October 12, 2016
05:14
Pornography first thing this morning, and then I feel sick. Using a keyboard feels foreign to me by now, but I am.
Instagram after. Someone I once followed for their picture ended up working at Apple. Now they're at airbnb headquarters. Before that, they were working hard on Oculus Rift. They post a long post about how they volunteer every morning, and how we must all contribute. I wonder why I can't stand this person. I wonder if talking about how we must all contribute is dismissive of all the people you'd think you're helping. Because "we" just means people like "you". And I wonder if any of this makes any sense.
I listen to Coma White, but it all feels so different than it did about eighteen years ago when it was brand new, when there was no Coma White before. It's not just getting older; it's the way I listen to it. I search for it in my sad songs playlist, but I don't want all sad songs. I just want Coma White. I queue it before selecting a song I don't like from a soundtrack, so that when I skip the song, Coma White will play next. I think about the last person who left and wonder if she would see how she threw me away. How she took a pill to make her numb. I think she'd just see all the pills I'm dependent on.
When it came out, Coma White had a long stretch of silence afterwards. CDs had a bit of mystery to them. You could see how much time had passed, but you didn't know necessarily what happened next. Vinyl was before my time. I'm beginning to feel too nauseous to write. Every track has a name now, and they're all numbered and visible, and whatever music you're listening to might be interrupted by a phone call. I don't like that. But I don't intend to romanticize the past. So I turn on my wireless speaker, and I listen. A robot voice says "successful", an interruption in the music. I think technoklogy could be less disruptive to these moments.
The future Marilyn Manson was portraying is where we are now. And then I'm listening to a landscape of post apocalyptic fiction. "Chronicles of the Wasteland". And I'm aware of the wasteland that I'm in. A rapper or someone once talked about how people talk about the end of the world coming, but for some people, their world is ending every day. I am not one of those people.
I am experiencing my own apocalypse. I am slogging through a wasteland that only I can see, looking for parts, looking for anything that will keep me going. The world I knew is gone. And the world, with everyone else, is moving on. Construction happening in the city, so much is changing, and I see that an immense tomb is being built, that everyone will live in, die in, by leaving or by dying, and that others will profit from. The city doesn't want people sleeping in tents outside their businesses. They just don't want the people, period. They don't want to see them, or even know they exist. If they're not contributing, the city wants to forget they exist, not even know they ever existed. As more changes, this will become more true.
They can exist as ideas, an issue that socially conscious people can discuss while displacing at the same time displacing them.
Some terrifying moments yesterday. A woman screaming get the fuck off my property shoves a security guard and throws a syringe at him. We block the door to the children's area, who are all experiencing this with us, while spinning in circles, while living for much less time than we have.
I glanced up at a black man walking on an overhead walkway, who immediately became hostile. Threatening me, with families and children between us. Swearing at me. Telling me he'd hurt me. I thought it best to go to the bunker. I could have acted as bait to get him away from the people, but that would be the stupid heroic move that would likely lead to a concussion, possibly death, possibly shot or cut. Better to defuse him by leaving the area, and protect myself by being in a locked concrete room. I feel good about my decision, I think.
Dispatch kept asking questions, asked stupid questions. Eventually I patrolled with a security guard, looking for the guy. I don't know how dispatch lost the guy. I don't know if it's their fault, but from my end, it was frustrating because there have been situations such as these I would classify as emergencies, that have been met with questionions rather than assistance.
I'm late to the gym. I need a shower. I need a haircut. I need a shower to get a haircut.
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