I’ve been depressed before and it’s like a constant grey weight a cloud with physical substance that settles onto you like a chainmail cloak and makes it impossible to get out of bed or do much of anything and this isn’t like that really. It’s like I read somewhere that some people do psychedelics and instead of seeing everything as emanating light love they come to think of the world as a nice clean ball of rock that’s been infested with crawling life everywhere and if we could just get rid of it then things would be simple again. It feels like that some days and sometimes it feels like they’re calibrating how much they can take from us everyday before too many of us start to crack under the pressure.

Like remember in Star Wars when that big slug was going to throw Luke and his friends into that desert monster. They said that thing wasn’t just going to chew them up it was going to keep them alive for hundreds of years to feed on their suffering and that’s how it feels now there are screens everywhere in my pocket on the train platform on the streets and they’re all showing me ads and sometimes the ads are for real things I don’t need like new shoes and perfume but sometimes they’re not for anything at all, fake games and products and services and scams. An infinite scam vortex that sucks everything down into itself and some people are just stirring the pot at the top and the only way to get by it seems like is to put your hands on the spoon.

A guy at a party said that he was marrying a Christian fundamentalist but he really into Zen and he couldn’t explain why he was marrying her, he seemed kind of sad about it. People wonder why people are retreating into obviously insane bullshit like Catholicism and part of it sure is trying to stand out in a sea where it feels harder and harder to do that everyday but part of it I want to believe is looking for something you can hold onto, some kind of connection to history that makes more real what you’re living instead of escaping into the unreal through infinite entertainment, games and TV shows that never end and invite you to invest more and more of your self into them. I bummed a cigarette off the guy at the party and smoked it out the window and there was this little cat there who was only ten weeks old which seemed so strange, that something could be so new to the world but new things are birthing all the time.

Of course everybody wants to escape and I’m no different because I want to escape somewhere where the virus of connection hasn’t saturated but there aren’t really any places like that left and to get to them you really need money or to know how to live off the land which of course I don’t being a city kid. It’s funny how growing up we all had to tell our parents that the internet and computers were these great things that were exposing us to all kinds of new and interesting situations while they thought they were dangerous or just a waste of time and now most of them have been fully sucked in and more and more of us want to live without them because they’ve gone from someplace we could visit to this oppressive web we can’t crawl out of.

Maybe I’m just getting old and maybe I’m feeling left behind by the constant whirl and churn and feeling like I got here just after things started to go to hell and now I’m scraping forever in the algorithmic storm fighting to be seen like everybody else is except for the people who know better or don’t care, I forget that there are so many of them sometimes, the people who stayed in their hometowns and married their high school sweethearts and there’s no trace of them on any social media I wonder how it is for them to live.

As for artists M. says he is writing for himself that he doesn’t care if he gets accolades or other people like it and that’s probably the best way to be, finding meaning in the work but some days that still feels so hollow. You have to do a lot of things I think like how Marx said you’d hunt in the morning fish in the afternoon and write poetry in the evening. I can’t remember if he said write poetry exactly but I’m a poet so that’s what I’m claiming. Some of these people online think we’re going to use technology to create a fully automatic world, a fully automatic space communism where nobody will have to do anything they don’t want to. I get why they want that but it’s just Heaven for atheists, it’s not a real future. It’s always built on other people’s backbreaking soul-sucking work like those workers in Kibera who were training AI for garbage pay because the company claimed it would disrupt the local markets too much if they paid them to sort through gore and hell porno so someone could use AI to generate insipid landscapes and claim they’re an artist.

And it’s not like those people are just suffering for our sakes in America either because automatized bullshit makes things more horrible for us too like we’re ants surrounded by this vast increasingly complex structure that makes the world more alienating everyday and isn’t even necessarily making our lives easier just more and more bounded by arcane rules and pretty soon we’re going to need priests to appease all this stuff to make it work. We’re ants and they’re holding magnifying glasses up to us to see how long we’re willing to suffer before our bodies crackle and give out but did you know that there are 2.5 million ants living on the planet for every single human being and if they decided today to kill all of us they would probably win and there are a little under three thousand billionaires alive today which means there are about 2.9 million of us for every billionaire there is. I just thought that was interesting.