cali yuga 2012-2020

around 2012 there was a nervous, unconsolidated energy stuck in the circuitcraw of the net and the automatic public had a satanic panic reaction to the lifeforce they found here–they irradiated the internet and made it their suburb and in fact reclaimed the bleak military origins of it, connecting the lost military toy of the past to the contemporary military geist of the drone

I made freely, stupidly, retardedly

after that I lost sense of time because I was selected for death, selected as a degenerate artist

I did not burn or drown like some. i started writing this after someone told me about the death of someone i knew back around 2012 and it broke open a bittersweet little pocket of trapped time syrup in me, full of dead bugs and hair.

my brain did boil. there are types of physical abuse where people expose you to great amounts of heat without water, where if you are a person who lacks physical mobility at times there are people, beloved people, who will take great delight in watching you slowly fractionally die from dehydration, and that is something that happened, and which no one talks about

heat death is extremely painful and claustrophobic

this week i kept waking up after 30-60 minutes of sleep with a suffocating sensation from the intense trapped heat of a climate genocide heat wave in a state where the air is the most toxic in the world from all the fires burning. i sleepwalked, hallucinating my environment as hermetic and looping, pseudo-aware but unable to get off the rails. one time i woke up just far ahead enough of the hallucination tide to see it fly out of me like a spark, evade my hands, and disappear harmlessly into my hair.

it is difficult to feel that one is getting enough air with the windows shut like a dog dying in a car. going for days and weeks without being able to open the windows, off-gassing and cooking chemicals and carbon dioxide building up.

I had some kind of hope or energy around 2011 and 2012 because the state had not yet noticed me. I miss the people who would soon go to ground, literally or metaphorically, who weren’t given a world where they could be their best timeline.

cyber-austerity hit and the people playing around were seen as the problem. they made business look bad. the lost children were separated from each other.

the violence after that, to my anatomy and prefrontal cortex and hippocampus and amygdala and housing and the people around me, made me not a person for a long time. we were hunted like animals.

apparently I made some things people liked in certain years after that, and that helped the body survive. despite people’s predictions that I would become extinct, the art I made became more popular than ever.

I rarely marketed what I made and posted most of my projects once. I didn’t network and rarely submitted.

people resented an enjoyment in me that in retrospect was simple and childish and did not require violating other people or playing fantasy football with other people’s violation. my pleasure was not cruel enough for capital. i put the spillover of this organism into stories because putting it into other people seemed horrible. many prefer the opposite: being cruel and coercive to a lot of real living people to make widely marketed stories that are wholesome.

in this between time of the 2010’s I regret not feeling very funny, not being able to swim around like I should have been able to. frozen and fractured and merely surviving. sick of being stuck in bed in a full brain cast.

I only knew one or two people at a time during those years of starvation.

my friend erin believed in me completely and had that rare purity uninfected by the internet demons. you drift apart from people for various reasons, geography happens, unpersonhood happens, when you get extremely wounded sometimes you pathologically need to reset your entire life, maybe that was it, that self died and was no longer available. sometimes people don’t kill themselves but they die a different way. but i never forget the care she and others gave me.

times were extremely hard, 2-4 people crammed into apartments like shipping containers, the functions of kitchen/living room/four bedrooms/bathroom all compressed into the size of someone else’s living room. no fan in the bathroom, humidity and mold growing out of control…

me and neotenomie put out some hits and did the poor person survival thing. my house crest had been stripped from me and I was wandering thru the land, so it was a lot for one person to believe in me and start a new life from the total razing that people directed toward the lost children of the internet. for some of that period she was literally the only other person who would talk to me.

my work got more popular than ever despite predictions that I would be erased from the world. got in museums, coasted on that despite my body being a necrotic heap of fused slag in the corner most of the time. I didn’t change my name like they told me to, I made it bigger.

I was almost totally anhedonic between 2012 and 2019. sometimes the fetal self would manifest, but not holistically. in confused convalescent bursts. mostly we just let random boring constructs screen our brain-calls, because the outside world didn’t deserve our light, and we had been trained to believe if people saw that light they would violate us and drain us. violence makes the world feel arbitrary and pointless.

around 2019 I had seriously bugged out from my interactions with the “art world” and the absolute joyless locust hunger of most people in it, even to the small degree I tolerated it. most artists aren’t shit poor and from as neurologically fucked braincastes, so you don’t have anyone to talk to. its like trying to have a conversation in the black lodge but completely boring and stupid.

I miss the hope that I could be seen and gotten, in a world of so many stagnant petty aristocrats or those who just want something from you, who are afraid and want your fire because they denied their own. i missed the idea of people who know what it means to burn, to live without insulation on the actual shifting tectonic plates of raw reality. but who are also building something on top of it, because part of me is very boring, very builder archetype. after three decades of being exposed to almost nothing but nihilistic violence and instability, i react to my fears with planning, i crave calm. but i must be careful not to return to the anhedonic convalescence void.

I never knew how to make stuff. I made my earlier stuff on pure, unhealthy, manic energy, in ritual heat, nursing directly from the wound. but that’s not sustainable.

I had an instinct that I wanted to have “fun”. because wounds are prescriptive and joyless or the joke they tell is very pagliacci. I knew I had made “fun” things before. armada and even most of what I made. so I guess I mean fun for me, fun for this new self that was born after the fire. or like. coming from a place that isn’t pure survival. wondering if I even had that capacity.

I made fewer public things and worked more in private. wrote 100’s of 1000’s of words trying to figure out what this alien body could do. releasing fragments mostly for friends or sometimes locked on my patreon. an instinct toward longer, more intricate stories/characters, while also wondering if i can exceed my wounds, if i have the capacity to do these things which are often dominated by people with time health and property.

now the outside of the world matches more closely what happened to me in 2012, what was happening to the shit castes all century. we were canaries but people didn’t even benefit from us, didn’t properly use our corpses. they were like oh, these beautiful birds are dying for no reason.

this anatomy is sensitive to heat and pollution. old scars are always waiting to emerge like scurvy marks. if I keep living I want to release my secret operas. to keep learning how to use this body. i love my girlfriend because she keeps me alive. i’m so grateful she’s still alive, when she was in the hospital my entire heart was hostage in her, i had no language or life or light outside her. every day i get with her is a gift.

it still impresses me that so many people find and support my work despite my inability to promote it. I feel the squishiness of their energy that felt so lost after 2012, their search for something outside the panopticon, and it keeps me writing.

20XX. the entire world is being virally penetrated against its will. individuals are blamed for failing to compensate for the collapse of an entire national system. governments are evil but the one good they can possibly do–recording lessons of the past so they are not repeated–did not happen.

this is an era for teaching and nurturing, not mindless punishment. this of all eras, where people are born into darkness and insanity, abandoned first by their parents, then the state.

I spent most of the last decade caring for others and being cared for. it wasn’t always easy or clean but there is no doubt in me that when people fell apart it was because of the inhuman conditions we were placed into. many forget that during the cali yuga, karma receives a bonus multiplier, for it is more difficult and precious to acquire.

people who are kind in hell are better than the most pure, concentrated beings of light in heaven, who cannot accrue virtue because they are automatic. wealth is automatic. property is automatic. the automatic ones judge us, but they are nothing.

I see those who shared hell with me in the light of the best timelines we deserved.💜