(7/13/21)

Whenever I’m driving home from work at like 2 AM, I see the worst traffic accidents. A few weeks ago I saw two cars flipped over, like two giant beetles in the middle of the highway. 

Things stick out when you drive. Everything–the things you see, the lyrics in the songs on the radio, what people say on podcasts, conversations. I like driving. There’s no pressure to be anywhere, to do anything. You just have to drive. You are stuck in the peaceful in-between, in the stretch between one destination and another. I like spending time in that liminal space between places. I can observe my thoughts better. Even though it’s not usually physically quiet in my car, it’s quiet in a different way. It’s like time stops. Multiply that with night time, which also feels like stopped time, and it just feels like everything is standing still. There’s no pressure. I mean I’m sure you can get somewhere faster by speeding or something but I’d rather spend more time in my car than out wherever. There’s a lyric in a Front Bottoms song: “I like the in-betweens, I like the time it takes to get somewhere,” which basically explains it. Sometimes I wish it took me longer to get to places. I wish I didn’t have to pay for gas.

A few weeks ago, I felt like I was waiting a lot. Not like, in line at the grocery store, but like in less physical, less acute ways. Like, waiting to hear back about a job application. Waiting to hear back from somebody. Waiting for life to get a little more stable to really start living.

But that’s a really shitty way to spend your time. That’s a weird phrase–spend your time. You can’t spend your time. Time isn’t money. You can’t save it up. Time just passes, regardless of what you do with it. That’s something I tell myself a lot.

Anyway, waiting sucks. Not the physical act, because waiting I think is never a physical but always a mental exercise. A mental exercise of anxiety and restlessness and I dislike it. Waiting isn’t necessary because it doesn’t make time move faster, but I find myself doing it anyway. And waiting is necessarily an action of nondoing, like it prevents you from doing things. It prevents you from action. Waiting is an odd state of limbo.

So I stopped waiting and now I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing but I’m not waiting anymore. I’m trying to live in the vertical depth of time. When you’re really focused, you can split the seconds into longer things. If you really get down to it, you can press the grit out of a millisecond. Hear the fucking flute in the edges of a song. Feel your breath hitting your upper lip, things like that.

They say time moves faster as you get older, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think you just stop paying attention the older you get. So time bleeds faster. You pull the fibers out of the minutes and so they lose their texture.

I compulsively check the status on my packages whenever I order something. I know it doesn’t do anything but I do it anyway. I think this compulsion translates to other parts of my life. 

If I don’t leave the house once a day, and talk to a godforsaken person, I about lose my mind.

So anyway, I think we’re constantly existing in in-between spaces, I mean the whole space between birth and death is a liminality. So you could be constantly waiting for something, you could say “we’re all waiting for death” or whatever, but that just isn’t true. Waiting is a thing you do with your mind, not a state of existence. Uncertainty is always; you can’t wait to know things. That’s what makes life fun; that’s just the way it is. You can only ever exist between things. Like what Bill Hicks said, “the world is like a ride in an amusement park,” that comedian I don’t know anything about, but he’s sampled in this one song, “Games,” by Alex Wiley. So living is kind of like driving.

Something said about having to work on yourself before pursuing other people. But that work is never done, let me tell you. Hopefully you will always be working on yourself. And you need to figure out a balance because otherwise it will suck. It’s a constant push-pull, the equilibrium is hard to maintain, but where’s the thrill in being perfectly balanced? If you’re on a balance ball and you’ve somehow mastered your center of gravity it’s not fun anymore. Regardless of what situation you’re in, I mean you should be somewhat prepared, but if you don’t fucking live and take risks then it’s all for naught in my opinion. I’m trying to make my twenties fun and interesting. 

Speaking of, habits are important.  I really need to force myself to write every day, to meditate, to brush my teeth or whatever. Exercise and shit. God it feels good to just everything in my brain go on the page. Just spill. The constant fight between stability and wanting to pursue things. You can’t wait. You have to gradually add them into your life. It’s best to jump into things before you think you’re ready, I think. That’s the best way to learn. You’ll never be ready. What am I trying to say. There’s a certain level of preparation and then you just gotta dive. Preparation is dumb. I don’t like to prepare. Ten minutes is a long ass time. 

This is the right way to write—brain matter spilled onto the page incoherently, then you pick out the good pieces and stick them together. Letting your subconscious fill the page, no gate, no nothing. I tried to write coherently from the beginning but that’s the wrong way. Vomit is the right way. It’s like emptying your brain. Taking out the trash, if that’s what needs to be taken out. Letting your neurons fire. Free association. It’s liberating; the muse that’s supposed to be making godly, precise writing flow out of me, she’s actually quite the opposite of eloquent.

People can feel your inner state. I know it. Because I feel calm around certain people and not around others, and it has nothing to do with anything I say or hear. But I could be fooling myself. I could always be fooling myself. 

Let me enlighten you to Near Death Experiences. The divorce rate for those who experience near death experiences is really high, because one person goes through this insane experience that changes the way they view reality and the other person doesn’t and then their values are unaligned. 

Reading about NDEs and that book The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test along with a few other things have sort of convinced me that consciousness exists outside of the brain. 

In the Eckhart Tolle book I’ve been reading, it says people who are not in touch with their bodies enough, “begin to look not only for substitutes for that natural state of well-being within, but also for something to cover up the continuous unease that [they] feel when [they] are not in touch with the aliveness that is always there but usually overlooked. Some of the substitutes people seek out are drug-induced highs, sensory overstimulation such as excessively loud music, thrills or dangerous activities, or an obsession with sex.” 

So as somewhat of a thrill seeker, that sort of resonated with me and makes me feel like I need to play a sport or something.

Let me enlighten you to the thrill of hackysack. Me, one of the security guys, and the sound guy were playing hackysack at last week’s show. The event was kind of dead so there wasn’t much to do, plus the event wasn’t gonna end until 2 AM. We got up to five consecutive hacks. I think playing hackysack made me realize how good physical activity feels.

I’ve always wanted to be good at hackysack every since I heard that’s what Rivers Cuomo did on tour all the time. It’s weird to trace the line of what you did, what your obsessions were, to who you are today. I am very indebted to Rivers Cuomo for a lot of things. I don’t know how that happened. I don’t listen to Weezer all that often any more. But I don’t need to trace out the past.