on it -- maybe we can make it mean something to someone."


"um... ok. sure."

what to do when the one you want never wants you

"But those who know best say this, that any liberal man would choose the pain of this desire, even for ever, rather than the peace of feeling it no longer; and that though the best thing is to have, the next best is to want, and the worst of all is not to want."
- Pilgrim's Regress


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1. make a sad playlist
2. write a sad story
3. draw something
4. tell someone
5. tell no one
6. write a letter
7. be alone
8. tell her how you feel
5. tell no one
9. write a song
9. wallow in self pity
10. get over it dude
11. wait it out
13. understand there are things in this life you desire that you can never have
14. learn to accept this devastating and inconvenient truth
13. fall in love with someone else
12. do it all over again

Book of titles (only of titles)

1. dry spell
2. toxicology
3. neverlast
4. holocene
5. the story of thirst
6. perditio
7. the other
8. the unforseen costs of being yourself
9. incomplete
10. the history of illusions ii
11. the coolest girl on earth (conversations with)
12. parallellus universalis
13. kamikaze
14. wabisuke
15. weakness and paralysis
16. takotsubo
17. ETERNALBLUE
18. how to write the songs that will earn you the love you never got from the people who can't give it to you anymore
19. pure song
20. perfect blue
21. autoimmune
22. injured party
23. missile of denial
24. things i thought would make me happy
25. the double
26. completely natural man
27. Die Zeit Ohne Beispiel
28. the incinerator
29. Saturday with no miracles
30. famous and unwell
31. ode to soft goth with bangs
33. shuraba
34. autophobia
35. you can't kill time with your heart (but you can sure make it sing)
36. the addict's prayerbook
37. wayback
38. ghost notes
39. the guy who never dies
40. precursor
41. low boi
42. how to date girls without ever having really been hurt by one
43. press 1 to finally be happy
44. crying in da club
45. roti kosong
46. everbad
47. it's not too late to be a new person
48. keielsanjurokkei
49. in high school she drew pictures of birds
50. ore zanmai
51. everything i heard was a lie i came up with
52. narrow is the gate
53. syncopatience (master of)
54. go your own way
55. an iterative approach to dating
56. rememberer
57. westward
58. westward ii
59. the light fantastic
60. song of the dead
61. comfortations
62. how to turn off your heart
63. shitty loop
64. history of making big mistakes
65. my kind of woman
66. ode to being the person you're supposed to be
67. the hunger artist
68. yakitori hyung
69. heartsink mother, heartsink son
70. ichiban natural girl
71. super change robot
72. a broken heart is one that dared to hope
73. poison eater
74. hms false hope
75. heartland
76. gentlest comedian
77.  saudade
78. suboptimal inamorata (complex)
79. chiaroscuro
80. good job gaijin boys
81. gift of brokeness
82. let me tell you all about my new favourite band
83. young tunku does stand up
84. a broken heart is like a leaking battery
85. student of silence, prisoner of solitude, testosterone hyung
86. the loneliness diaries
87. thrilled to be here
88. young tunku falls in love
89. maximum cliche
90. i like tortoise matsumoto
91. heart's content
99. text me when you get this
100. the history of giving up