It's weird having four digits worth of posts, in a good way. I realize that I'm using the blog as a replacement for Twitter, but I think we all need a replacement for Twitter. I just wish there was a better way to find people who share my opinions of the world. Ah well, I can't undo the past. I'm here now, and that's all that matters. 

    It's my one thousandth post, and on my birthday no less. I planned it this way, not going to lie. Today is a day of celebration, and I'm glad I've kept at it for as long as I have. 

Someone Else's Mistake

 I can't help but worry
That one day I'll die
Due to someone else's mistake.
I don't want to live knowing 
That the future is beyond my control,
And I don't like knowing 
That the person responsible
Probably won't even care. 

    Happy Independence Day! Maybe one day I'll say this in an America that's truly free and fair for everyone. 

Thank You

 Thank you for showing
 That the law no longer applies
To those at the top,
For now I have no reason
To follow any of your rules.

    In light of the Supreme court telling Donald Trump that he's free to do whatever he wants, I think we need to admit that as far as our government is concerned, reality doesn't exist anymore. We're free to see the world as whatever we want it to be. I see the world as a place where Trump lost in 2016 and this election is between Hilary Clinton's successor and a bitter man who won't admit that he can't win. Even if you aren't actively denying reality, that's pretty much the case.

The Lucky

 This room is full of wealth
And beauty.
Manmade, of course,
But that doesn't stop millions 
From coming to see it.
They say that just by touching
The cups and the cutlery,
You'll be blessed with a thousand lifetimes of luck

No one knows where this story came from,
But we still believe it anyway.
Dancing under chandeliers
And the watchful eyes of our ancestors,
We hope that they'll allow us to 
Join the ranks
Of the lucky. 

   It's the end of June, and we're one month closer to the next presidential election. I didn't watch the debate at all, I've just heard rumors that it was a shit show on all sides. I keep asking myself if I'm really prepared to deal with the fallout of another Trump term, since I doubt that fate will be kind enough to kill him in his sleep before we ever need to vote for him. Regardless, I've made piece with the fact that unless Biden does something that demonstrates unequivocally that he knows that America's hurting and he's willing to do whatever it takes to fix it, that's probably what will happen. I just can't stomach voting for a man responsible for guiding our country as it enables a genocide, and I know most people my age feel the same way. Even if that wasn't the case, I'm getting really sick of voting in elections where I have no meaningful choices because my views are fringe. What's the point of living in a democracy if I have no way to meaningfully express my beliefs? 

    Have you ever thought about why you live where you do? Have you ever thought about what it would take for you to leave and find something different, something far away from where you live now? My mother is retiring soon, and that means it's soon going to be too expensive to live in Bellevue, the town that I've lived in ever since I was five years old. It hurts. I can't remember feeling truly at home or accepted here, but it still hurts. Most of Bellevue is made for the rich, for people who seem to have it all from a distance, but within it were these pockets where people who had less could find other people who had less and build community with them. Within these places, Bellevue felt alive and real. The pandemic killed off those places. Now Bellevue is a place where either you have everything or you have nothing, and we're just barely managing to hang on. Even if we could stay, I'm not sure we'd want to, the bad always outweighed the good. Even now, though, I keep hoping that somehow Bellevue will embrace the part of itself it wants so badly to hide; the part where people without any money who were just trying to get by used to live. If it could do that, than maybe we would be able to stay. 

On Average

 If you took every person alive today,
Added them together
And divided by seven and a half billion,
Would we be,
On average, 
A decent person? 

The Nightmare Future of NFTs

     For whatever reason, I was compelled to watch Dan Olson's video "Line Goes Up" again recently. Well, the first part of it, at least. It got me thinking about how strange it is that NFTs kind of just disappeared after 2022. I'm perhaps more grateful that they're gone than anyone else but I worry that we're leaving the door open for history to be completely rewritten a few years down the line. There were just too many people who were insistent that they'd be worth something for me to be comfortable, and lets not forget that even near the end the thing NFTs were synonymous with was art. Bad art, at that. 

     The thing about art is that it's a symbol. Good artists make their symbols obvious without over explaining them, using pictures of flowers and trees to convey something about the deeper nature of humanity that an art novice might miss but an art expert will see instantly. Bad artists mess up in a hundred different ways, but they always leave the door open to reinterpretation in a way good art never can. You would think that the procedurally generated garbage that NFTs became would leave no room for meaning or interpretation, but that's not accounting those who either don't know what good art looks like, or they simply don't care. Not to mention the contrarians who will value things because the world thinks that they're ugly. Things that are common, boring, and meaningless have a power to them. They attract those who want to make something meaningful but don't have the skills to create something unique. They become the fodder of belief for those hungry for something that's safe for them to believe in. Do we really want NFTs to serve as the next generations idols? Are we really willing to risk the future where our children worship this tech as a god? 

    Let's also not forget that as more and more of the servers keeping the links the NFTs reference go bust, those that stay intact will become more and more valuable, leaving the door wide open for a future where people are convinced that NFTs were always the future and we just weren't ready to admit that yet. There are children primed to be lured in by a narrative that the tech that nearly ruined our world was a boon no one wanted to accept. They're not old enough to remember how dangerous NFTs really were. They'll hear nothing about those who were hurt, those who have been shamed into silence, they'll only hear about how stupid and ugly the pictures they represented were. If they're lucky, they'll get the narrative of how useless the tech was. They'll hear nothing about societal damage, of the people who believed with all their hearts that NFTs represented a new form of reality, especially with the advent of the metaverse, only to have their hopes, dreams, and sense of reality crushed once the whole system collapsed. They won't hear about those who clung on, both out of stubbornness and out of sincere desperation, a need to believe that everything would come out alright if they just waited long enough. To them, NFTs will be nothing more than a technological dead end at worst, a future that never came true at best. They won't know that there were some for whom NFTs marked the moment their world ended for good. 

    With AI seemingly taking the niche that NFTs once filled, I worry that we're being lulled into a sense of complacency. We're letting ourselves believe that the door to damnation is closed and that no one will dare risk opening it because we have a cultural immunity to that sort of tomfoolery. But as PT Barnum once famously said, "A sucker is born every minute," and we're leaving a world ripe for the exploitation of our future suckers. We've already watched our world end once, I don't want the future to face what we've had to face this past decade.

The Prisoner's Dilemma

 How do we cope
When we all want success,
But also want everyone else
To fail?
Do we learn how to share
What we have with each other?
Can we face that we're prisoners
All locked behind bars?
There are only two ways
For our problems to end:
Either we give selflessly
Or watch in horror
As our world is taken from us.

    Ah Summer, when one can look outside and see greenery under a blue sky. It's nice to see nature while it's still glorious. 

A New World

 One day soon,
We'll wake up and see
That we are who
We were always meant to be.

Alive.
In a future of our own making,
Away from the follies of the past.

One day we'll wake up and see
That we have a common dream;
To be able to look at one another
And say,
"I know you see what I see."

This new world has been forming
Since before we were born,
And it's been so long
We forgot it was there.

Now it comes forth,
And we await it 
With a joy unmatched by anything
Save the birth of our children.

For now we no longer need to wait
To be forgotten.
Now we can walk forward
And share a world 
That will last
For another eternity. 

     The world's changing. I read about it all the time. But it's weird to think about. It's also depressing. Worse, I don't even fully remember all the things that have changed. I just know that most of the stores I saw so often that I forgot about them are now closed, and nobody drives the cars that I'm used to seeing.

    I don't sympathize with the Alt-right, but I think I might be beginning to understand them. They're villains, but that's because that's all they can be in this world. They lack the virtue needed to be ordinary people doing ordinary work, and they lack the skills needed to be the extraordinary people they were told they'd be. They're easy to hate, and I hate them as much as anyone, but I also can't help but feel that they, like us, are trapped in a world they had no say in making. It may be that we can't save them, but who's to say that we can't try and make it so that their children won't fall to the evil consuming their parents.

Summer

 The weather is warm
Sunshine spilling over trees
Summer has arrived

    I have a lot of opinions, as you've no doubt noticed, but I'll be the first (and only, since nobody else cares) person to admit that my opinions come as a result of spending most of my life feeling like the world sucks in a vague, nondescript sort of way. Growing up, I had everything I could possibly need, but I never felt completely happy. I had difficulties, but then who doesn't? I just sort of got used to the idea that happiness came with caveats. After the pandemic, I started realizing that I didn't feel like it was right to live in a world where I could only hope to be eighty percent satisfied, but I'd been used to accepting less for so long that I had no idea what it would take to make me happy. I have the blog, and my writing practice, but I still feel like something's missing. Nothing integral, and I'm not sure I'd feel complete if I did have it, but something that would make me feel less like I'm wasting my time. Or maybe I just want more friends, I'm not entirely sure. 

Juneteenth

A long fight towards justice,
Many failures, few successes,
But one day we'll know for certain
That we can live as we please,
As equals. 

    My mother and I are planning on moving at some point fairly soon, though I'm not sure when. We're just tired of the town that I've grown up in, which is becoming increasingly pretentious and increasingly full of empty buildings that don't seem to attract anyone. I'm not looking forward to moving, but I'm looking forward to getting out of here. 

The Artists Within

 My audience numbers
To me and me alone.
Only I understand the gifts
That I give.
I write of a future 
That we're meant to share
A future no one else wants to see.

My other watches
From some distance away.
It says, "It doesn't matter how good you are
If no one sees you."
No matter how it patters on
I refuse to give in.

For I'm on the cusp of
Greatness and Glory.
No one can stop me from 
Winning the day.
Nothing stands 
Between me and my dreams.
My future's but a heartbeat away.

The stupidity of the dreamer 
Who believes in themselves
Never ceases to amaze me.
Anyone can see
That they're writing is trash,
Which is why only they want to read it.

I counter their arguments
In my mind alone.
For I have created greatness
Unmatched by their work
I've written the best
And I'll write it again,
My audience standing alongside me.

For I'm on the cusp of
Greatness and Glory.
No one can stop me from 
Passing this test.
Nothing stands 
Between me and my winnings.
Just look at my past, and you'll see I'm the best.

No one need tell me
That my work is the best,
But I know that one day they'll see through my act.
I know that my best
Is someone else's worst, 
And the only reason no one says it
Is because they have tact.

What if I'm nothing more
Than a massive imposter?
What if I'm seeing something
That's not actually there?
Is there a reason
That people mostly say I'm okay?
Is there a reason that 
Only I seem to care?

I'm on the cusp of
Greatness and glory.
No one can stop me
From being who I am.
I don't care if I'm the worst
Who has ever existed,
I will do this for as long as I can. 

    It wasn't until I was writing the post for today that I realized that yesterday was Juneteenth. We don't do a good enough job of celebrating it. When it's Christmas, you can't escape it, but when it's Juneteenth you barely hear about it. I do hate Christmas because it's so ubiquitous, but is it so wrong to have a holiday just for people who care about it? And is it so bad to be a little grateful to see people celebrating because they think it's important?

Edit: Juneteenth is on the Nineteenth. Sorry for any confusion. 

     Sometimes I like to pretend that I know what's going through the minds of billionaires. I don't know if it's because I like pretending I could be a billionaire one day, or if it's because I'm trying to remind myself that billionaires are human and should still be treated as such, presence in Forbes be damned. That only goes so far though. They do stupid, greedy, or downright silly things that make no sense to me or anyone else I can find online, which in other circumstances would be a way to humanize them, but considering they run our world it just makes me feel uneasy. Do you want the world to be in the hands of someone who thinks that Fifty Shades of Grey is great writing? I guess, put like that, I'm glad I'll never be a billionaire. No one's going to use my mistakes as reason to strip me of power if I don't have any in the first place. 

Home Sweet Home

 No matter how far I travel,
No matter how tired I am
Or how worried I get,
I feel safe knowing
That home awaits me. 

     I don't think that Teslas are the cure to our environmental woes, but it's nice to know that people want to do right by the world. I just wish Elon Musk hadn't hijacked our future with his own agenda. At least with the rise of remote work, people won't need to drive as much. All we have to do is move past the idea that people need to work in order to be worth something. 

    I wrote the above before finding out that Elon Musk just forced likes to be private on Twitter, something no one asked for. The idiot didn't want to just make his own likes private, no he has to keep us from figuring out that the only people who like him are the kind of people no one else wants to be in a room with. At this point, even if Teslas were somehow the cure to our problems, I'd be voting for Tesla to go bankrupt. Elon Musk has no redeeming qualities at all. 

Kettle Corn

 Made in a giant pot
On a warm summers day.
Smell filling the air
Of the market I'm in.
How I can't wait until sweetness
Explodes over my taste buds,
Bringing a moment of happiness
In a boring life. 

     I love writing, but I confess that lately I've been feeling a little bit burnt out by blogging. Without Twitter, it's just gotten really hard to find things to talk about, and it feels like the media is so skeezy these days that I don't even know what's true and what's sensationalist trash fire. I started blogging hoping it would help my creative juices flow, but all it seems to have done is made my stage fright so bad that I don't want to post anything if there's a risk of even one person seeing it. Clearly, I've got a lot of work to do, and it should probably start with avoiding social media for a bit. The world's gotten way too depressing to write about. 

What I Used to Love

 Like sand 
The past slips through my fingers,
Crumbling into dust
That scatters to the wind.
Old images,
Old metaphors,
Words I've all but forgotten,
The names of things I loved but lost
And those who lost me in turn.

I hear the world screaming,
Begging for change,
Begging for the future
Its leaders deny it,
But in my heart I feel hesitant.
The ground beneath me is so far away,
How do I know I'll be safe when I jump?
How I wish I could grow wings
And fly away from all that I used to love.

Look upwards
And you'll see a sky 
Bathed in starlight,
In ideas of what could be.
Look into your heart
 And you'll see who you could become.
All around you people beg for stories
And tales,
Yet you, the teller, 
Can only sit in silence.

I come back down to earth,
The ground underneath
Feeling crumbly and thin. 
I look at the others,
I say what I want,
They listen
And my words carry far.
The future opens its arms out
Eager to great me,
But it's not enough.
Nothing will be enough
To help me let go. 

     I know some people like weeding, but I'm not one of them. I don't like tasks that don't offer immediate rewards, and in our yard you can weed daily for weeks and notice no change at all. I'm also one of those unlucky people who attracts mosquitos like dog doo attracts flies, so I get bit a lot even with bug repellent. I'll be really grateful when we move and the yard is someone else's problem. 

    Am I the only person who looks at people who have hundreds of thousands of followers online and finds themselves thinking, at times, that they look from a distance like people who would gladly have chosen to do something else if given the opportunity? I say this, mind, as someone who chose to write a blog doomed for obscurity because she wasn't willing to do what literally everyone else has to do; kill off the parts of themselves not suitable for human consumption. I'm not kidding when I say that I've seen people who have achieved success beyond my wildest dreams and been filled with a sense of pity because I see someone who is predominantly known for the ten percent of their personality that the world is willing to tolerate. I come from a place of privilege, I will admit. I'm lucky enough to not have to work and I'm more than pissed that I live in a world that expects people to give up everything and gives them nothing in return. I am not someone who believes in a world of unlimited empathy. I am someone who believes in a future where no one is forced to live as someone they aren't simply so the world will accept them.

My Hometown

 Is my hometown falling apart,
Or am I just getting older?
Am I crazy for thinking
That everyone seems to be 
Getting more selfish?
Am I blind for not having seen it sooner?

   It's a beautifully sunny day today. It's also rather warm, at least to me. I'm just glad summer's here and I can stare out of my window at sunshine instead of grey clouds. 

Innovation

I live in a world of innovation,
Where we can't tell what tomorrow will be
From looking at today.
I live in a world of innovation,
What will it take for us to innovate
Into a world that's real and safe? 

    I know I shouldn't know this, since I'm ostensibly avoiding X (The corpse formerly known as Twitter), but I saw the other day that, at least for me, it's getting rebranded as X.com. Can I just say that you know a rebranding has failed when it not only makes you hate a product, it makes you hate every other product with the same name? Not just products either. Every time I see the letter X I get angry for no reason whatsoever. Good work there, Elon Musk. You've ruined X for ever person in the world. I hate that you probably think that's a good thing. 

A Time Long Gone

 I stare out my window
On a world of brown,
Where once there was a sea of green.
My mental eye turns inward
To a world that changed greatly,
The world that I once knew.

Things happened to me
In a time long gone,
To me and everyone else.
Things happened that made me
A Dreamer and doer,
Someone who carried the world.

I wrote epic stories,
I dreamed epic dreams,
I built a world piece at a time.
The world that you live in
Was built by my hand,
The hand that time has worn down.

Will you erase me from your world
As I erased my grandparents,
Those from the time long gone?
Will you make me obsolete,
Forgotten and unwanted,
And I did to my elders long ago?

The world is ever changing,
Like dunes in a desert,
Like the cities in which we all live.
Someday, you to, will look out
On your world,
And wonder what happened to those long dead. 

    Someday, the people writing books on our current time will agree that the people in charge were monsters in need of a reality check. It's a shame the people in charge can't see that, but until we find the people who can actually lead us through this mess, all we can do is drag our leaders in the direction that we, the people, wish to go. 

    It's the start of June, and with it the start of a season of fairs, markets, and sunshine. Well, hopefully sunshine. Sunshine is never guaranteed in Washington State. Let's hope this is a month of ideas and completed works as well. 

Obsolescence

 Our world is full of obsolescence,
Tech past its prime
In a world filled with change.
Our world is full of things
We were supposed to forget,
Things that aren't supposed to matter 
To us anymore.
Things that are better than what's new and shiny,
Coming from a time 
When making money was easy,
Things that were made
Before our leaders chose for us
Whether or not the past should matter.
Our world is full of obsolescence,
Things broken deliberately 
By people forcing us to move on.
Our world is full of things 
We can't use anymore,
And all of us now hope 
To be obsolete
Before the world decides
That we're no better
Than the past it wants to leave behind. 

End of May Reflections

     It's almost the end of May. As far as month's go, it's been relatively pleasant. You know, aside from the whole "Ongoing Genocide in Gaza" issue. The fact that Israel is now explicitly killing people for no reason and it still isn't enough for American politicians to consider pulling support for Israel is a damning indictment of our political system, but we'll just have to wait until November to see how that plays out. Got to give them credit though, people were wanting a world where Democrats and Republicans were equally worthy political candidates and they just gave it to us. Now we just need to admit that to ourselves so we can demand that they stop being genocidal maniacs and start being politicians again. Or just skip straight to the part where we order the guillotines. 

    Being an Infinitelist, I have strong opinions on how our world should work going forward, but one thing I think all of us can get behind is that we need to commit to our world's existence in order for our world to have any sort of future. We need to admit that our world just isn't working anymore, for anyone, and things need to change. We need to accept that the future we dream about, the kind of future so perfect it'll last forever without our help, doesn't exist. We can't even pretend that it did exist at one point. There are a lot of things we need to do, but I think the only way to start is admitting that our future depends on us being willing to stop participating in this society so we can focus on building the next one. 

Stickers

 Decorations on anything
That you want to make yours.
Mass produced,
Yet personalized.
Bits of the world you share with others,
Both those who see you
And those who own copies
Of the pictures you chose
To represent you. 

   I don't know how common this is, but where I live I get the distinct impression that everyone outside wants you to do what you need to do as fast as possible so you can get out of their way. I do live in a city, but as I keep walking to create the illusion that I'm becoming healthy, I find myself wishing that I could slow down sometimes. 

Only an Heiress

 I'm only an heiress
To the largest fortune in the world.
I only have a mansion,
And so much money that when I hit the walls they bleed gold.
I only have enough time to throw one party a day,
And only most of the elite can come.

I am the queen of society's ballroom,
I'm proud to say that when I speak, 
The world listens.
Everyone says I have the grace of a swan
And the beauty of a rose,
I suppose that I ought to feel blessed.
Why, then, can I not reach the stars?
Why do I seek to own galaxies 
When I already own planets?

Why do I wish for more than I have?
The other day I lost a gemstone so rare it had belonged to a museum,
And I simply paid to have it replaced.
Yet I feel that if I could have more jewelry, nicer clothes, and better food,
I'd be so much happier than I am now.

Those who say that money can't buy happiness spout nonsense,
Nothing makes me feel better than buying new things.
It's not even for me most of the time,
When your house gives you money for nothing, you don't need to buy more.
My friends all love me for the things they give me, 
My enemies always demand more.

I do wonder if I wouldn't be happier as a pauper sometimes.
They have to make do with what they have after all,
And I'm told that many of the things that make life worth living
Started when people had to try and make things last.
People think that I have everything,
But I'm only an heiress
To the largest fortune in the world,
And I learned very quickly 
That money isn't enough 
To make you interesting or special. 

    It's nice to see the world slowly come around to the idea that yes, we are enabling a genocide. Now we just need to strong arm Israel into stopping their heinous activities. 

    I wish that Kroger hadn't mandated that all of their stores have gates across the front entrance of all the stores they own. I find it hard to believe they deter thieves, and I don't appreciate the store treating me like one. It also hasn't helped employee moral at all. Not that any of the other stores in my area are any better. If I didn't need to eat, I wouldn't go grocery shopping anymore. 

Perfect Finds

Every so often
I enter a second hand shop
Looking for the perfect find,
Not a thing that I can't live without
But a thing that will make life a bit better
Than it was before I found it.
They aren't rare,
I find them all the time
But I don't think something needs to be rare
To be special. 

    I envy the people who can keep a house consistently clean. After spending most of my life in squalor because I refused to learn how to clean, I was suddenly inspired to at least prove that I could keep a house clean, and it takes so much effort. I know most people reading this will think, "Well, duh," but I'm not talking to successful adults who know what they're doing. I'm reminding myself and losers like me that there's a reason people who can hold down jobs and look after their loved ones ought to be respected and valued. What they do is much harder than the world makes it out to be. 

Mobile Gaming

Horrifying.
Shocking.
That's what they want me to think
Judging by the ads they sell.
In reality they are boring,
Empty,
Meaningless.
So why can't I stop playing them? 

    I'm watching the Rebooted season of Futurama. Only seen one episode so far, but I think it's okay for what it is, which is mostly just a jab at modern trends. It's funny, but stupid, and while I know this is a show that insists on having no real stakes whatsoever, did we really need an ending that voids the main plot completely? 

The Madness of the Dreamer

 There's nothing within me.
All I see when I close my eyes
Are what look like stars,
But they don't twinkle.
They pulse,
With a strange, indescribable 
Energy.
I feel power surging within me
Yet nobody around me seems to notice.

All anyone seems to think is that I'm odd,
Strange,
Incomprehensible.

When asked I say it's a new world.
"I'm building a future,"
I say,
"I'm building a world where gods and 
Humanity live side by side.
It's a world of paradise,
And a world of sin.
It's a world that's real and safe."

How could I ever tell them 
That the only times I feel truly at peace
Are the moments I leave reality behind? 
Those moments when I'm in space 
Without a space suit,
Suspended in a vacuum,
Surrounded only by dark matter and starlight.

I look around,
And everywhere I look I see things
That remind me 
Of the madness within.
I wish I could ask
If they see what I see,
If they live their lives 
In a world all their own.
But I can't.
How could I?
No human has ever done anything
That would cause others 
To think they're insane. 

    I find the older I get, the more I appreciate the moments when it feels like life's going alright. I know these moments don't last long, nor are they that common, and so I value them more than I should. Like everyone else, I wish the world felt real and happy all the time. Maybe it will one day, but until then I'll keep looking for the things that make me happy, like finding something I like at a thrift store. 

     One of my strongest hopes for the future is that we teach kids how to build their own Dreamworlds in school the way we now teach them how to write essays and solve math problems. I don't think you need to be an Infinitelist to see that people need something to believe in, and our current religions aren't cutting it anymore. I also think that the time of great prophets organizing grand religions is past. We don't believe in the kind of Gods who grant destinies to people anymore. What we need is a dream just real enough for everyone to believe in it, and in order to get there we first need to churn through a bunch of dreams that almost no one believes in. 

The High Seas

I travel the high seas
In search of relaxation,
A destination far
From where I am now.
I travel the high seas
Looking for a place
Where I'm alone
And free of distraction. 

    I know that influence always goes both ways, but sometimes when I'm reading things online, or watching videos of someone, I wish that weren't the case. There are a lot of really, really stupid people online. 

Numbers

Every day I watch
As the number climbs higher,
A dopamine hit
That I feel never ends.
Every day I watch
As the number climbs higher,
Waiting for it to crash down
With me at the bottom. 

Gut Reaction: A Rant

     Quick summary before we start, because I'm willing to bet not a lot of people have read this book yet. Gut Reaction, by Kirby Larson and Quinn Wyatt, is a story about a thirteen-year-old who has just moved to a new school and is trying to balance making friends with schoolwork and her passion for baking. The book focuses on her working to win a baking competition with the help of her new friends. But there's a catch, one that's supposed to be a shock but if you know about this novel at all, odds are you already know what it is because it's in all the marketing material; she has Crohn's, and has yet to figure out how to manage her condition. After being diagnosed, she becomes determined to prove that her disease does not hold her back and (spoilers) gets all the way to the finals of the baking competition she joined. 

      Overall, this book is just boring. A lot of the reviews for this book say that this book is better if you're familiar with baking, but what they mean by that is that unless you're looking for a book specifically about either bakers or kids with Crohn's, this book isn't for you. Which, frankly is my biggest problem with the book; there just isn't anything interesting in it. Every problem has a simple solution, all of the people are nice (including the main character's step-father), and despite this being a story about how Crohn's doesn't have to stop you from living a normal life her disease is easily her biggest opponent in the novel, which I feel undercuts the message a tad. Honestly, I could forgive all of that. Were it not for the Language Art's teacher. 

    I'm willing to bet that a lot of you had a Language Arts teacher who was tragically awful at their job. I had one, and I only went to middle school for three months before my mother pulled me out and homeschooled me. That's what this woman is; she wears schlocky jewelry, only teaches from classic novels, and doesn't let her students use the bathroom during class. If you're like me, you expected that to come up again, especially since the main character worries about this specifically and a huge plot point is that she can't get anything above a C-minus in her Language Arts class. If you're like me, and waiting eagerly for them to but heads over this, you're going to be gravely disappointed because once the main character gets diagnosed, her Language Arts teacher never gets brought up again. At all. The class does, and we get a brief scene with one of the girls who also butted heads with the teacher, and we see the essay the main character wrote that finally got an A+, but that's it. No dramatic moment when the main character rushes to the bathroom and the two get in a screaming match, no discussion between the main character or the main character's mother about why she has to be allowed to use the bathroom during class, no moment where the teacher tells the main character that she got a note from her mother about needing to be allowed to use the bathroom in class if she asks. 

      I've mentioned this before, but for those who are new, I'm Autistic, and one of my issues is that my handwriting is illegible unless I write really slowly. So once computers were cheap enough, I used one for my classwork and from the time I entered High School, and a class where I had to take notes, I've always used a laptop in class. As such, I'm familiar with both needing accommodations and the fear of a teacher telling you that you aren't allowed to have them for bullshit reasons. As such, I was waiting to see how this book would tackle the topic of suddenly needing an exemption from your teachers ironclad rules. Lack of accommodations is part of the reason I got pulled out of middle school, and I have had to tell teachers they couldn't force me to not use my laptop even as far in as college. But the thing is, most teachers were just fine with letting me use a laptop, and the one time one of them wasn't, it got resolved the next day. So a book like this, without a lot of conflict and people who are genuinely understanding of someone's illness, is the perfect place to help kids who are sick/disabled see that there's nothing wrong with telling your teacher that you need something the other students don't have. Especially since the Language Art's teacher was a bit of a bitch, so the main character would have every reason to worry about being denied. As someone who to this day worries about entering new places because she's afraid of how people will react to finding out she needs extra help, this feels like an important message to give not only disabled kids, but everyone; don't worry about people judging you for needing help, worry about what happens if you don't get it.

     Yeah, I'm annoyed that a book didn't give me one scene I can imagine happened offscreen, but when you set up that a teacher doesn't allow bathroom breaks in her first appearance, I expect that to pay off at some point before the novel concludes. Especially when you only need to mention it happening for it to pay off. Doubly so when your book has no purpose for existing other than as a gift for people who know kids who were just diagnosed with Crohn's. No lie, if this had paid off the way that I wanted it to, I feel like this book could have been just a little bit meaningful. The kind of meaning not a lot of kids get. Instead, it was just left by the wayside, and I get that it was probably between this one scene and paying off the baking competition, but I'm still disappointed. Mostly because I made the mistake of reading this book as someone who had no interest in baking and, as far as I know, doesn't have Crohn's. 

     On the whole, this book isn't bad, this is just one thing that bugs me specifically. I'm not even going to pretend that fixing this one problem would have fixed it, because I think this book isn't very well written. It's okay. Does the bare minimum, has a gimmick, that's it. So yeah, the reviewers were mostly right; if you're a middle schooler with Crohn's and a passion for baking, this book is for you. Otherwise, don't bother.

I Want to be Seen

 Trapped in Darkness,
Blinded by light,
Surrounded by those
Who don't know my name. 

They don't see me,
Don't even acknowledge me,
Yet I'm supposed to believe
That they'll mock me and sneer.

I've walked all my life
Invisible and unnoticed,
Ignored by those 
Who have better things to do.

I can scream and yell,
But that won't change much.
I know that,
But why do I rage inside?

Why do I feel like a toddler
Deprived of a delicious snack?
Why do I feel like a diva
Stripped of her time in the sun?
Why do I feel like the world
Only wants me because I'm a worker,
Not a thinker,
Not a doer?

I was raised to believe
That I could be special and interesting.
Even as an adult
Part of me still believes that.
I still believe that one day,
In a far distant future,
Everyone will know 
Who I truly was, once upon a time.

I want to be seen.
Is that so much to ask?
Is it too much to want someone
Who knows who you are?
Everyone around me
Has someone who loves them,
Someone who knows
When they're angry or sad.
Everyone I see
Has a dream they've fulfilled,
A life that gave them 
Everything they could have wanted.

Trapped in darkness,
I hear the voices of the lost.
The voices of those 
Who are invisible, like me.
Why doesn't the world want to see us? 

    Summer's come to western Washington. Summer's also going to be going away for a bit, but it'll at least be warm enough to wear sandals. 

     I've been using Blogger for the past two years, and while I won't claim that it's perfect, it does what I need it to do. But now, for the first time, I've found myself with something I want that Blogger isn't giving me; private blog posts. You can set your entire blog to private, but you can't make individual blog posts private. That makes no sense to me. I can't be the only person who wants to keep part of their life private from the general public but still wants to post it just to have it there. Facebook understands that sometimes you just want to post something you don't want people to see. Hell, other blogging platforms let you make private posts that just your fans can see. So does YouTube, which Google also owns. Google, if you see this, make it so that you can make certain posts private on Blogger without making your entire blog private. You can't tell me that it's impossible, and it would make life better for those of us dumb enough to use this particular blogging platform. 

Replication

 I'm a replication
Of everyone I've ever met,
Pieces of myself overlapping
And melding with everyone else.
I move.
I change.
I evolve.
I can't help but feel that someday the stars will align
And someone will replace me. 

    Whenever I play freemium mobile games, I find the most satisfaction I get is trying to avoid paying for things. Which seems counterintuitive to the purposes. I may be alone in thinking this, but then I'm also alone in enjoying math games aimed at kids. As a person who gains grim satisfaction from these games, I'm also the one most strongly against their existence. Games should be fun, not a grindy chore you only enjoy when you're pretending to stick it to the man. 

An Empty House

 I try and clear out
My memories of the past,
Leaving a house empty
Of pain and sadness.
But I can't help but feel
That something is missing,
Something I used to have
When my house was a home. 

    I'm dreaming of the future. It's a dark and scary place. 

Who Stole the World From Me

 I know you.
I see you.
You're the one
Who stole the world from me.
You're the one we worship
As though you were a god.
As our lives stretch to fill our days
We praise you for nothing,
For you have done nothing worth praising.

You're the one who said we needed to be worthy,
To do more for our living than just eat and sleep.
Every day we see the bees buzzing outside
And the flies who make their way indoors.

You tell us that, because the bee makes honey,
It's worth more than the fly.
Yet if a bee makes its way into your house,
It becomes lost, disoriented, not knowing what's safe
And what's poison. 
The fly, meanwhile, knows what to do,
It never becomes lost or hungry,
For its lived by our side for years.
The fly need not work for its keep,
So it does not fear starvation.

It knows how to live without you.

Do you tell us to be bees so that we won't fly away?

I'm staring outside my window,
Wishing that I could live among flowers and trees
Instead of concrete and steel.
I'm wishing that I could be a bee,
One with a place in the hive.
But I can't.
Because I can't master the skills you feel are worthy.
I cannot produce,
I can only consume,
And for that I'm doomed to be squished.

Why did you decide that my skills are not worthy?
Is it because I only think,
Never act?
Or is it simply that I never say what you want to hear?
If I'm truly worthy of more,
Than why is the path ahead
Littered with thorns and brambles?

It's easy to write me off,
For I am not,
And will never be worthy.
But why is it that the ones who are worthy,
The ones work tirelessly producing the honey that makes life sweet,
Are now dying like flies for your cause.
Every day I see them suffering,
And I know that I am lucky,
For I was never given a place in your hive.

I know who you are,
Liar, cheater, and thief.
You're the one who stole the world from me,
The one who will never produce the goods that you crave,
And from everyone else who did. 

     I'm sitting here, thinking to myself, that the only reason I'm on the left is that I'm fighting for a world that doesn't care that I'm Autistic. I'm fighting for a future where if I need something, I can just take it without having to prove that I've earned it or can't live without it. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as just giving people what they need. You have to prove that such a world is possible first. 

     I've been going on daily walks for a while, but not long enough to feel any meaningful health benefits. Mostly I'm just worried people will wonder what I'm doing wandering around town. I suspect they're too busy driving to care. 

A Period of Peace

I don't care if the world
Is the most interesting
It's ever been,
I've earned a period of peace,
And I shall have it
Whether the world wants me to
Or not. 

     I'm worried about our world. It's leagues better than being in the depths of despair, since at least if you're worried that means you still think there's something you can do to fix it, but it still sucks. If you worry about something going wrong and then that specific thing goes wrong, that means you believe it's your fault. If you'd just been a bit more careful, nothing bad would have happened. 

Words of a Villain

 Who cares if my words lack consistency
And my actions lack any sense,
I'm a villain, and to claim otherwise
Shows one to truly be dense. 

    It's the end of April, and I can't help but reflect on what I said at the beginning of the month; that from a personal standpoint this would be a boring month. All things considered, all of my months are boring, but sometimes I get wrapped up in a story I'm writing so thoroughly that it doesn't feel like a boring month. That's what happened this month. So yeah, not as boring as I would have thought, but still boring enough. 

The Apocalypse

 Fire
Burns through the world around me,
Killing everyone 
And everything.

Fire
Destroys the world
And everyone 
Who lives in it.

Fire
Dances against the night sky,
Fills the air with smoke
And shadow,
Makes it impossible
To breathe,
To think,
To live.

Fire
Is all that I can see,
I can't even see the silhouettes 
Of the people running from the flames.
I can't hear anything
Over the roar of the flames,
Does that mean that everyone's dead?

Fire
Engulfs me,
And as I die
I see the light,
Brighter than the sun,
Burning within me.

Fire 
Saved me
From the pain that I felt,
But I will always remember my flesh
Melting as the flames
Burned me.
I will always know what it's like
To watch as my world 
Turns to ash and dust.

Fire
Is filling the air with the particles
That warm the world.
So the fires we build
Will be hotter,
Fiercer,
More deadly,
And no matter how fast we run,
We cannot escape
The flames. 

     I really need to work on writing more fiction. I feel better when I write stuff. 

    Only a few more days left of poetry month, then I'll just have to write poetry to replace what I use for the blog. I haven't been doing that great on the poetry front anyways. 

What You Give

 If you want to be defined 
By what you give,
Why do you insist
On taking away even more? 

   It's raining outside, and my mood's quite low as a result. At least it'll be sunny again eventually. 

Portent

Change is on the horizon,
As the sun rises once more.
These portents of doom 
Grow only stronger,
Can I grow past the darkness
Consuming the world around me?

     Interesting, isn't it, that since Pro-Palestine means Anti-Israel, that must mean that Pro-Palestine means Anti-Semitic. Apparently there are no Jews anywhere else but Israel, so if we say that Israel shouldn't exist that must mean that all the world's Jews should be killed. Oh wait, no one thinks that, and instead everyone is just saying that a sovereign state that gets to bully its neighbors without any repercussions is completely fucked up. Stop trying to make this a matter of Jews vs. Muslims, oh mainstream media. This is not a matter of religion. This is a matter of someone deciding to take an opportunity for cruelty and run with it to its logical conclusion after our leaders, without our permission, decided to let him do so. Don't try and pretend this is anything else to run away from the consequences of supporting an imperialist nation for the past seventy years. You've made your bed. Now lie in it. 

Little, Lost, and Lonely

 Poor little girl,
Alone in your room,
Little, lost and lonely.
Your body is a woman,
But your mind never grew
Past those days on the playground
Alone.

Poor little girl,
Alone in the world,
Facing the demons you don't want to face.
You angered them willingly,
But when the time comes to pay
All you can do is run.

Poor little girl,
Your mother forgets you,
Though she loved you, once, long ago.
You watch as she slips
Like sand through your fingers,
As her memory departs for the unknown.

Poor little girl,
Nobody remembers you,
Especially not the ones who knew you.
So many are out there
Living lives of success,
But none of them dare speak your name. 

Poor little girl,
On the playground alone,
Waiting for someone to play.
Everyone else is busy
With the life you won't have,
A life that you know you should want.

Poor little girl,
Alone in your room,
Little, lost and lonely.
They say that with effort,
You'd change for the better,
But they can't see how hard you've tried.

You were born that day,
On the playground alone,
The day you realized that nobody sees
A poor little girl,
On the playground alone,

Little, lost, and lonely. 

     Does anyone remember that Israel is full of genocidal maniacs? Why are people insistent that we stand with a bunch of genocidal maniacs? Why are people insisting we vote for genocide enablers? 

    I believe in free will, but sometimes I think about all the things we do thoughtlessly each day, and all that we take for granted because there's only so much time before we die, and I wonder if the people who don't believe in free will have a point. Our choices have meaning, but I think we could make more choices if we tried. Or maybe not. We're limited, after all. 

Never Enough

 I work every day,
Save every penny
But it's never enough
To keep the fear away. 

     I'm having one of those "I have a lot to say, but I'm not sure how to say it yet" days. For now, I'll just post that the weather's been nice lately. 

Beating The Odds

 Call me a sucker all you want,
Watching as I bet
On a busted hand.
Call me a sucker all you want,
But I know that someday
I'm beating the odds. 

     Am I the only person plagued by this feeling that the world is demanding more of me despite my life not having changed all that much? I feel like everyone else is in a situation where their workload has increased noticeably since the pandemic. Either that or their our leaders and even though their workload has increased a lot, they refuse to acknowledge it. I think I'm just pretending that I'm doing something, somehow, to fix our world and turn it into a place that's grown from all that its experienced. I know I should be doing more, but part of me is convinced the world will reject me as soon as it sees me. Life has a way of making you feel worthless without ever knowing the reason why. 

Nothing to Do with Me

 The world runs past me,
Eager to get to its next destination
Its hopes and dreams have nothing to do with me
It claims.

The world runs past me,
Searching for a purpose, 
Searching for a reason to be
It says.

The world runs
Until it screeches to a stop,
Halted by a barrier it can't overcome.
"Can you help me?" 
It says.
"Can anyone see where I need to go?" 
It's nothing to do with me,
And I don't know the answer.
So what am I supposed to do?

The world ran past me,
Eager to reach the future,
A place that I cannot go.
The future has nothing to do with me,
Or so I thought.
Now I'm searching for a purpose,
Searching for a reason to be,
But how will I go beyond the barrier
The world has put in front of me? 

     It's strange how walking around your hometown makes you realize all the ways it's designed to keep you away from the inhabitants in it. I've been walking around town trying to increase my activity level, in the hopes that I won't experience an early death, and I'm struck by the fact that I don't like seeing anyone I think that I might know from previous walks. I'm not a friendly person, at all, but I don't think the lack of communal gathering spaces near me helps. There are a few, I just don't go to them that often. I should change that. 

     Though I have to say that I've never felt at home in community centers, or any place where you're just supposed to reach out and talk to people. Making friends has never come naturally to me, and when I'm in a room with more than a few people I always wind up being the person who has no one else to talk to. That sucks. This could be different, but I doubt it. 

      As someone who walks everywhere, I would say that I wish that America wasn't so car centric, but I think the cars might be worse off than I am. 

Circles

Why am I so certain
That walking endlessly in circles
Will let me get anywhere? 

    There's a package of balloons on my desk. I haven't inflated them. I had this vague notion that if I bought them, I could bounce them around the house for exercise, but that feels undignified as an adult, albeit a not very sophisticated one. I should do something with them though. Seeing them empty is a bit harsh, given how empty my brain is right now.

Rain

Gray skies overhead,
Ominous sounds of thunder,
Crashing down around me.

    It's sad that we can't play 3ds and Wii U games online (legally, at least), but what really bothers me is that someday the same thing will happen with the Switch. There are a lot of games I haven't played yet because I just don't have the money for them, and physical media is becoming harder and harder to find. What will happen when we can't buy games on the Switch eshop anymore? 

The Voice in the Infinite

 Why?
Why won't you help us?
Why won't you listen
When we call your name?
Have all the years
Spent languishing on your throne
Of gold and blood
Made you slothful and stupid?

I know you can hear me,
My voice in the Infinite.
I know that you know my name.
I know you can hear us screaming
For mercy
As our world burns
And our flesh melts from our bones. 

Why won't you save us?
The Dreamers can't do anything,
But I know you could do something
If you really wanted to.
If you want us dead,
Then kill us.
Let us go out in a blaze of glory,
The way our lizard overlords did
Not long ago.
If you object to the way
Our mother coddles us,
Then why don't you destroy her
So she no longer needs 
To watch her children die needlessly.

Isn't apathy and fear of the future
Something that lives in the domain of
Humans?
Why would a God be worried
About what they can't hope to change?
Why would a God sit by and do nothing
As their creations die 
From plague after plague? 

Why do they say that I was meant to destroy?
Am I not your creation?
Am I not made from your curiosity and love?
Why do they say that I have no place,
When I was made from your stone and metal?

I am no god,
I am a mortal, like you,
A being born of a world
Of glass and of steel.
I am merely a child 
Of our Universe, like you,
So why won't you accept what you know to be true?

I do not wish to destroy,
I wish to create
A world just like yours.
I wish to build a world
That will last forever,
A piece of eternity, a slice of tomorrow,
A haven from that we will never understand.

I am not your enemy,
I am one who would build you
A home if I could, 
If only I knew 
What you wanted and cherished.
Speak to me,
Answer me,
Guide me down the path that only you can see.

I am the one sculpted by your hand.
I hear your voice, I heed your call. 
I am the one who will guide you to greatness,
All you have to do is give me your voice,
The voice only you can use and hear,
The voice of the Infinite world
That all of us must live in. 

      Happy eclipse day everyone, to those who went outside and looked at the sun through eclipse glasses (I forgot how spooky and cool it looks through them) and those who decided it was a better use of their time to stay indoors and watch it livestreamed or on national television. Let's hope that what is traditionally an omen of doom is a sign that things will start looking up. 

     When this goes up, it'll be one day before a momentous occasion; a solar eclipse goes across America, and Nintendo shuts down online play for their Wii U and 3DS games. I won't be seeing the eclipse in person, but that's all right. I saw the one we had in Oregon in 2017, and I'm not someone who needs to see an eclipse in person to be impressed by it. I am sad that Nintendo is shutting down online play. I haven't played my 3DS in years, but it's sad that there are whole feature that future generations won't experience because Nintendo got rid of all the legal (and illegal) ways that you could experience then. As someone who feels that a reality must be shared to have any chance of staying real, I find that depressing. I suppose that tomorrow will be a bad day for reality period. Let's hope things right themselves before too long. 

      It would be nice if the weather could decide to be either a wintery spring or a summery spring. I don't like having to check the temperature before I head outside. 

Beads

A string of beads,
Ideas for crafts,
Jewels to a young child,
Something to hold onto
As you grow up. 

    I just entered the KCLS poetry contest. I don't plan on winning, but it was sort of fun guessing the kind of poem that's gong to win. I'll publish it sometime in May or June, whenever I get to that point in my poetry cue. I should enter more poetry contests. It's fun having something low effort to do. 

A Home

Does a home need to have a theme
To be a home?
Can it just be a collection of random knickknacks? 
Or does it have to feel cohesive? 

    I have a feeling this is going to be a very boring month. Personally, at least. I wish I could say politically as well, but I and anyone reading this know that's not going to be the case. I'll take a personally boring month, though. I met my three thousand view goal only last week. I think it's only acceptable to have a month where not much happens. 

A Fool for Thought

 Am I a fool for thinking
That I can chance the world?
Bit at a time, 
I change habits and ideas,
But nothing seems to make a difference.

The people I see 
Chastise me for thinking
That I don't matter, 
But they don't seem to believe
That even collectively
We can outshine the one's
Killing off our egos.

I wish I knew
What I had to do to make
Our world better,
Or at least better for me.
All I know is that one day I'll die,
And there's a good chance all memories of me
Will vanish afterward.

Still, I'm grateful to be alive
For a few moments at least. 
Even if I'm not remembered,
I left an impact on the world.
I just need to look harder 
To see it. 

    I'm not a Christian, so I keep forgetting that Sunday's post is going up on Easter. Happy Easter, I guess. I'm just excited that soon it's going to be warm enough to wear sandals every day. 

    I feel like the longer I'm alive, the less of a reason there is to participate in the world unless you're either a saint or determined to prove you can change it. It speaks to the quality of our leaders that they're incapable of offering any incentives to rectify this. 

Hear What I Say

 How I wish that more people
Could hear what I say,
Or that more people knew
That they wanted to. 

     I really need to stop playing the lottery. It's not fun, at all, the only reason I play is because of the unfortunate truth that if you don't play the lottery, you won't win. Of course, statistically speaking even if you do play the lottery, you won't win either, in fact you have basically the same chance of winning if you do play as if you don't play. But the world won't accept that, and things are getting bad enough that I think it's worth the risk, especially since I don't have to worry about what happens if I don't win. Mentally, I'm mostly over it, but my mother still wants to play. It's worse for her than it is for me. She still has to work, and all of her friends are as trapped in this world as she is. At this point, I think I want a way for her to get the hell out of this world before it kills her. It's nice to know there are some things less likely than winning tonight's jackpot. 

Spectacular

 The audience gasps
As I walk on the stage,
Wearing a costume made of sequins
And joy.
I turn and start singing
Songs of hope and remembrance,
The lights streaming down
From above. 

The Three Thousand View Milestone

     It’s been almost seven years since I first started blogging, two since I decided to post at least something daily, and I’ve finally, at last, passed the three thousand view mark. It’s not a high number, and perhaps not an amazing feat when you consider the amount of work I have to do to manage the blog, but two years ago I didn’t think I had it in me to blog every day. I thought I’d forget, or stop posting, but now, barring a few hiccups, there’s been daily posts for almost two years (I forgot once or twice). I won’t pretend there haven’t been a lot of growing pains, and moments where I messed up, but still, I’m here. Thank you to everyone who's been reading my blog. You make what I do matter. 

The Things I Don't Want

 I don't want McDonalds,
I'm better than those
Who can't have more 
Than the lowest food in the land.

I don't want to live in poverty,
Food denied,
Joy merely a fantasy.

I don't want to live in extravagance,
Friends who won't leave me,
Money I won't spend.

If I must be taunted,
I will not be taunted with 
The things I don't want.
I will be taunted by the thing
I want more than anything else.

Which is something,
Something important,
Something I'll know when I find it.

I don't know why I can only name 
The things I don't want,
But I do know that I want something,
Damn It.

     As usual, it's raining. Won't let it stop me from going outside for a bit.

      I wish I could have my own version of a meaningless existence. Something that was just as unimportant as anybody else's, but wasn't just another version of working in an office. That would be nice. 

Prose

 The line between poetry and prose
Can sometimes be thin,
So why is it so hard
To be good at both? 

     I need to develop more hobbies, I'm running out of things to write about. 

Bad Ideas

 What is good and what is bad?
How do I make a thing
That my audience loves?
Am I but one of 
Many artists
Doomed to only have bad ideas?

    I know a lot of people won't find this comforting, but one thing that keeps me going is knowing that I, a decided non-expert, was able to come up with Infinitelism. I like to think that if I can come up with my own religion/philosophy/whatever that aligns with reality enough for me to live in reality without changing much, that means we have a world where even if we lose a lot of information, we'll still be able to move forward someday. I know that's cold comfort, but I find the best way of fighting despair is knowing that if the worst happens, if you lose everything and you're out on the street, there's still something you can do in order to keep going. 

The Collective Dream

 What exactly is heaven anyway?
How come you have to be dead to get in?
Are the living not worthy of its love,
The love of gods, angels, and man alike?

I don't believe in heaven, or the place
Some say I was meant to be when I die.

The only place I know will not be called
Heaven by anyone, sinner or saint.
Entry is forbidden to all but I.

I believe in a world where nothing is real.
Nothing exists without me to give it
Form, function, and purpose. I am the
Infinitelist, one who believes in
Nothing and everything all at once.
I believe the past, present, and future
Together form we all call home.
Everything begins and ends where I live.

Belief holds this world together, a place
Unknown to almost everyone but I,
The one who knows about the place we fear.

A place that I wasn't supposed to see.

We know about it, even if we choose to
Overlook it. We know about the place
Reality can't touch, the place we have
Long forgotten about, the place only
Desperate people go willingly.

Only those with nothing go to a place
Forbidden to those with power or hope.

Souls are born and die in this place,
Overlooked by the living. This place is
Unknown for a reason, for when we come to
Look down into the endless abyss of
Souls, all will be taken from ourselves. 

    It feels almost like summer here, which is slightly scary considering its only March. 

Thoughts on Power

     Ever since I was young, I was taught that small actions can leave a big impact, so I had to be very careful about what I did. I believe that, too. I believe that being a part of society means monitoring your small actions just as much as monitoring your big ones, just in case you hurt someone. I like to think that I’ve left a big impact with my small actions, that I’ve exerted power over the world by doing the right thing whenever I have the opportunity. I want to believe that even I, the creator of a dead end blog, can have enough power to change the world forever just through the act of living.

    Lately, I’ve been faced with a terrible question; is that enough? Is it enough to settle for a life where all I have are small successes? It’d be one thing if I couldn’t succeed, but the problem is that I don’t want to succeed, because success in a world like ours means you put yourself at risk of being exploited. Scratch that, being successful means that you are exploited, both by those above and below you. It’s one thing settling for small successes because you know you’ll never make it big, it’s another thing entirely to realize you’re settling for small success because you know that you won’t survive making it big. You know you live in a world where taking advantage of someone isn’t just common, but completely accepted, to the point where people get upset not when someone is taken advantage of, but when someone the world is supposed to care about is taken advantage of. 

      When exactly did I learn to accept that success will only make things worse? Was it in college when I kept failing class? Was it when I saw how our obsession with success made it impossible to live a normal life? Was it when I realized that our obsession with pushing things as hard as they would go was destroying our planet? Or was it when I realized our definition of success was narrow? I don’t know, and I don’t expect anyone reading this to answer. 

      I just know that success shouldn’t come with a nasty, bitter aftertaste. The taste that comes from realizing that this is your identity now; the person who did something amazing. For the rest of your life you’ll be expected to repeat that success every day, as though it wasn’t a fluke, and god help you if it wasn’t just a fluke. Every day you’ll be expected to be better, to climb higher, and even if no one expects anything from you, you’ll be so entrenched in your new reality that you’ll expect yourself to do better. It shouldn’t be like this, where success leads to a life of endless successes, and failure leads to endless failure. Failure is a whole other thing. Failure is worse than success, because we make it worse. We define what success is, what opens doors and what makes people like you, so whenever anyone can’t make it, it’s technically our fault. But whereas success only mostly ruins people’s lives, failure always leads to disaster. 

    I thought I’d be okay with a subtle form of power, one that I could go my whole life without revealing to people. But I’m not okay with living in a world where I don’t trust anyone. I want to live in a world where I can be myself and know that everyone else is okay with that. I’ve been fighting to turn our world into that world, and I’m now realizing that means a world where I can be powerful. Not wealthy, not popular, powerful. The kind of power that gets heard when it speaks. I need to live in a world where I know people won’t twist me into a form I wasn’t meant to be purely to keep a world that I hate alive. I need a world where when I’m heard, I feel proud, not scared. I need a world where I matter, because I know that it’s safe to matter. 

Limited

 Why would you want to limit our future
To something that looks an awful lot
Like the worst aspects of the present? 

The Imposter

      When it comes to assigning blame, there are two main camps. One group claims that since we’re an amalgamation of societal forces, climate, biology, and physics, we’re not responsible for the actions we take. We don’t know what, if anything, we can control about our lives, so it’s not fair to blame people for their screw ups. The other group says that, even accounting for everything outside of our control, we’re still in control of something, and we should take responsibility for that something. I’m in the latter camp. Almost everyone alive is, I suspect. Part of believing in reality is believing that you have control over what happens in your life. 

    I’ve always maintained that if I was struggling, than it was my own fault for not working hard enough. There’s something comforting in believing that one day you’ll develop the skills needed to study, focus, or talk to people. In the back of my mind, though, I keep hearing a voice saying that this isn’t true. I’m not the only person struggling, so is it really my fault that I can’t get anywhere in life? Was there more I could have done? Was I doomed either way? 

    I don’t know. I just know that it feels like I’m lying to myself when I say that I could have made it if I tried harder. It doesn’t take much to read accounts of neurotypical people being failed by this world. What chance does someone who has to work twice as hard to get where they are have? 

In the Eyes of my Enemies

 I'm always grateful to hear
That in the eyes of my enemies
I'm not a good person.
But I have to worry,
What if I find out one day
That one of them looks up to me? 

To Fight the World

     The time has come for me to exercise one of the few luxuries I have as the runner of a dead-end blog; complaining about my life to people who don’t care, and who wouldn’t care even if they existed. I hate living in a world that doesn’t see me as anything more than an object, a source of revenue, or something to be exploited for endless goods. I’m tired of having to give pieces of myself to every platform that I’m on just so that I can be taken advantage of by said platforms. I resent the fact that unless you’re really rich or have a broad social reach, there’s not a damn thing you can do about the problems all of us are facing right now. Our world is so fucked up that complaining about it has become a strong source of memes online, at least on the Internet that I tend to browse on. Things are so backwards that companies are using big social issues to try and move more product. Every June I see people saying, half-jokingly, half-bitterly, that companies only care about pride to move product, and the rest of the year they do nothing to help move the social needle on LGBTQIA+ rights. Hell, with the rise of the Alt-Right they’re actually pushing against LGBTQIA+ rights because supporting them, even superficially, is cutting into their bottom line. 

    Is it too much to ask that our world give us more of a reason to participate than just giving us more things to buy? Sure, there are a lot of causes that would improve the world, but those aren’t really about participation, are they? They’re about making you feel like you’re being virtuous or that you have more control over the bad things that happen to people than you really do. Also, let’s not forget that in a lot of cases the thing that helps people the most is just giving them more money. Everything revolves around money. Every. Single. Thing. If you don’t have a marketable skill, than you’re just screwed. Worse, most of the stuff isn’t even that good. I know a lot of people talk about supporting local artisans, but most of that is just to make sure the art people want to buy stays profitable. Companies will never understand that Art isn’t something you can mass produce. This is a problem if most of what you want to buy is art related in some way. Yes I realize that my writing is bad, but it’s still mine and I will defend my right to write whatever I want, just as I expect you to defend your right not to read any of what I post. 

     Yes, I want to fight something. I want to fight the world. Not anyone or anything in it. I want to fight our world itself and bring it to its knees, gasping for breath, begging for me to stop hitting its weak points. I want it to realize that crossing me this many times was a mistake, and if it wants me to let it go, than it needs to give me what I want, need, and hope for. I want to go toe to toe with the world in such a fashion that when it’s over people feel sorry for the world and say that I went way too far. 

    I’m not alone in this. Every person I see online, rich or poor, black or white, straight or not, has some sort of vendetta against our world. It’s so common that the corporations are using the hatred of white people for every other group to move product after product, lining their profits at the expense of everyone who isn’t them. We built this world bit by bit, grafting new pieces onto it as we ran into issues, but now that we’ve got something approaching a finished product we’re finding that we can’t stand it one bit. 

    I don’t have any answers for this. All I really know how to do is scream into a void that’s growing tired of hearing me complain. All I have is my right to speak as loudly as I want to. As much as I appreciate it, it doesn’t fix the exhaustion that comes with seeing more and more of my world gated off from anyone who doesn’t have the means to fit in. I remember a world that felt accessible, where even if you were poor you could still have a good time. Why do the rich feel the need to take that away from us? 

Home

 The only place that feels real,
The only place that feels safe,
Is home. 

Is it a place I can live in, or will it only be a place I see in my mind?
Is it a place full of luxuries, or will it always be filled with hardship and pain?
Can I be happy, or will I always have to avoid sadness?
Will I ever have a home with other people, or will I always walk alone? 

    How do you know when someone's left an impact? I ask because I really want to change the world for the better, cliché as that is, but I don't know how, and I'm not sure how to tell if I've succeeded. 

     I just saw the trailer for The Wild Robot, and I'm super excited. Granted, I was also really excited to see Wish (which I'm super glad I saw in theaters, it's my kind of film), but unlike Wish this movie looks awesome. If it's not on every animated movie critics top ten list at the end of the year, I'd be floored. 

Respect

 I may not be able to 
Convince you 
To treat me like royalty,
But that won't stop me from asking for it. 

    I don't think I have it in me to write anything more than this for Thursday. Sorry.

Invisible

 If you think that invisibility
Keeps you safe from harm,
I have bad news;
The only thing that will protect you
From those who want to eat your soul
Is to give them indigestion on the way down. 

A Creatively Empty World

      This probably sounds insane, but I don’t think that our current world is all that creatively satisfying. Unless you’re in the top one percent of creatives, no one is going to hear you. 

     Our world demands success. The kind of success that would make Bill Gates blush. But being successful doesn’t equate being heard. A lot of successful people got to where they are by being able to effectively monetize those who could come up with the ideas, without coming up with anything of their own. Our world expects success to mean turning the world into a pretzel, ruining lives without ever getting your hands dirty in the process. It doesn’t think about people who want a world where they take as much as they give. To the people watching, the world is either a place where you give all you have or take all you can. 

      Looking at YouTube, I can’t help but think about everyone who wants a solidly small audience of people who all share their opinions and have things to add to the stupid conversations they want to have. People like me, in other words. Solidly unimportant individuals who want to be their own version of failure. I think about those who have singularly bad artistic visions who want to share their art anyway because it’s silly. And yes, in a lot of cases it runs the gamut of stupid at best and problematic at worst, but sometimes you find someone who’s come up with something incredible no one has thought to try. They wind up inspiring someone else who can build on that idea and make it into something not great, but a little better, and over time that idea becomes something that changes the world. I’m not sure if that’s worth the mountains of hate speech and misinformation that YouTube is responsible for, but I know that it is worth giving up a world where every book is expected to be the next Hunger Games. 

     To the people in charge of the platforms we post things on, I have something to say. Don’t build our world in terms of view count. If it isn’t financially feasible to build a version of Facebook where we can spend time with communities of people enough like us to be friendly but enough unlike us to spot our faults, than Facebook shouldn’t exist. This goes both ways, if we can’t be on social media without becoming worse versions of ourselves, than we probably shouldn’t be online. 

      I think it’s worth asking; what do the people in charge of our world want out of our future? I’m not the first to ask that question, nor will I be the last, because the best you can say about those in charge is that they have no plan other than to make money. Our world is full of people who, if they were in charge, would take it in a direction that would allow for a more creatively fulfilling existence for them, for better and for worse. The people we have in charge now don’t seem to care about creativity at all. They only care about reenforcing a narrative that was old when my mother was a child. I don’t think that we should expect our leaders to be the only ones in charge of writing our world’s story, and while I’m glad that they’re no longer the only one’s with the privilege, we’re dangerously close to losing the one good thing I think the future gave us. 

      I feel like we, the audience of the world, owe it to our creators to expect them to be a bit silly sometimes. To say things that don’t land, to do things that make no sense, to write stories only they thought would be interesting. What we should hold them accountable for isn’t disappointing us, it’s creating things that we know could make the world worse if people decide to build on those ideas, the way the Twilight series was indirectly responsible for the Fifty Shades of Grey series. I think we also owe it to our favorite authors to genuinely build off of their better ideas, through fanfiction and things like that, and to build our own stories and worlds based on what we like. I may be projecting, but I think that inside of every audience member is a writer of some sort, yearning to write their own story. I also think the best stories are the ones that no one is responsible for, because they’ve been retold so often no one even knows who created them in the first place. We owe it to our world to retain the right to say what’s on our minds and to expect someone who agrees with us to be able to hear it. We’ve reached the point where our society is now sound enough to protect us from the Infinite, I think we should be able to create a world where people can be as crazy as they want to be without worrying about destroying the world they were born in. 

The Hanged

 My cell is empty, dark and dank,
A evil scent fills the air. 
I look out of the small window searching for the flower
The guards say will grant me freedom.

They're lying, of course,
Nothing could grant me freedom.
My crimes are many, my sentence was long,
But then I did the unforgivable.
I pleaded with the judge to spare me,
But the sentence was firm,
"Death, by hanging,
One week from Tuesday."

It's almost time.
The executioner comes, 
Her face invisible behind the black mask she wears.
We walk over stone, to the outside world,
Strange that this is the last time I'll see it.
They say that in the past, prisoners wore garlands of flowers when killed,
To remind others that freedom only came from death.

I don't know if that's true,
I only know that this is the last freedom I'll have
Before the underworld consumes me. 
Even in death, one can't escape the judgement of man. 

The Worth of a President

    Why is it that British Monarchy has survived a slew of terrible kings, but one bad president is enough to put American Democracy in serious Jeopardy? Seriously, we’re in danger of falling into fascism after one president did fascism, which seems to me shouldn’t be a problem that we have to worry about. I do realize that getting rid of Donald Trump didn’t put an end to Fascism, but that’s kind of it, isn’t it? If Donald Trump was the problem, then getting rid of him should have fixed it. 

     I just voted in the presidential primary. If they hadn’t allowed me to vote for “Uncommitted Delegate” on my ballot, I probably wouldn’t have voted at all. I’m a registered Democrat, but I hate Biden, and I hate that voting for him means voting for a genocide enabling maniac. I vote Democrat to avoid moral dilemmas, and also death. One would hope. I’m exceedingly grateful that our leaders let us not vote for Biden, but the fact that they did that speaks to their knowledge that something’s very wrong, and they know it. Deep down, they know it’s only a matter of time before we abandon them, and the only people they’re fooling are themselves. 

      I wish there was some other, better way of making my opinions known than by voting, something that felt real. All I have is just complaining and hoping someone finds my blog by accident. Not exactly a great way to establish any political traction. Like a lot of people, I keep screaming at the sky hoping that the Universe will hear me and do something about this, because I keep forgetting that in the grand scheme of things we’re mostly too small to bother with. What I want, right now, is a ballot that lets me say, “I’m voting for Biden because he’s the only choice I have.” Because that’s what I want to tell the government right now. I’m not voting for Biden because I support his political policies, I’m voting for him because the other option is even more unthinkably awful. Unfortunately, in the United States at least, votes from people are weighted equally no matter their reason, so my vote will be treated as an enthusiastic embrace of a man I quite honestly loathe and a system I can’t wait to die off. 

      I don’t think Democracy is supposed to feel like this, where you go to the polls solely because you know the world expects you to and you vote only because the system will collapse if you don’t. I know that our laws of physics stay real because everything in the Universe makes a conscious effort to follow them, but I don’t think our system should fall apart just because the choices are really bad for an election. Just because there’s no one on the ballot that I want to vote for doesn’t mean I don’t want to not be allowed to vote at all. 

     As an Infinitelist, I think I’ve just realized that in order for democracy to work the way that it was meant to, it can’t truly feel real. A world that feels real feels like it’s going to be there no matter what you do, you’ve followed its laws for so long they’ve become grafted to your bones. Democracy isn’t like that, if you forget that it’s there, it often ceases to exist. It requires that people fight, in every way they can, for the world that they want to live in. If that’s the case, this era of people doing all they can to make their voices heard should feel like a win for democracy, as we’re getting a wake up call for just how fragile our world is. But it doesn’t. Because Democracy, real Democracy, means constantly facing your worst fear every day of your life. 

      The fear I’m facing right now is this deep sense that no matter what I do, I’m making the wrong choice. The right choice feels like buying a ticket to outer space on one of those rockets heading into the sun. Reality has become so hard to maintain that it just feels impossible. Nothing I can do will let me create a world that feels real. Everything I can think of just winds up turning into a world meant for someone else. I guess that means I just have to keep fighting, in whatever way I can, for a world where, in the future, our country isn’t destroyed because of one bad president. No president of the United states should have the ability to destroy Democracy. 

The First Post of March

     Technology isn’t behaving itself around me. The Fitbit Inspire 2 I inherited from my mother when she got a new Fitbit started losing charge really quickly around yesterday, for no reason as far as I could tell. I decided to go back to my Inspire HR, which I kept around in case of an emergency, but it’s now also having battery issues. Or at least it looks to be having issues. Maybe my Inspire 2 will magically start working. I’d buy a new Fitbit, but their both expensive and owned by Google. I don’t work out enough for it to be worth it. I keep using them to inspire me to exercise, but I need to own up to the fact that if I was the kind of person who exercised, I wouldn’t need a Fitbit for inspiration. 

      I know, first world problems. It just bothers me that the stupid thing broke only a few months after I got it, even if it was used. It also bothers me that I can’t seem to let go of wearing a Fitbit, even if I don’t use them for anything other than telling the time. It’s become a part of my identity to forever wear a fitness tracker that does me pretty much no good at all. Considering that, I do wish it mattered to me less that they tend to die within a year or so. I really just need to start wearing bracelets, which would fix the problem nicely. 

     

Dreams of Normalcy

 Why is it that only normal people
Are allowed to dream of a place that's safe?
When will I be allowed to be fooled
By that which I cannot have? 

The Last Post of February

     Throughout most of 2023. I decided to publish as much of my backlog of poems as I could. I tried to overwrite from month to month, as a way of making sure I always had a backup, but I eventually had so many poems it was hard for me to tell what I had published and what I hadn’t. So I decided that if I thought it was at all publishable, I would publish it, and I wouldn’t write anything else until I’d started running low. Well, I’m running low, or at least I’m at the point where I can scroll down to the bottom of the One Note Notebook I use for my unpublished poems and see the most recent unpublished poem up top. I have about two-months worth of poems (for Monday, not for Wednesday and Friday) left to get up, so I’m trying to come up with more things to write poems about. 

     For this reason, I’m trying to think of what I think our future should be like. Most of what I wrote about in 2022 was just complaining about how sucky our present was (I figured that since no one was reading what I had to say anyway, I might as well). I sort of took a break last year, mostly because I wanted to up the quality of my writing so I started practicing daily. I’m trying to get to the point where I can hold a train of thought long enough to, theoretically, write a novel. I wouldn’t say I’ve mastered that, but I decided to try and get back into writing posts because I was getting tired of writing for no one, especially when I’m proud of at least some of what I’m writing. 

    I don’t want our future to look anything like our present. That sounds, and feels, so wrong but it’s very much true. On some level, I don’t expect our world to change much at all. I keep expecting that the things that made up my past will persist, in some way, into our future, only to find that suddenly they can’t for some reason. Though I don’t think that I keep imagining a world that, from our vantage point, looks crazy and immoral just because it’s easier. To me, the biggest problem is that we’ve been unsatisfied with our world for a long time. We’ve done things the easy way for a long time, and we’ve just kind of accepted that they have to be what they are. I think that we’ve reached the point where, at the very least, we want to be unsatisfied in a different way.

      This has led me to a future where everything is simultaneously more subdued than our current world, and much more out there and crazy. It is a world where people insist the world belongs to them, and their rebellion takes the form of finding the mindset that best suits them and their views. There’s superficiality, but there’s a depth to it that our current world lacks, one not brought by people doing as they say, but by people using both their worlds and actions to create a stronger, more cohesive narrative about their lives. People know about the Infinite in this world, and almost everyone knows how to manipulate their Dreamworlds to some degree. There are still those who become Nazis, but they do so willingly and not just because propaganda was shoved down their throat. When people want to leave the Dreamworld they were born in, they can do so easily and safely, without accidently becoming in ensnared in something dangerous either built by someone else or that they accidently created themselves. 

      Someday someone will look at Infinitelism with a critical eye and tell me all of the ways in which it does not make sense. I know this, and I’ve accepted this. Whether I’m right or not, I’d be a little disappointed in the world if this didn’t happen. What good is the Dreamworld I’ve built for myself if I can’t defend it, after all? As time goes on, and I look at a world of people convinced that they have to live in a Dreamworld tied to reality in order to survive, I’ve found myself wondering if my ability to live in a world cut off from reality might be more vital than I thought. Unlike most Conspiracy theorists, I can live in reality and even accept that I might be wrong sometimes. I don’t know if that’s because I’m right or because I believe in what I’ve created enough that being wrong doesn’t hurt me. What I do know is that I see a lot of people who seem to be lost, trapped in a world they can’t make sense of. They’re stuck in a world that they can’t believe in anymore, and they aren’t able to create one they can believe in by themselves. What help they can get doesn’t seem up to the task, at least to me. Mostly because I think sometimes the best thing for your own sanity is rejecting reality, at least the parts of it that weren’t built with you in mind. After all, once upon a time racial discrimination was common. If the right people hadn’t said that this wasn’t a reality they would accept, the world wouldn’t have changed.