so many things happened. what do I do. do I log each day? do I absorb it? do I let it emerge when it might?

who am I becoming, I wonder.

on this road trip I am movement. I am acceptance. I go from place to place. last summer K said that polyamory felt like an experiment in letting different parts of the self emerge. non-rootedness feels like an experiment in shifting being, while also playing with what it feels like to be the same person. what core remains unchanging? can I size it, move it around, leave it the dense, semi-firm shape that it is, like a red-hot squash ball after a bout of action, still firm, but pliable, strangely sticky, stubbornly spherical?

I notice my movements. how do they feel? when do they rush, when are they steady, knowing that there’s all the time in the world because this whole thing is finite? the game is infinite because the life is finite. and then, and then? what happens after I’ve died a few times? died, reborn, died reborn? are these questions that cicadas or snakes or other molting figures ask themselves?

—

there is writing for me and me, and there is writing for me that I might share, and there is writing for you, if you are a friend, and there is writing for an amorphous ‘out there’. what is to be said is not simply what is to be said; it’s about where on the spectrum this lies, it feels. the writing between me and me is private. we talk over and through months and years and, now, decades. so then, what is this writing? why share at all? am I sharing to be seen? because in many ways, my seer exists inside of me already. so then, what do I want by sharing this at all?

this is a question that has plagued me since the age of the Blog, the weblog. why am I sharing, and to whom? to me these questions are paramount and pivotal, central questions that have to do with who we are, who we want to be, all that jazz. medium formation is identity formation. the world wide web was an experiment in identity, very clearly so, and it felt like it went without saying.

now we have these things. social media, which is really a series of ux frames, protocols, frameworks. my understanding of financialization is the double-layering of abstraction. the first layer is that what you value becomes tokenized, totemized in bonds, stock. the second layer is the metagame that arises out of the first layer. does the flash crash have anything to do with a loss of value? “depends on how you know that you value something”, someone might reply.

how do you know that you value something? do I value your attention, and you mine? if so, then why would I even want you to notice this? the double-layering of abstraction that exists means that social media’s metagame, the game on top of the game, is somehow played blindly, or boringly. what happened to that charm? was that relegated to a moment in time when I was ten, fourteen, eighteen, twenty one, shaping and being shaped by the internet, like K, letting parts of my self emerge?

the fact of the matter is that I am changing; I feel myself changing. molting, shifting, transforming. sitting with B over lunch, a month ago, I realize the wisdom that comes with decades more of age; talking to H, I realize the experience that comes with decades more of a practice. so all that is to say that: it turns out that this can happen, too. fascinating. heartbreaking. beautiful.

—

what’s definitively true is that I’m the fullest I’ve been in years. maybe even a decade. i am the happiest I’ve ever been in a long time. and I am definitely becoming the strangest I’ve ever been.

al-Hallaj

“And don't be afraid of being labelled strange. There is a freedom in strangeness."

— — —

what I really mean to hold on my heart is a kind of yearning. yearning for some futures, yearning for a kind of love, yearning for a kind of being, yearning for. yearning for someone (or something) that might knock on the door of my heart and say hello; yearning for someone I might be able to trust; yearning for my heart to be open again, open to being hurt in those ways again.

really, that’s it. simple. but isn’t that the crux of it? what does it mean to keep your heart open, knowing that you will get hurt? what does it mean to get hurt in the first place? what do I hold that allows me to hurt myself? expectations? desires? attachments? and is this attempt at understanding my own attachments a kind of wisdom, or another way for my fear of getting hurt to manifest?

what is fear? is it in the body, simply, a reflex and sensation that will cessate over time? Is it something to be conquered? loved? who is the me that is fearing, and what does he need, beloved? and if I were to console, “everything’s going to be alright”, would that not be an empty promise? but if I were to say, “everything is how it is”, wouldn’t that be how it is?

and so, as I look over myself fearing, what can I do but say, everything is how it is? —- and so, let’s move, let’s be the pea plant weaving spinning finding grabbing rotating twisting climbing, let’s be the water that finds and makes a path. let me be the me that I will be. already who I already am. let me, let me, let me;

at these moments, what might I say but: I love you, thank you, good night.

(written in the middle of the high desert, near Canyonlands, Utah, while watching the moon rise.)