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running low, or at least I’m at the point where I can scroll down to the bottom of the One Note Notebook I use for my unpublished poems and see the most recent unpublished poem up top.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. 

Your World of Lies

 Your world is a world of lies,
A world of safety as thin and full of holes
As lace. 
Your world is one that promises eternity
Yet can't deliver on tomorrow.
Your world is a world of danger,
Dread,
And despair.

Imaginary Conversations with Imaginary Critics

     One of the things I believe about Dreamworlds is that they should be built to withstand criticism. Not ignore it, not resist it, but instead take it and try and build around the problems people have with it even if they’re minor ones. I know, most Dreamers figure this out early on, or else they wind up getting hounded out by everyone else. 

     As a blogger with an audience generously measured in the single digits (although it seems to be growing) I don’t face criticism for my writing that often. Which I’m okay with, considering that my delusion of choice is that I’m an amazing yet undiscovered writer. As someone who believes in a world made by herself for herself, I do wonder whether or not there’s some sort of issue I haven’t thought of. Something that makes it impossible to believe in both my preferred philosophy and the reality in which we live. You know how with most conspiracy theories, you find that you can only believe in them if you choose not to believe in anything else? I’m trying to avoid that, since the whole reason I created this was that I was a science nerd who desperately wanted to believe in some sort of all-powerful being. Which, of course, eventually led me to deciding in some sort of super sentient Universe trying to keep itself together as best it can. Hey, it works for me. 

      The thing about being any sort of religious wacko, especially if you essentially live in a cult of one, is you wind up thinking you hold some sort of key to understanding the Universe. What I see is real and makes sense to me, so it must also make sense to everyone else as well, right? Not helped if you believe in something so hidden that our Universe is trying to protect us from it, so it’s not only unfalsifiable but the smaller the number of believers, the more convincing your ideology seems to be. Put like that, the chances of it becoming mainstream are nonexistent. Hell, I’m convinced that someone will eventually figure out a way to prove that it’s wrong. I’m pretty smart, but I was never the best at physics. I’m okay with that, not in an “I’ve made peace with it” way, but in an “I’m smart enough to figure out that if this were true we’d be in danger” way. That’s why I write about it so much, I’m certain that it’s true and I’m pretty sure even a casual observer can tell that most of us live as though it is true. Most of psychology is devoted to the idea that most of what we see isn’t real, it’s just an approximation, and most modern literature is about how we use stories to make life simpler and more exciting. In such an environment, I find the fact that we don’t take the subject of fantasy seriously to be maddening. What we believe and why will be the thing that forms our future, we need to be talking about it a lot more than we are. 

      I won’t act like I believe in only reasonable things that can be backed by proof. For example, I believe that influence always goes both ways, even in situations where that shouldn’t physically be possible. So every time your favorite creator changes your mind, you’re also changing them in some way even if you can’t see it. Sometimes it’s an exchange, sometimes an enhancement of something both of you already believed, sometimes something else, but the influence is always there. 

       I know that I don’t have an audience, but even if I did I feel like I wouldn’t be criticized all that much because there isn’t a lot to criticize. There’s a lot of ideas and words, but not a lot of clear explanation because I never explain this to anyone. No one in my life knows that I believe in most of this. I wish I could discuss this with someone, but I have a deep dark suspicion that people would just think that I’m crazy. Why wouldn’t they? I believe in something so unreal that I believe our reality was built to protect us from it. I don’t even think that an external reality that exists regardless of what we do is real. I believe in an innate consciousness shared by everything in the world because I think the only thing keeping our world together is that everything in our Universe believes in our Universe and is following its rules. How much crazier can you get? Let’s also not overlook the fact that a philosophy designed to build realities is a huge danger to the world. Just imagine what kind of trouble we could get into if someone like Donald Trump found out about this. 

     I’m in a weird position. As the one person who believes in this particular set of beliefs (that I know of, and I know a lot of people believe in parts of this), I simultaneously want everyone to know about this and am worried about what will happen when someone who isn’t me finds out about this. Will they laugh? Get Angry? Steal my ideas and build a cult? What if someone decides that I am building a cult? What if it turns out that I am building a cult? Do cult leaders know what they’re doing? How do they find out before it’s too late? No one talks about this much. In our world you either join a religion or you become an atheist of some sort. Only bad people try and build their own belief system to explain what goes on in their lives. 

      Maybe that can be your takeaway from this blog. I don’t want Infinitelism to be the end point anyway, and I’m certain that most people want something more solid than the idea that there’s something out there that science can’t explain. I did. So I made that something. Maybe you can to. I’m not the only one who knows that we need something to believe in. I think it’s time we move past prophets, and into a world of people who are just trying to figure out what reality looks like to the little creatures who are trapped in its embrace. 

Alone

 To influence the world, you must let yourself be influenced in turn. 
This is my mantra,
These are the words I let guide my life.
Yet now the world has been closed off to me,
And no one will let me speak out.

I feel so alone,
Unwanted.
In my younger days, 
I dreamed of success,
Of joining those 
Who bring the world to life.
But in time,
It became clear that I was too stupid to do that.

I watch as my world fades
Bit by bit,
Person after person vanishing
Into the great unknown.

How am I supposed to find meaning
In this empty place?

All I can do is dream,
Dream of a future only I believe in.
A future where nobody needs to work,
So everyone's contributions have value. 

How I wish I could just write,
Just let my thoughts spill out across the page,
Never needing to fear a future where nobody cares. 

The Fall of the Internet Archive

       There’s a war going on that nobody can see, a war between the people who make money and the people who spread knowledge of what is, was and will be. One front of this war is between the Internet Archives and Americas four largest publishers. I suspect you’ve read something about it, and if you do than you know that our world has decided, categorically, that knowledge is a thing only the privileged are allowed access to. The people who run the Archive are fighting, but with everything else going wrong, nobody thinks that a library is worth saving. There is not much chance of survival. To be clear, I want it to survive. As a Dreamer, I want a world where anyone’s voice can be heard, and that isn’t the world the publishers live in. They live in a world where you charge a penny for every word someone else speaks to you, where those who made it to the top hold sway and those who have yet to make it are cast out. Small authors, unpopular ideas, things that could influence someone in a major way, these things have no place in the world the publishers want for us. All they want is a world where we give them everything, including our souls, so that they can rule over us for eternity. 

      I don’t want the Archive to just be a lending platform, I want it to be a conservation platform where you can find records of every edition of every book. I think the Archive’s role in our future is the preservation of history so we know what happened. A good example of this is the recent Roald Dahl controversy. The one where publishers decided to try and censor his work to make it more palatable to a world that has largely rejected his ideas. I don’t agree with their decisions, but since I think that our world is forgetting about him anyway I find it hard to care. What I find heinous is that they decided to retroactively doctor up any e-books they’d already sold to people without their consent, effectively erasing any record of the change. I don’t care if you think a change is justified or not, it shouldn’t be forced on your consumer base especially when a lot of them were rightly skeptical of the idea of censorship in the first place. There was no reason for them to do this. I know for a fact that most people wouldn’t have minded buying the books with changes, especially if it let them continue reading the books of their childhood without feeling guilty. Humans aren’t sinless, and most of us don’t want to put in the effort it takes to be good people. But the companies wanted to erase all trace of the censorship. I can only assume that on some level they feel guilty about playing dictator. The Archive, had it existed, would have functioned as a place of record keeping, a reminder of the kind of world Roald Dahl lived in and a place where Dreamers and Non-Dreamers alike could go and read the original texts and make up their minds about which were better. 

      Our world needs the Archive, but it also needs to be a place where anyone can access any media whenever they want to. Our world needs to be a world that we, the people, make real. Until now the job of reality maintenance laid in the hands of the wealthy, they were the ones who had access to the records that made our world last longer than a mere instance. Innovation after innovation has made it possible for us, the common people, to tell our own stories and write our own history, for good and for evil. But the publishers, indeed our leaders in general, don’t want us to write our own history because our history usually paints them in a bad light. They’re not good at their jobs and no one knows that better than them. Worse than them, though, are those who know the importance of reality but refuse to do the work needed to keep it alive. I’m told there are more authors rooting for the Archive’s downfall than are fighting to keep it up. They don’t see themselves as mere Dreamers, but as Creators, people engineering new places for people to go. They don’t see the publishers clearly spelling their doom. We don’t need a world where books can be lent out, but we do need a world where books are protected from those who wish to do them harm. Including, it seems, most of the people who write them.  

Requests of the Unreasonable

    I hope that I don’t need to say this, but I need to start by reminding everyone that we don’t live in the same reality. Most of us are lucky enough to live in a reality that overlaps with everyone we meet. All of us overlap at least a little bit. We may not agree on the difference between good and evil, but we all agree the sky is blue, and when you jump up, you’ll go back down. It’s what we don’t agree on that’s problematic. What’s good, what’s bad, where to draw the line. Our world is shaped by disagreements, by people saying that they don’t think something is right. A good thing, a bad thing, but mostly a thing that haunts us and the worlds we make.

      Our world is currently defined by extremism, but those who can’t live in our society’s, or who simply don’t want to. People like me, different on many levels, ignored by everyone for the sake of convenience. Many of the people in our society wants a world where those who can’t, or don’t want to, live in in its boundaries simply leave and go somewhere else, but that’s not feasible anymore. There’s no wild land left, countries are bound by similar rules, and even places without laws aren’t safe from pollution and warfare. It also doesn’t help that those who live in society rarely fare better than those who leave. As someone who avoids society as best she can, I find it horrifying that those who live within it, who follow its rules and sing its praises, routinely complain about the issues that keep me from wanting to join. Am I wrong in feeling on some level that if I was being punished for not following the rules, this would be better? I don’t like the feeling that even if I lived in this world, nobody would care.

      I can’t help but wonder if things wouldn’t be better if the extremists got their way. Evil would be in society, but we could at least see what we were fighting and not hold back until we got rid of it at its source. As it is, we know that our world is unwelcoming and its people unhappy, but nobody is quite sure why. I think that we all know that if extremism did make its way into our worlds core, all that would happen is that we would fight to bury it again, and then not do anything to make sure it was actually gone. I’m also very aware that the extremists are no better at building worlds than the moderates are, meaning the best we can hope for is a world that’s just as bad as what we have now.

      Still, I can’t help but dream of a world that suits me, that I can just live in without difficulty. This world just doesn’t make any sense to me at all, and whenever I try to live in it I keep running into walls. Between autism, anxiety, and a strong sense of doom, it’s reached the point where it’s been years since I tried in any meaningful way. I’m well aware that I’m lucky to have someone who can support me, and that my luck will run out, but the answer to my problems is not trying to go back to college or getting a job at a grocery store. I’ve made peace with the fact that my options are either starving to death or destroying my mental health, which will likely lead to me starving to death as well. Which is something a lot of people just don’t get; dealing with people I don’t know often isn’t safe for someone like me, and it’s increasingly becoming dangerous even if you’re what our world calls normal.

     I think what I want more than anything is for our world to stop trying to be reasonable and try to look at us as beings who feel a lot more than we thing, beings for whom a world based even superficially on logic just won’t work. Religion, belief, insanity, everything that we say divides us and makes us more vulnerable, all of this and more are things that will stay with us forever. On purpose. We were built to be unreasonable, because the act of living, of being in a form you know is temporary, is the kind of thing only unreasonable beings would do. You can’t solve extremism by being reasonable or understanding. The people who feel slighted will only listen if they believe that you feel as they do.

An Important Person

 Someday I'll have proof
That I'm an important person.
Someday I'll have proof 
That the world knows my name.
Someday I'll know for certain
That I'm not just another being
Our world will forget
Long before the end times come.

More Thoughts on AI

    I think that by this point we can all agree that “AI” is something of a bust. It could be just that it’s early days, but I feel like the tech people shoved the idea out the door long before it was ready. Most people know it’s not even an innovation, it’s just repackaging something people already didn’t like. I think that the biggest failure of AI doesn’t even have to do with the tech itself, it has to do with how it was marketed to capitalists. From the start of this tech bubble, the people in charge of marketing this have acted like this will replace humanity, right down to invoking a tech apocalypse where the tech becomes so smart that it decides that it doesn’t need us anymore. Why they thought that was a good idea, I don’t know, but at this point I think it’s safe to say that no one is looking for something to replace humanity. If we can’t work, the economy is kind of shot, and I’m pretty sure that an AI smart enough to replace us is smart enough to realize that ruling over a world is worth nothing if you have nothing to rule over. What I think people want is AI that’s capable of surpassing humanity. They want a machine capable of leading them.

      Considering the state of our government, it’s not hard to see why. Power in the United States divided between the government, who we elect, and the businesspeople, who we don’t. We’re seeing why a world where half our power is contained within positions that we can’t change if something goes wrong is a bad idea, not least because it makes it harder for us to get rid of elected leaders who are doing a bad job. It’s at moments like this that insane courses of action start to seem reasonable, in part because they feel like the only thing that will do any good. Any minor changes result in a world that, looked at up close, is exactly like what we have now. It takes time to see the effects of change, and humans aren’t good at thinking long term. 

      I don’t think that AI designed to lead us is a good idea, but even I can see the appeal. The biggest problem facing our world is that everything is in pieces. I’m not just talking about politics, but academics, nationality, culture, just about everything. There is something incredible about living in a world where you can have a group tailored to your exact personality, but the price of that is you can go your entire life without realizing your world isn’t real, so long as you don’t interact with anyone outside of your group. To an extent, this was also true in the path, but because groups were both smaller and built out of random chance, it was easier to build meaningful connections with people and you could live your entire life without seeing that it was all a lie. Now, the only way to keep your world real is to deny that anything outside of it is real, unless you devote your entire life to learning how to build a reality. Most of us can’t do that. I’ve tried, but there’s too much for me to keep track of. We need better tools to help us figure out exactly what people will accept, because even groups are full of people with contradicting interests. I’m just not sure if this is the answer, and even if it was I don’t trust the people in charge to implement it properly. 

      Frankly, I have my doubts that AI will become what we want it to be, and it comes down to the problems we’re seeing now. AI is infamous for having “Hallucinations”, caused by them learning incorrect patterns, and I distinctly remember reading stories where models claimed they weren’t making anything up. They point to what I think the real problem with AI is; it can’t see reality. Neither can we, but we interact with it on a daily basis, whereas the models only interact with the reality we feed into it piece at a time. I think it’s reasonable to say that in order to build a machine capable of interacting with reality, we first need to understand reality, and reality is made of so many moving parts that we won’t have an easy time doing that. It feels more likely that AI will become a series of tools made to help us interpret data, and not much else. Until we learn how we protect ourselves from the Infinite, I don’t think these new tools will do us much good. 

The World Can Be Better

 I want to believe 
The world can be better.
I want to believe
That our wounds will heal.
I want to believe
In the world around me,
In the people I see, 
In the future,
In something other 
Than the present moment.

Denial

     I think that our world is in denial. I don’t mean a world, I mean the world. I’ll be specifically referring to the United States, since that’s where I’ve lived for my entire life, but I suspect this is an issue that stretches worldwide, across the developed world at least. I also won’t be naming any particular examples, because I don’t think this is an issue I can convince anyone is real. Maybe someday I’ll find someone with the right terminology to explain, but for now I’ll just describe what I see as best I can. 

     I think the best place to start is in 2021, when we thought the pandemic was going to end but it actually wouldn’t officially end for another year. I distinctly remember a conversation with my mother where she insisted that after the pandemic was over, we’d go back to normal and everyone would forget all about Covid-19. I said that wouldn’t happen. We’d seen our world stop being real for an entire year, we couldn’t go back because every minute spent walking in that world would be spent waiting for it to collapse. I didn’t mention this to her, I just said I didn’t think we could go back. She disagreed. Three years on, I think that it’s safe to say that I’m right. We keep trying to go back, but nobody wants to go and every attempt is met with pushback. I think that if our leaders had made any attempt to make it feel like things were changing, we’d be able to accept this new world. But they’re not. They’re pretending that it’s still 2019, not 2024. 

      Somewhere along the way, the denial of our world’s death in 2020 became the bedrock of other, deeper denials. Chief among them the denial of a plague I don’t think anyone but me is noticing. I can’t point to anything in specific, but I get a strong sense that many people, regardless of political or religious affiliation, no longer believe that our world is real. It’s not a new thing, conspiracies have a history going back to the beginning of time practically, but we didn’t live in a world where social media was owned by people who were complicit, or even actively peddling them. This goes a little bit deeper. It goes to a world that’s seen our leaders deny that covid’s still a threat, people push for a world where obvious cons were peddled as a new way to form a reality, and where AI is making it possible for anyone to make an image depicting anything they want. Even those who don’t think the way that I do are being tormented by a sense that something isn’t right. Physics is still there, but the world they see in the media doesn’t quite match with what they see on the internet, and at this point everyone knows that could be either because the media is lying to them or because they’ve somehow ended up in an bubble of some sort. Unless you have a degree in media literacy, it’s impossible to tell, even if you know that someone is lying to you. You could go to the most trusted news source you can think of and still not be certain that someone isn’t pulling strings somewhere between where the news enters the machine and when it reaches your eyes. It’s a wonderful environment if you want to convince everyone to hate one another. 

     I don’t think it matters if physics falls apart or not. Even if you aren’t an Infinitelist, you can tell that reality is crumbling and the people who are supposed to protect us are either too weak to do anything or to insulated from consequence to care. I don’t think anyone is in denial of that. What I think they are denying is that our old world didn’t stop being real overnight. It was real because it gave us what we wanted, most of the time at least. It might not have given all of us grand mansions, but it gave us a nice place to live. It was good enough, and that’s all most of us wanted. Then it stopped being good enough, and it’s clear that it will never be good enough again. I keep seeing people pushing for a world based more on what’s real, but what they keep missing is that our old world wasn’t based on reality at all, but it was still enough to keep us happy. That’s what we need to keep in mind. Our new world might just be enough for us, but even if it isn’t run by despots, it’ll never quite be a real place. 

Be Yourself

 Silence.
A room full of people
Chattering loudly over one another,
Yet I can't say a word.
My voice speaks,
Yet I am silent
For the words aren't mine,
They're what everyone else wants to hear. 

A smart person would say,
"Let loose, have fun."
But I'm not a smart person.
I don't talk much.
I don't know how to be nice. 
In my mind I keep thinking,
"When did I stop being me?"

A Cry of Defiance

     Someday I'll figure out what parts of me are safe for public consumption, but for now all I can seem to manage is, "It's gray outside, and the mood of the world is grim." For now, all I can do is write and hope that ideas come to me. I'm told it gets easier, but at the moment I'm not sure. I'm so tired. Just living feels exhausting right now, and I'm not even one of those people who works every day. How is everyone else able to handle it? Are they just living without being alive? I hope I never figure that out, and for their sakes I hope things get better. 

      It seems almost mean to point out how horrible things are, especially when you know that you have nothing to add. For me, this isn’t an act of addition or subtraction, it’s an act of defiance, an act of telling the world that even when it destroys any and all acts of creativity, I will keep writing. I will keep writing until I physically lose the ability to write, and even than I’ll just keep writing stories in my mind. I will write so long as defiance blooms in my heart, just as everyone will keep living so long as their lungs draw breath. In a world where most things will never know life, living is an act of defiance. Dreaming is an act of defiance. Believing our world can be better is an act of defiance. 

      So long as I live in this world I will suffer. Most of us have been forced to accept that. Having realized this, I’ve decided that I can either submit to a world where I’ll be neither safe nor happy, or I can turn into a person this world will never love. Not that it would love me even if I turned myself into its slave. 

      I’m a person who dreams of the impossible because the things this world expects you to want are insultingly superficial. Clothes, but nothing that will last or be comfortable, instead you’re supposed to get something you can wear all of one time to impress strangers who don’t actually care about you. Accessories? Perhaps, but nothing that says anything about you, only something that tells the world that you have something approaching status and power. Your title is supposed to say what you got that power for. I will never have a title, or lands, or a name in this world beyond the one I was given at birth. I can’t afford to be different than who I am now, this world has seen to it, and it won’t even let me dream of the things that would let me be the person I badly want to be. It insists that everyone dreams of being a very specific form of rich person; the kind that has all the money they could want but absolutely no personality. You see them all over, people who surround themselves with others they pay to do the thinking for them because any time they think, things in their general orbit tend to catch on fire. The worst part is, you have to let the person paying think that they’re smart, because the world insists that rich people got their power legitimately even though that isn’t true. You could be the most deserving person in the world, but wealth will still only be given to you through chance. The dream of wealth exists only because without it, our world would cease to be real. 

      I’m tired of living in this world. I hate the idea that I’m only supposed to do what I do if I can figure out how to turn it into a boon for the rest of humanity. I hate the rest of humanity. It’s full of people I can only think are willfully stupid, people who are so terrified of not being right they refuse to see what’s right in front of their faces. I may be wrong about a lot of things, but I’d rather be wrong than a member of the living dead. That’s what I would be if my right to dream was taken from me, either by those above me or by those below. I don’t care what anyone says, I’m a Dreamer and that’s that. I will dream of whatever I want whenever I want to, because if there’s one thing this world can’t take away from me it’s the idea that somewhere it’s still possible to make your dreams come true. I may be crazy for believing this, but I’ll believe it regardless, because if I stop believing in it than I may as well die. 

My Truth

    I'm trying to write more posts, but it's not going well. Mostly because our decaying world has once again forced me on the search for a meaning to life. I don't care if such a thing doesn't exist, I want to have one, if only to say that I found something. I have to say, I get why religion is so important to people but I kind of wish that it wasn't. I have a lot of thoughts about why our world is the way that it is, but they're just things that I think about based on what I've read and seen, not any sort of grand revelation. I think that any future religion is going to be about the weird thoughts people have in the quiet moments when no one is looking, not some grand discovery by some great theologian. 

     I see a future where religion is a lot more spiritual and a lot less holy, with people worshiping in their living rooms and assembly halls instead of in grand cathedrals. To be fair, while I've believed in something for most of my life, I've only been in a church a handful of times (my mother's always been an atheist) so I don't know what effect a church or the presence of a belief system has on its members from firsthand experience. I just firmly believe that being religious doesn't mean being part of a church or an organized movement, the movements are just a way of letting likeminded people find one another. My problem with organized religion is that there isn’t any one I think is flawless, nor is there one that seems to have made peace with the existence of the scientific method. 

      My reasoning for creating Infinitelism, which is what I call my religion of choice, stems from me not finding a religion made for someone who wants to believe in something that will stay real regardless of what space she finds herself in. In this day and age, we’ve all been in spaces where one thing is true and other things are not, and we’ve all felt the exhaustion that comes from hearing someone in a space we frequent say something we vehemently don’t agree with but are not in a position to argue with. I hate being in spaces where I can’t make myself heard. It’s why I run a blog with no followers; you never get any love but no one complains either. I’ve always felt the need to believe in something, but nothing I found made sense, and critically believing in anything seemed to require you either believe science meant absolutely nothing or that everything in our universe happened for no reason at all. Neither felt particularly satisfying for me, so I decided to just make something up based on what I felt made sense. If you’re going to be crazy enough to believe in something in this day and age, I figure you might as well just make it up as you go along, so that’s what I’ve been doing. 

        I don’t think that Infinitelism is the ultimate truth, and I keep waiting for the moment science figures out the ultimate proof that our Universe is objectively real. That won’t happen for a while, which I’m finding strange because at least a few science types think that consciousness is universal across our Universe, so the idea that our world is just a sort of fever dream has to have occurred to someone other than me. Or at least someone has to have asked the very obvious question of, “If our world is a simulation built on top of another simulation, what would the world underneath all of the simulations be like?” Asking that is what led me to believe that reality isn’t real unless we make it real, regardless of if the “we” is living or nonliving. 

      Regardless of if it’s the ultimate truth, it is my truth, and I refuse to live in a world where I can’t live by what I feel is its basic tenants. Namely, I want to live in a world that I know is real and will stay real. Not just because it’s bound by physics, but because we as humans work to make it real. It’s not just living in a world where the accepted truth changes from one minute to the next, it’s this irrational belief I have that physics, the thing that everything in our Universe believes in, will one day stop being real and it’ll be up to us to find a suitable replacement. Until I think we’re capable of doing that, I won’t be able to feel safe in any world we choose to make. 

Rewards

 Some days the only reward I want
Is to know that my happiness
Isn't causing someone else pain.

A Response to a Post

   I should start by saying this is a response, of sorts, to this post on SubStack by Joshua P. Hill. I should also mention that this isn't really about that post. This is about me, the way I feel about the world, and what I feel we should do moving forward. 

      I’m going to assume that anyone reading this knows what a parasocial relationship is, because they’ve been talked about kind of a lot. I’m also going to assuming that you’re opinion of them ranges somewhere from neutral to negative. The overall view of the world is that if you have imaginary friends, your primary goal should be to get rid of them and make real ones instead. Upfront, I hate this attitude. A lot. I suck at interpersonal relationships, always have, and probably would struggle even if I didn’t live in a world where interpersonal relationships had grown more difficult even for allistic people (so I’m told, anyway). I can get along with other people, but I can’t form anything that feels real. I don’t know how, and nobody really wants to talk about the difference between relationships of circumstance and relationships that feel meaningful, all I hear people say, time and again is that real relationships feel more meaningful than parasocial ones. That’s never been true for me. 

     The problem, for me, is that no matter who I’m with I have to hide part of myself. The neurotypical world won’t come to terms with the existence of Autistic people who can live in society, sort of. I’m far from the only neurodivergent person who feels like unless I’m perfect people won’t accept me, and good luck being perfect when you have to have total focus or you’ll lose the plot of a conversation. There’s no one instance that made me reluctant, it was a lot of people consistently being weirded out by my behavior that made me stop wanting to connect with others. 

      What I hate about society’s reaction to parasocial relationships is that you can clearly tell that it’s the product of people who have never walked into a room full of strangers and been hit with an immediate sensation that they didn’t belong and needed to leave fast. Joshua talks about a future where parasocial relationships are unnecessary because we’ll have a community of people who love us, and I desperately wish that I could ask him what Universe he’s been living in. For some of us, parasocial relationships are the only option we have. The world we live in hates us too much to let us become part of a community.

     That’s my emotional reaction, but one thing I realized as I started writing my thoughts out is that, in a way, we all kind of live in a parasocial relationship. Who doesn’t feel like the community they’re a part of, be it their town, country, or fandom, knows who they are and cares about them? Who hasn’t referred to a group of people as though they were a consciousness independent of any member? Hell, we even have the phrase “Collective Conscious” implanted in our society. I’m not alone in growing up in a world that expected me to form a parasocial relationship with it. Most religions assume that you’ll spend a lot of time in prayer, singing hymns, celebrating holy days devoted to various gods, and forming a community based around the church, the people in it, and the gods that it’s meant to worship. I’d go so far as to say that true community is impossible without parasocial relationships. We need to believe in something in order for it to be real to us, so in order for a community to be meaningful, we need to believe that it’s a real thing that’s doing real good for us and for our world at large. 

     This is just my reaction, but reading this post feels like someone saying that just because something isn’t real, that means it can’t have meaning or purpose. As someone who doesn’t believe in external, objective reality and thinks that everything is meaningless until we give it meaning, I find this troubling. Not problematic, exactly, but it feels like the first step to saying that we don’t have to worry about our world falling apart because it doesn’t involve our input at all. I know that’s not what he wants to say, but that’s what I feel like he’s saying. Maybe I’ve just gotten too involved in a religion only I believe in, but I don’t think a world becomes real just because you get a lot of people together who want to make it real. You need to give them something to hold onto, something they can make their own. If you take away their ability to fantasize, than you’re left with nothing but the dust of hope and the remains of a belief system. 

Your World of Power

 Your world is a world of power,
Of strength,
Of belief in the impossible.
Your world is a world of power,
But to me it's the only thing stopping me
From falling into the Infinite. 

The Cost of Dreaming

    Ever since October 7, we've been watching Israel push Gazans as far as they can, and now it looks as though their final plan is coming into fruition; bombing Gaza until not a single person is alive. A million people, dead, the image burned into our minds for all eternity. In my mind I remember a video I saw about a month ago on X, the corpse formerly known as Twitter, of a Democratic senator saying that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza didn't matter, that by the time of the next election, we would have all forgotten. A million people, killed, by the hands of the country that financed this "war". A war between those with guns and those who have done nothing but run for their lives. A war between the media and the journalists desperate to get the truth out. A war between those who want to live in a virtuous nation, and those who believe that as long as we don't televise the death, we don't have to face the consequence for murder. 

      What angers most people is that our country could be this openly cruel even the fascists aren't (technically) in power. What bothers me is that there's nothing we, the people, could have done to prevent it. It's openly known that we're funding Israel's genocide, and yet when we screamed at our politicians to do anything to stop this, all we could get them to do was to pause the fighting briefly. They had months in which to stop what's clearly going to happen, but they didn't. You can't tell me they didn't know this was coming. They had access to the top military data in the country. If an idiot like me could see that Israel wouldn't stop until every man, woman and child was dead, they could see that too. Yet we, the people, the one who elected our politicians to office, can do nothing but sit back and watch. Even if we were to seize the means of production now, it would be too late. 

   The reasonable voices in our world are telling us to keep things in perspective. Any price is adequate, if it means keeping us safe from the Infinite. Then you realize that the world is expecting you, an average citizen, to shoulder the burden of a million deaths in order to keep your world going. That’s when you look around and see that most of your friends and family are perfectly willing to accept this price, assuming they will still be alive when this is over. Everywhere you look, you see people not talking about this, assuming they can’t cover the nuanced issue of a world leader butchering a bunch of innocent people just to throw his weight around. At best you hear people mention that Israel has oppressed Palestine since its inception. Mostly you don’t even get that.

     There will be those in the months ahead, as we are treated to picture after picture of people dying preventable deaths, who will claim the fault lies with Egypt for not opening its borders. As if the fault would lie with anyone who doesn’t lie down to authoritarianism. Even if Egypt were to open its borders now, that would solve nothing. The problem isn’t that we as a society killed millions of people, the problem is that we decided that the death of millions was a reasonable price to pay in order to protect ourselves from seeing the Infinite. If that’s true, than I must ask; what will it take for our world to change? Is the death of our country enough to scare you? Is the death of our planet enough to scare you? Is the potential death of our Universe from breaks in reality, preventable only through understanding of how our physics were created, enough to scare you? All of these and more will happen if we don’t agree that seeing the Infinite is a small price to pay for keeping our world alive.

     Ever since October 7, I’ve been watching people fight with all that’s in them to keep this from happening. Now, upon seeing they can do nothing but watch as a million people die, many are breaking. This is not awakening them to the Infinite. This is the moment they realize that as long as our world is alive, they will never be safe from the Infinite. Our leaders, safe on their mountains, refuse to believe that we’re in trouble. I’ve had enough. We’ve all had enough. All we want is to live in a world where we never need to see the Infinite, and no matter how hard I look I can’t find one anywhere. Should we be surprised, then, that a new world is being born?

A Cry of Desperation

 Those living on borrowed time,
Before the gods remember why they hate us,
Are trapped.

How can we escape a planet that won't notice us?
How do we flee forwards in time?
They say there's an answer,
That happily ever after is only a song away.

How can you give up everything
For a world you do not love?
How do you have faith in Gods
Who do not want to listen?

What do you do when you can't stay
But have nowhere to go?
Why am I a worse person
For not wanting to exercise the few rights I have?

Morality changes.
I hope that someday we'll move past the idea
That only one kind of work is valid,
That a person who can't keep a house clean
Is impure.

I want to live in a world where work is plentiful,
And the workday short.
Failing that,
I wish that there was no work at all.

I wish there was a world
Where housing was free,
Food plentiful and cheap,
Everyone was guaranteed enough money
To survive,
And no one had to wait for the day their parents 
No longer love them.

If you're listening,
Then I must ask;
Why is there a world that only half of us believe in?
Why can't you help the rest of us be heard?
If we don't believe in you,
You'll fade from existence..
If you want to last until tomorrow,
Show your followers the truth.

Transitions

    Back when I was a kid, Rhee and I used to drive down to California to visit my relatives once a year, on average. There was a point where we only went every other year, later on we went twice a year, so it averaged out to about once a year. One part that sticks out to me about those trips is the stretch of I-5 that goes over Mt. Shasta. Green, mountainous, but mostly unremarkable excepting the number of brake test areas and runaway truck ramps. I think the reason I remember it so vividly is that to my younger self it was the point where we transitioned from Oregon, which felt friendly and familiar, into California, which was not only large but strange and alien to me. It had different environments, a lot more people, and was much more important that Washington was at that time. The Tech industry didn’t dominate Washington the way it does today, and Washington doesn’t have nearly as many people. 

    When I think back to my childhood, most of what I remember is comprised of transitions. I remember when I graduated from middle school because everyone knew it would be a huge deal, so that moment stood out in my mind. I remember when I went to college, because the transition from high school to college was, and still is, one of the most important moments in the standard cultural narrative. I remember summer as the time between one stage and the next. That changed on the fall 2014, when I realized I would have to repeat a class that wouldn’t be available until the fall of next year, and I wouldn’t be able to graduate on time. That was when the transitions stopped meaning as much to me. 

      Ever since then, life has progressed slowly and rather unevenly, with a lot of me going “backwards” relative to the rest of the world. Because of this, until recently I operated as though I hadn’t changed since I turned eighteen. I’ve come to realize that my life has changed, and my opinions aren’t what they used to be either. I hesitate to say that I’ve grown though. I’ve felt for a long time that personal growth is something of a myth. We learn things, and we change, but I don’t feel that we necessarily become better or worse with time. We just pretend we do so that we can pretend that time makes us better. 

     I’d like to think that I’m a better person now than I was a decade ago. I’d like to think that I’ve grown up a little, learned a little more, become someone I couldn’t have imagined I’d be back then. I also know that I’m still waiting for the moment I know who I’m “Supposed” to be, the moment I thought I’d reached back then but began to realize that wasn’t the case. I always knew I wanted to write, to share myself with the world, but the world insisted that was a bad idea. It’s what I’m doing right now, and no one cares about what I have to say. They’re too busy focusing on their own problems to worry about mine. 

    Maybe grade school got me into the habit of waiting for the next big moment of my life, the moment when I knew I was ready for the next step. I lived in our world for so long, I’d come to expect that there would be a place for me, even when there wasn’t. Now I’m trying to make a place for myself. Sort of. 

     I feel like I had a point to make about the importance of the big moments in our lives, but if I did it got buried in a lot of musings on who I am as a person. This is part of the reason I’m grateful it’s become clear I won’t find an audience. I can just be myself and not worry about anyone getting angry at me. I know that I have flaws, and if I was a better person I’d work on fixing them, but I’ve always felt the world should be willing to let me not live in it if I don’t want to. That way I can retain my personality without making anybody miserable. But they keep insisting that not only do I have to live with other people, but my life will only get better if I keep trying. I don’t believe them, but until we figure out a way to let people live by themselves, I don’t think I have a choice. 

A Dream House

     I’ll never forget the day my Grandfather died. My mother and I were on our way to California to visit him, and we were somewhere in Oregon if memory serves. We heard the phone ring, and I remember picking it up to answer. I don’t remember what my cousin said to me that day, all I remember is the urgency, and Rhee pulling over into a Rest stop to answer. That’s when we heard. It wasn’t unexpected, he’d been battling health issues for some time, and had been depressed for decades. It had also been a little over a year since my Grandmother died. Without her, he pretty much had no one. He couldn’t walk very far, had to be on oxygen, minimal contact with anyone who wasn’t his family. He was also the kind of person who a total stranger would find interesting, but someone close to would find despicable. His children loved him, but did not like him, and I straight up hated him. I don’t want to say that I was excited for his death, but I thought it would alleviate all my problems if I didn’t have to see him every Christmas and summer. 

     My grandfather left us enough money to buy a house, and since we lived in housing owned by the county at the time, my mother immediately set about finding us a new place to live. I knew it was coming. I wouldn’t say that I felt excited, but I did feel relieved. Our apartment complex had a whole host of issues, from remodeling woes to poor management, that had led to a general feeling that the only reasonable course was to get out of there as fast as possible. We took our time house-hunting though, wanting to find the perfect place. And we found it, or thought we did. 

     Our first contractor scammed us out of a bunch of money. Our second contractor did his best, but there were so many problems that I have doubts as to his skill, but it was my mother’s first time renovating a house and she didn’t want to find anyone else. We hoped to stay in our apartment until our house was renovated, but it took so long that we had to move in anyways. When the remodeling was complete, we kept finding issues. Finishing on the cabinets breaking, minor plumbing issues, stuff that might not have been related to the remodel but didn’t raise the house in our eyes. It’s gotten to the point that my mother says that when she retires, we’re moving somewhere else. 

     I’m a writer, so naturally this house has become something of a symbol for me. It’s a representation of what I like to think of as failed optimism. 2014 was a time of hope for me. I was in college studying for a major I thought I’d like. I was doing well in school, I wouldn’t have to see my grandfather anymore, and we’d soon be out of the crummy apartment we were living in. As the years went by, I flunked a lot of courses (in part because I didn’t know how to study), I figured out I couldn’t make it in the major I started with, and we were stuck in the apartment for years. I eventually flunked so badly I had to quit college, and the house turned out to be a major disappointment. A lot of work, and while it was in a nice part of town it didn’t fix our growing list of complaints about the town itself. This house, therefore, is a representation of the hopes I had in my early college years, hopes that wouldn’t pan out. 

     Unlike my mother, I don’t want to leave. I thought that when my grandfather died, all of our problems would be fixed. We’d have a nice house, money to pay for college (I was taking out student loans at the time), and be able to do things other than visit relatives twice a year. Ten years on, I know that while it fixed some issues, it created a lot of new ones. I don’t want this house to just represent all the ways my mother and I failed to achieve our dreams I want it to represent the ways in which we made it work out in the end. I don’t want to run away from our problems this time. I don’t know if this is where we’re meant to be, but I know we won’t find where we’re meant to go by running from place to place. I want to leave after I find myself and know where I belong. More importantly, I want to leave this house as a person who doesn’t try to solve her problems by wishing them out of existence. My grandfather shouldn’t have had to die for me and my mother to be happy. Even if it had fixed our problems, it’s not something that should have had to happen. 

Cold

 Heat has been sucked from the world
As the love for its systems lays dying.
They say they'll banish the cold,
But only if we let them
Set the world on fire first. 

A Magic Eye Poster

 There’s this great moment in BoJack Horseman where Diane tells her husband, Mr. Peanutbutter that, “Sometimes I feel like our marriage is like a Magic Eye poster. It’s messy, and at first glance it doesn’t make any sense and it’s hard to figure out. But, sometimes, if you squint at it just right, everything lines up and it’s the most beautiful, wonderful, amazing thing.” I remember that quote, because I feel like I spend most of my life looking at things that just seem to be random, messy, and nonsensical, and it’s deeply rewarding when you finally figure it out. Or, as Diane puts it, “Squint at it just right.” What really resonates with me, and with a lot of people, is when she follows it up with, “I’m so tired of squinting.” 

     Most of us are tired of squinting. All we do these days is try and make sense of senseless circumstances. Take Israels genocide of Gazan citizens. Nobody wants it, but our politicians won’t stop funding it. What sense does that make? Are they assuming our hatred of Trump and the republican party will be enough to take them to victory? Are they forgetting that not-voting is an option? That may be the worst example, but it’s far from the only one. We’re still being pushed to give up our dreams of working remotely, with excuses that no one in their right minds believes in. We’re being told that not only is Covid over, which it isn’t, but that we should forget that it ever happened. A few candlelight vigils and some memorials are all we get. Our world died, and we’re being denied an opportunity to mourn. 

     It’s not just our politicians and bosses who are forcing us to squint. It’s the idiots online who insist we overlook our president performing a literal genocide so that the worse candidate won’t have a chance to win. Never mind the fact that Trump shouldn’t even be allowed to run in the first place. But rather than question why the hell a president no one wanted who everyone knows broke multiple laws is allowed anywhere near a ballot, we’re supposed to square up and valiantly… kiss Biden’s ass to keep him in power. Any outsider looking at us right now would wonder what the hell we were thinking. We shouldn’t be voting for anyone. We should be in the streets demanding candidates who don’t suck ass. 

     Like most people, I remember the 2010s as a time of optimism. It occurred to me recently that when people talk about getting back to normal, they talk about going back to the 2010s. A time when the internet was mature enough to have good stuff on it, but still had enough diversity for you to be able to find your people if you looked long enough. The App store was garbage, but not every game was trying its hardest to be Candy Crush. Tech had hit the plateau, but it wasn’t obvious that the industry was run by idiots. You could still by into the idea that without innovation our world would have something of a future. Best of all, Trump wasn’t president, and we knew he never would be. Sure, the Republicans were pulling a lot of dangerous stunts, but no one thought that we would elect a president who could ruin America forever. 

        The problem is that in 2024, the 2010s aren’t what they really were. Like a Magic Eye poster, they were messy and didn’t make a lot of sense, because people in general don’t make any sense. So instead of remembering what happened, we remember what we thought happened, or what we wanted to have happened. For example, I remember having a Surface pro in 2013, despite not getting one until my mother gave me her old one in 2016. I only know it was in 2016 because when I got it, windows 10 had been out for at least a year, and I didn’t have a Surface with Windows 8 on it. I think that my brain combined the good parts of college with the computer that I liked (as opposed to the cheapest laptop they had at Costco) because that lined up with my internal narrative that college was perfect and wonderful until 2016. But it wasn’t. I started college with a bad laptop that I bought solely because it had a touchscreen and, for some reason, I wanted to upgrade. I hated that laptop so much I blocked it out. What else could I have blocked out? 

     Most of us look back on the past with blinders, or to borrow a comparison from BoJack Horseman, squint until our past makes sense to us. But that doesn’t fix the past. Or the present. It doesn’t erase the problems that make our world confusing and messy. It doesn’t stop the deaths of millions, or the screaming of those who just want to pretend everything is alright. At some point, squinting isn’t enough to erase all of the bad parts. That’s what life is like these days. You can’t squint anymore. You can only close your eyes and try to block out the noise. 

The Things We Forgot

 They say if they wait long enough
I'll forget the crimes they commit,
I'll forget all the things they destroyed,
I'll forget all the times they ignored me.
They say if they wait long enough, 
Time will erase me from history,
But could it get them before it gets me? 

A Distant Dream

        When I first started this blog back in 2017, I mostly wanted to live out my fantasy of being a professional writer. Not that I wrote professionally (I’m still a long way from that, actually), but it was nice to dream of one day being known as a writer, rather than as a college student preparing for a career that I had no interest in but, I was told, would pay the bills. Maybe it would have, I don’t know. I flunked out of college before I could get my degree. Now I live out my dream of writing “Professionally” and I have to say, it’s not as fulfilling as I hoped it would me. I’m not actively miserable like I was in college, so I’ll gladly take that. It’s just that as a writer, I kind of thought I’d have some sort of reach, some sort of audience to win over. I never dreamed that not only would I not have an audience, but I’d have no way of getting one, as far as I know anyways. Keep in mind that when I first started thinking of becoming a blogger, it was 2014. Anyone could have an audience in those days. Now I’d be stunned if even a celebrity could find an audience. 

     It’s really tempting to throw in the towel. I don’t mean abandon the blog. The only thing anyone has left these days are dreams of relevancy, and I’m not giving up mine. What I mean is giving up on the idea of an audience finding me and just writing my thoughts out as a kind of diary. No fear of judgement, no worries about what would happen if someone saw me for who I am, just me writing for the blog the way I write for my “practice sessions”. That was something of an original goal, write down my first drafts for stories in a place where there was just a bit of pressure, than edit for publication. That hasn’t happened, and at this point I have no idea if there will be any place that I could publish my stories in a year. The problem is that I still want to write stories. 

     There are writers out there who only write as a means of paying the bills, but I’m not one of them. I don’t write for the craft, though I greatly admire those who do. I write because I spend more time in my stories than I do in reality. My stories are my world. They’re the core of my identity, and I want a place to share them. I also have a bit of ambition, telling me that stories are only worth sharing if they’re good and if they improve the lives of those reading them. I don’t think my stories do that. I never set out to do that. I set out to tell stories that make me feel better and give my life meaning. I also set out to at least try and give a little bit more meaning to other people’s lives. We sorely need it right now. 

     I think I need to face the fact that my dream of going professional probably won’t come to pass. I’m not entirely sure I want it to, either. I love writing, but I hate the idea of only being allowed to write what my audience wants to read. I’m not scared of not making money doing this. What I am scared of is a future where I have to give this up in order to survive. Our world hates people who create for the sake of it. If you’re a creator, your supposed to create for the sake of someone else, or something else. Everything’s a side hustle, every craft a chance at success. I’m sick of it. Doubly so because it means that every artist’s dream is to make it big, even when it’s not what they want. I wish that we lived in a world where all of us could just do what we wanted to do, without needing to worry about pleasing someone else. Most of us want that, or at least to please someone whose demands are reasonable. I’m an exception. I don’t want to work for anyone and don’t want to depend on pleasing others to stay alive. I don’t think any of us should have to. I think that living in society means sacrificing some of our personalities, but that just means we should work hard to make sure no one has to make that call. 

A Simple Dream

 I open my website and see
The numbers go up,
Ten, a hundred, a thousand,
So many people see
The things I have written.

Outside a small group, no one knows my name,
Everyone who follows me loves me as I am.
I'm only a little famous, but that doesn't matter.
I've achieved what most can only dream of.

A forgotten painting in a lonely gallery,
A song sung only when everyone's left,
The bits of art no one but a few know.
They say I'm underrated,
That someday everyone will know my name.
But I know better.

I make art only a few people care about,
Because I make art for myself and no one else.
I have enough to survive,
So I'm not complaining.
It's rare to be unique
While being someone people care about.

Perhaps when I die the world will understand me.
The future will remember me as one who saw the truth.
For now, I'm happy living in a simple dream,
Watching numbers tick up slowly,
Knowing the love I see every day is real. 

     Do you ever go on a social media platform and wonder if it'll still be around in five years? There's the one everyone knows will die soon, but even YouTube carries with it a faint stench of death these days. I'm told you can still go on Myspace, but I'm waiting for the moment when someone types in Twitter.com, and is met with an error. The kind that comes from accessing a site that doesn't exist anymore. Either that, or we just get a page of updates from decades ago, a screenshot of what the web used to be like in decades past, kept alive only by those with fond memories of the 2010s. 

    I wish I knew that I wasn't a great writer because I chose not to be one. I hate this voice in the back of my head that insists that even if I wanted to be a great and memorable writer, I'd never become one. 

What's it Have to do With Reality?

 What's it have to do with reality?
Your world of stories and dreams.
Your land of heroes, villains, and bystanders
Wishing for a new world?
What does any of this have to do with our world
Of numbers that fit on a line?
How can a world of atoms and physics
Interact with the world of our minds?

      I've said before that I don't think external, objective reality exists, but I sometimes feel like I don't exist either. I feel like I'm just imagining that I exist, and when the world's looking right through me that's because I'm not even there. I feel grateful to be born during the Internet age, so that whenever I want a reminder that I exist in some way, I can just google myself and get my social media accounts. Though, that doesn't help with the uncanny feeling that I'm just a ghost who possessed a human body at some point. I don't have a job, or any friends, or any sort of connection to the outside world at all, of my own volition. Maybe I'm the one the world avoids looking at because it knows that I can't exist, because I live outside of reality.