Of Time

A popular sci-fi concept is time dilation. To have others experience lifetimes in your personal seconds, depending your location or other circumstances. But I don’t think you need to travel to other planets to experience it.

While I sit on this flight I can’t help but find myself disoriented. Not on how time isn’t trivially changing, like timezones or the semi-permanent cabin night of the shuttle. It’s how, in this movement, so I find myself unlodging whatever essence of what I am. And I can’t help but feel as if they happened the day before, despite the years in temporal distance.

And while I am confronting the book of my life, a book I desperately try to erase, downplay, leave attachments to some high power, I also feel this time dilation gap between other passengers, or those even here, on neocities. Some moments I feel as though I am walking through a graveyard; others I feel as though this is the to-be-landing meteoroid site. Yellow flames to mark the new age, superseding the deluge.

The further in physical distance the more it seems to warp my sense of narrative, what began or ended. Just the other day we gathered on the driveway, figuring out how to get to the party for Halloween. Maybe hello and goodbyes are disingenuous at its core; no matter how well intended we’ll still always visit one another in random sparks of reminiscence.

The most uncomfortable aspect of time dilation, in my supposed version we all experience, whether in flashes of memory or shifts, moments to incite a differential between our understanding, the most uncomfortable is being aware of it. I am aware I am entering something I cannot even begin to conceptualize: all I know is that I can only imagine the fallout, with the older faces, the disillusionment, the hope inbetween.

You think you have this steady concept of everything, but one pencil out of place and you’re framing everything anew, and foreign, and I guess I always say if you got here once you can get here again, whatever situation you’re in.

So is written, another chapter, and instead I’d like to propose it a whole new book. I don’t recognize the person in my memories from even a year ago; it’s only a folly to connect them.

Of The Place Beyond Suburban and Urban Living

I’ve landed in a large city.

One thing not so often acknowledged is that we live in the ghosts of past cultures or even those as late as the 90s and whoever was the most hip then. The fact is if you had a coin flip and were either transported to the 80s or today, it’d be hard at first glance to tell what’s that different.

To exasperate this so the Internet maintains a mausoleum of these prior ideals, ways of life, polishes them, propagates them, but the trouble is that these ideals no longer reflect reality, and the trouble is that they still take up all the talking space. This is a large reason why I funpost online: I want to write over the towering and static imposition. Here is what I am currently, presently, really witnessing, here are the facts, and it’s rare to feel it reflected in the dusted museum of the net.

The typical portrayal of a city, for example, is one of opportunity and socializing, breathing and living. But I think my mind is messy in today’s unspoken alter-reality, because all I can sense is something unsettling. This may, in fact, just be jet lag.

Though in this jet-lag state I gave it a bit more thought and I think the reason why I find urban living to be (specifically to me in my neurosis) potentially disheartening (in a specific flavor, jet-lag induced) as suburban living is that it feels just as fake and just as a dead end. Both are potential prisons, but at least in suburbia you can LARP about “leaving” the prison (though you rarely do).

By “leave” I mean assert some sovereignty and explore interests that pay dividends, because that’s all you can do.

The fact is, whether in suburban or urban I always ask, “how does one spend the time?” And if that answer is some form of employment of a super specialized case that, in a practical lens, doesn’t do much, then what’s the point? If that answer is that you get to go from shop to shop and district to district without any larger synthesis, I don’t know. That fills me with anxiety.

I don’t know why I think like this.

Anyway, these feelings are always playing in the back of my mind, and are probably accentuated due to all the travel and newness.

Of Understanding Other Bloggers

It was the jet-leg.

Anyways, it’s been roughly three years and change since funposting, and of course in those three years I keep tab (however silently) on others. And whether under different accounts and at least now this one, nevertheless there’s never been much formal correspondence. Sometimes I feel as though we’ve already discussed everything without a conversation. I feel that way about a lot of the people I see on neocities.

In any case, I was always slightly enthused following along the bloggers I do, wherever they reside and plant themselves in their scene, because a distant place is a platform in which one could glean deeper into the essence of what’s left from home, from the remains of home. Of one’s threaded sense of being. If that’s what you want to do, of course.

James Joyce lived in Dublin most of his childhood, then switched about between the Switzerland and France or some other European country for the remainder of his years. Despite that, he always wrote in the setting of Dublin, because he wanted to capture its essence. When I first learned of this “literary” move I was a little perturbed: a city you devote your whole being to, wouldn’t you want to live there? But now I see: it is at this distance one can understand the implicits. You can try to comment on the fish tank from the inside, but you’ll only be struck by the invisible walls, the matter-of-facts which betray an honest reflection.

It is only by adorning the bystander role, the traveler, can one give an honest appraisal and perhaps convey the essence of everything they hold close.

The places I come from never seemed so clear, and when you spend a lot of time trying to dismiss it, one cannot help but inevitably give in how much some trails of blood shaped you. Even now flashes of college friends and high school buddies haunt me, and now it becomes more clear: the strands of isolationism found budded in the most innocuous choices, dodging hugs or trips.

In either case, I bring up other bloggers because I’ve always envied how they have objects to talk about, that there words have a place. There is an in medias res to the post, a grounding, physical happenings, and I never had that. The last time I bothered to talk about anything physical was another one I’ve been avoiding, and feel too shameful to recollect it here. For the most part it’s always just floating in the caverns.

Now that I am international, too, maybe finally I can don a proper seal and stamp of a Blogger. Instead of cultivating a trail of writings that try to fashion a house out of a mental wasteland. Now I can physically suggest, while shopping about the supermarket, I definitely am somewhere physically, a strange land, an interesting one, a place where I can write and not feel as though I’m exposing myself, and the inner fog will clear as the time goes on.

Of A Theme

I have purposely not researched this trip or things to do. Whenever I’m not sure what’s next, all I do is look up the region and click on the top SEO article and, sure enough, there is more to do.

One thing that surprised me was the silence. It has been more peaceful roaming these streets than whatever I’ve experienced in the last five years. Silence can cleanse your heart more than you can imagine; ideally paired with sublime nature.

Whenever I hold my phone up to take a picture, I wonder how many have stood in the exact same spot to snap the same photo for their own personal narrative-to-craft. I’ve always been a little suspicious of photos, because one can inadvertently focus more on the photo acquisition process rather than enjoying the place, today.

At times I feel like the tracks have already been laid before me, of all the other tourists, and I’m just following in line. To fully acquiesce to the thought there is nothing novel I am bringing here. My primary function is to inject foreign money into the economy.

Amusingly enough I feel like there is already plenty of literature to gush about any travel place of interest. Sometimes it seems like that era came and went, too, and now we’re in a post-written world. The doors are closing, and I feel it with each step. Which I don’t mind at all. I don’t feel too compelled to add to it nor bemoan how little there is for me to say and reflect on, the philistine I am.

Frankly I feel that’s most of the point: to comment on how little there needs to be for comment. The silence, bird calls, clean paths, maintained gardens and that’s all one could hope for.

It’s funny how, even though I’m now in a physical place, international, finally have the ability to talk with an anonymous guarantee seeing as how huge the place is, I can’t shake the habit of avoiding all conversation about it, even properly labeling it. Now I’m committed to talking about cities abstractly.

Maybe it’s because it’s extending a respect to the physical world. I don’t feel like you need words in the physical. Everything feels self-evident; while zipping around it feels I’ve already been here for years. Signing up for the train card was egregiously simple, at least.

I was laying in one of the large parks, open grass, and while looking around in such expanse and varied trees, those nearby happily eating under the shade, I instead contemplated how sometimes I feel as though there’s something in my blood that blocks my perception. It screams at me: I have things left to do, why am I here? It’s easy to feel neutral about it all, but most of the time roaming around thus far I only wonder about whether people get enough meaning in the metropolis.

I would wonder about the patchwork mechanic of such well-built infrastructure and tech. How it paves over the widening void found anywhere else in the world: lack of new values.

It always amuses me, sometimes reading complaints of distant places from Westerners. The complaints about how it doesn’t do things the way they ought to from where they’re from. The place is as it is today because of the people within it. You can’t transplant it, you can’t just merge all the good with all the good elsewhere, and you never will, and that’s okay. This is why also I find commentary a little silly.

I’m not sure what I hope to accomplish, but thus far I am waiting for the theme to emerge. Looking for things that can’t be put into words; a type of target you can try writing towards, I suppose.

Of Nothing

With a few more days and varied exploration it seems I have reverted to the default mode of existence. It’s not that I desperately try to erase the book of myself; I am just not that interested in it. There is nothing to say. I am without opinion, on all that I’ve seen. Though there are some commentaries, such as living as kings we do seem, or what happens next is a best guess. Nevertheless one’s mind gets clearer each day, and that’s all you can hope for.

Sometimes I think about what it means, to find yourself squeezed and distilled into a dew drop, of all the troubled moments and confessions; it’s not that I don’t admire art, but the best type of art, in a humble view, is the art that makes you feel empty.

My favorite feeling in the world is one of emptiness, frankly. All of the other emotions suggest there’s something missing, ironically. Only when you have everything do you get to feel empty.

Additionally, you can’t force what happens most of the time. I can feel the other part of myself, the alien infestation, conjuring up things for me to “stamp” as my thoughts. I can see that coming, certainly. But for now, I only take things day by day, as always.

Of A Loving Shopper

Sometimes I wonder how different it’d be to share this experience with someone that loves shopping. Would I still feel empty looking at all the price tags, or would the methodical request to do some currency lookup leave some amusement?

Perhaps I’d have even more tasks, whether in photo evidence or reminder, pinning locations on maps to find them once more, later, when needed, certainly, some logistics hashing pending. Perhaps another checked bag will solve everything.

We really do live in the Age Of Choices, and men much more resourceful than me outfitted entire cities as shopping centers to a shareholder’s delight. And however crisp these TVs do show (and looking up differences between miniLEDs and originals) I can’t seem to figure out what I could buy other than the same 4 ingredients to homecooked meals.

Maybe one day.