For awhile now I usually take everything day by day. For a good bunch of reasons, but reasons not worth iterating over.
It does work. Things are calm. Things are empty, and that’s all fine and dandy.
When you asphyxiate all thoughtforms and stare directly ahead, it begins to feel like a sudoku puzzle and the expected inputs & outputs form onto the paper with or without you. Greyscale’d doorways.
It’s better than having ugly thoughts driving you insane.
Reading about all of these zen masters, they’re always laughing, and though I’m no zen master, I do laugh a lot too. You learn to laugh because it’s more fun than a grimace.
In college I remember watching Ergo Proxy or Revolutionary Girl Utena or Legend of the Galactic Heroes or Steins Gate and they all have a point (or none of them do while you’re greyscale’d) but Ergo Proxy ties itself neatly along a sickly autumn with bloated lymph nodes and learning i3 layouts for an alternative Fedora install.
When you asphyxiate all thoughtforms you don’t see these things anymore.
Watching Ergo Proxy reminds me of blinking terminals. It reminds me of how you could have some sort of naive hope that more technology will solve your problems.
It reminds me of how fun it was, to configure all the keys huddled away in the autumn haze. Single window, blurry streetlights from evernew rain you’d force yourself to walk around in if you got too antsy.
When you asphyxiate all thoughtforms, you sweep it all away. It’s all gone, and that’s the price to pay, and now when I walk around the palm trees sway with or without me. But I bet the zen masters make the palm trees sway.
It’s all about gaining control over something hardly controlled – impulsive thoughts slicing into your skull and crumpling the TV in front of you. Maybe the idea is that you gain control so you’re in a permanent Ergo Proxy sort of mood.
The good cyberpunk one. With the streetlights and string lights around your room, shades of purple-blue. Where one could program all day until bony and frayed.
There were so many pretty tints to things, whatever series or interactions back in the day. When you asphyxiate all thoughtforms it all ends and you’re in the white limbo room perpetually, hesitant about anything at all.
Right now this room could be the Ergo Proxy room, it could be a retreat, a retribution and renaissance that maybe perhaps this is our future to seize. Maybe I won’t hurt others anymore, or others will forget about me as I merge into my monitor screen.
Instead it’s blank, and it’s always blank, and I’m blank too, and I’m not sure if it’s something worth fixing.
It’s like waiting for permission to live, or a twisted punishment which has no resolution. When will I enjoy the rain and neon lights outside my window? I’m not sure.
Will I always have ugly thoughts if I loosen my grip, let them resuscitate, all of these sickly strings bundled into my nerves, bundled into the midnight viewings of a new age horror film?
When I get especially stressed I like to make my room as dark as possible and talk to spirits. Since one time I awoke to a silhouette staring at me. Maybe it was someone I used to know.
If you yell enough, your echoes will sound like someone you used to know. Some say such emotions make you human, but if to be human is to err, then I’d rather be alien.
When you do seize complete control of your mind, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in an Ergo Proxy sort of mood – whatever happens you’ll be in bliss about it.
Just really love the empty city, I guess. A technological sort of hope.