oh and ah and how've you been

miss me? *points a gun at your head*

“Start writing…” the Substack new post page tells me. I scoff.

This might sound controversial, but “starting” writing is actually incredibly easy. Here I am, I started, now what? You feel so good about yourself huh? I was gonna start anyway. Now that you told me to do it, I don’t want to. But! I power through my stubbornness and power through my childishness.

I start anyway, how big of me.

With writing, it’s not the starting, it’s the continuing that’s the problem. And !!especially!! the finishing. I don’t really run out of thoughts, but once they’re on paper they immediately feel decidedly unshareable.

Thoughts come briefly into focus before disappearing from my field of view. I catch some and consider them for a while, but always eventually just let go. I’m already too busy free falling helically to think anything specific for any significant amount of time.

Spiralling is funny because it implies vertical motion. And it sure feels vertical, and not in a good way. But somehow I just find myself right back where I started anyway, like an Escher drawing.

* * *

A couple of months ago I mom’ed a little too hard and got my back messed up, so I stopped moving. And you know what I always say: when in doubt, move. Something like that, anyway.

There’s been a lot of doubt but not much moving, so you see my problem.

“I miss Zoe,” Mila says every day. “I want to go pick up Zoe from school.” All day, until it’s time to actually go pick up Zoe.

“Let’s go pick up Zoe!” I say, expecting wild applause and universal agreement.

“NO!” She doesn’t feel the need to explain this sudden shift in intention. She takes off her shoes. I just think, aaaaaaaafuckfuckfuck.

We had about five minutes of leeway. Somewhere in a parallel universe very different decisions were made in those five minutes. In that wondrous place we just took the pram.

In this here present universe I gave the bystanders a great show as I legged it across the playground clutching a flailing crying child with one arm, and her bicycle with another. Mila, raging against this temporary suspension of her autonomy was grabbing at my dress, pulling it down, bringing me dangerously close to public indecency.

This kinda shit is why other parents don’t talk to me.

* Is it me or is it you?

I no longer engage in scrolling. They’ve done it! They’ve decimated my focus so entirely that I can no longer even concentrate on scrolling itself. A round of applause for the geniuses that wanted to commodify attention. Now I don’t have any commodifiable attention left, great work!

I have grown annoyed and jaded, amused by next to nothing and trusting even less. I’m not interested in fictional lives of influencers, and I’m not interested in regular people that are just Oh So Based about some topic for five minutes; until everyone is onto the next viral thing.

As in quantum physics so in life, the observer effect itself is enough to disturb the observed system, something something. Is that right? I know little about physics (and even less about life). But we all know exactly what happens on TikTok:

A creator considers themselves. They decide this aspect of their existence was worth capturing and sharing. Then they filmed it and shared it. Nothing about the exercise is intrinsically wrong or bad. It’s just… “This moment is so nearly perfect, you know what would make it even better? It could be more observed! People simply must know.”

Must we? We are all already way too observed. Let me be a wave and not a particle.

You know, semantically, the electron observation experiment is incredibly poetic. I’m also a wave, continuous and unbroken. I’m just out here, vibing¹. Other people’s perception of me turns me in their mind into a discrete particle existing here in the world, contained within myself. Which, whether you’re spiritual or not (I’m not), sort of makes sense.

I think a lot of writers probably can understand this feeling of becoming contained as a side effect to writing.

Either way… you and me both, e^-, you and me both.

is that what i’m doing here? am i just a hypocrite? ah look at me with all the things i want to talk about, oh i know ill write it all down and make people read it lol OBSERVE ME OBSERVE ME

* My musical legacy

I have never really considered myself worthy of making any sort of music. In my mind people have always been doing me a favour by listening to me sing or play (or write let’s face it). To me, any consumption of my “art” can basically only done as a personal favour if for some reason you happen to like me personally or I’ve made you food.

“Why would I be doing that?” I was always a little confused when friends asked me if I’ve ever considered properly recording myself or writing songs.

I used to also get fairly debilitating stage fright. Blame it on eight years of music school where you’re actually being judged on performances. Harshly.

Maybe blame it on my weird relationship with my own self. That was, until I met my band. The comfort levels I feel on stage with these incredible people rival how I feel in my warm bed at the end of a productive day.

I forget sometimes I’m a part of it, and just listen to them play. It’s so beautiful, fun, spontaneous, joyful. Unfortunately, we see each other like twice a year now but even that is a gift. A gift, I tell you! I will take that over nothing and be grateful. “Why don’t you find another band?” I’m asked.

I don’t know, but I feel like I couldn’t. Some things are just magic, and others aren’t.

But I do miss music being there all the time, so I downloaded a DAW. My intention was to voice over some posts and maybe make some small jingle for an intro/outro situation.

Instead I made a few songs, and never actually voiced over a single post if you don’t count this silly poem that became my first ever song. I didn’t really know what to put into a video so I went over my camera roll and just put random videos there, and now it exists.

I’m truly happy it exists and actually kind of proud of it, even though you can even hear that I was sick recording this haha

The goal is to re-record the vocals when I’m done writing new things, and maybe release it, so it can be out there for me to know and feel warm feelings about.

I made a total of 5 songs so far, and worked on more that didn’t work out. It’s been a soothing therapy for my anxiety and joy and a source of sweet beautiful heartwrenching frustration.

This is a song I made while visiting my family at home in Riga, and the chorus is a morse code message, and that also makes me happy.

* Regression and progress (a rant)

I get distracted a lot and instead of making my awkward music, sewing (yes, I have started sewing again), writing, doing crafts, or even just taking walks, I start playing games.

When I abandon hobbying and start gaming it means my mind needs a break. Gaming is great to burn thinking time. Sometimes you need to burn some thinking time, but after a certain point when you’ve burnt enough you might sort of just forget that now it’s time to start thinking again.

This is what happened to me. I stopped trying to go back. I just surrendered to reading about all the awful things that are happening in the world and gaming and having a slightly overactive but hollow feeling social life.

If creativity brings peace, escapism brings emptiness. Sometimes I mistake emptiness for peace, I’m stupid. But I’m here, fighting the emptiness, even if it feels even less peaceful this way. I guess the fact that everywhere I look it feels like a mass psychosis is taking over doesn’t help.

Things that should be embarrassing just no longer are. Aren’t you *embarrassed* to be spending this much time on social media? Like, sure, you say “oh, I’m so bad” but true shame would never open up this way. I’m calling out everyone who admits to knowing it’s bad to doomscroll for hours.

If you truly understood what it tells people about the state of your brain, you wouldn’t admit to it.

I will say: “I’m so bad at doing the dishes, it’s so embarrassing.” It’s maybe a little embarrassing how full our sink gets sometimes but I don’t feel deep shame about it. People aren’t ashamed enough to mistake ChatGPT for genuine human connection. People aren’t embarrassed enough about TikTok being their main source of information. They’re not icked out by themselves enough following trends.

People have abandoned shame when it comes to more important things, too. How are people not so deeply ashamed to be expressing their racism, misogyny, homophobia, nationalism.

I sort of want to shake someone and scream: Why is everything considered okay now?

I know it’s defended as cope, making jokes about wars etc, but it’s really not fucking funny at all any more. We’re in the middle of every crisis imaginable and we’re seemingly not working at all towards making things better. We’re dancing in the eye of the hurricane, but not poetically. We’re dancing badly and off rhythm and everyone to their own fucking tune. Like a silent disco (oh, remember those? Those were fun. Very millennial moment here).

Whatever!

No levity for us until we’ve stepped off the brink of an international nuclear conflict eaten our veggies.

Also, no chocolate until you’ve done your homework.

I don’t fucking know, you guys.

Like I said, I regress into despair and anxiety sometimes and just feel empty and powerless. I know there are enough good reasons to feel hopeless from time to time, and I’m not alone,

but this is very off-brand for me.

* * *

Sometimes when I’m not terrified about the future I think about maths. Gödel said what? I’m not sure. My knowledge of mathematics is even more limited than my knowledge of physics and life.

But as you know I don’t really trade in precision here. The incompleteness theorems are beautiful and fun to think about. Something like, there will always be statements about complex systems that are impossible to prove within the system itself… And, as an extension of that, the system cannot prove it’s own consistency. Isn’t this true for us, people?

Some parts of this complex system we’re all in just are. Maybe the only way it can all work is if we find something outside the system that we can root ourselves in. (And no, religion doesn’t do it well, or at all.)

Maybe no matter how vertically we’re falling and how tight that spiral is, we will never be able to escape the fact that some things simultaneously are axiomatic but also don’t make any sense, unless you widen your field of view.

Maybe we can start with what we feel universally. Peace, empathy. Love.

See you later. Or something.

(listen to my other songs on youtube lol thanks)

1. I super trust you to know I use this word IRONICALLY