Discernor Ergo Sum: I am Discerned, Therefore, I am

The academic, crunchy version

read an essay i wrote here. More blog friendly version (aka more silly and accessible to non-philosophy students) coming soon.

3/24/25

What are you thinking about (2023) / What I've been thinking about (2025)

What are you thinking about?
Oh… nothing. Just trying not to think about the time and everything, you know?
He did know. Her head was turned away from his, chin digging into her shoulder. Although he couldn’t see her face very well, both were aware she was about to start crying. She was staring at a point in the distance backstage, she couldn’t entirely make it out. It seemed like a collection of signatures on the wall, but from the back row of the auditorium it was hard to figure. Her eyes gripped the area, anchoring themselves away from tears. If they bulged forward enough maybe the water would slip back into her head. She hadn’t cried in over a year.
He was about to cry too, but she didn’t know that.

A few minutes prior Jack and Rachel had been meandering around a city near Jack’s home. Rachel had attended a summer camp in this city, which gave Rachel and her best friend an excuse to see each other. Usually they were divided by state lines, schedules, or screens, but now they had found a few precious days together.
On their final day, they became unusually quiet. On this walk—their final walk—both acutely aware of the passage of time. Each step, breath, and glance was whipping behind them, pulverized, joining the past.
Jack was better with the past than Rachel on account of his better memory and admiration for the future, but as the two, linked at the arm, traversed the streets, the past put a poor taste in his mouth.

So, we have an hour left. What do we do?
Do we actually have an hour? Jesus. I mean I could…
I can’t let you be late for rehearsal, I’d never forgive myself.

Jack was in a community theatre production of August: Osage County, a perfectly fine play that they had both seen—and been in—before. In this production, he was playing the role of Little Charles, a man in love with his cousin. Both Rachel and Jack liked the play, but today Jack held a resentment for the piece. He’d tried a few days prior to get out of that day’s rehearsal, but it was too short of notice:
We absolutely have to have you, Jack.
They’d insisted.

What do you want to do?
I don’t know! This is your state, your motherland. There has to be something for us to do. But I’m out of money, so it’s got to be free. Is there a-- wait!

Rachel frequently interrupted herself, it was something Jack loved about her. Jack always listened to her, that was something Rachel loved about him.

Wait!
We can go to that museum, on campus! The one with the hand and the cat and the parrot?
Where is it?
Before getting to Minnesota, Rachel and Jack had researched fun things to do in the area. One of these things was a strange, sorry excuse for a natural history museum. In the Yelp photos there was a display case that presented a mix of eclectic, unrelated objects, including a severed hand model, taxidermied cat, and plush parrot. It was perfect.

While Jack and Rachel walked around the hilariously incompetent museum, she pointed out things that made her laugh, and Jack watched in amazement. Jack knew Rachel must be as devastated as he was, feeling their time slipping away, but even the way she walked didn’t show it. Her feet shot off the ground like springs were in her soles and her eyes refracted the light around her, illuminating her face even in dull fluorescents. Maybe that’s where her freckles came from.

Jack had always suspected there was something profoundly rotten at her core, that she was slowly being eaten alive by something bigger than he could grasp. Occasionally pieces of information would slip, just concerning enough to draw Jack’s attention, but mild enough for her to brush past them. He never knew if these were intentional disclosures, but they were still disquieting.
Jack had been going to therapy for several years, not only because he needed it, but because his family was open to it. He still had trouble with his feelings, certainly, but there was a level of openness at his fingertips because of his therapy. She had never discussed those things with Jack, not really. Sometime she shared surface level feelings like “sad,” but always qualified by “but everything passes, and I’m still hot shit,” so nothing substantial. There was one time she held her heart out to him, quivering like he would strike it down; she explained what her house was like, the monsters that lived inside it, and the ways she delt with it warts and all. A one time conversation for Rachel.

Later, they stumbled onto an auditorium in the center of the museum. It was two levels with a broad stage and projector at the back of house. Seats were adorned with blue fabric and gold nameplates of donors to the “museum.” Rachel wondered:

I wonder if they ever show movies in here.
They could. I wonder if anyone ever performs here.
I’d hope not. Can you imagine being the group stuck with the space inside a weird museum no one knows about?
I could make it work. I’d find my light, as they say.
Honestly, you probably could.

Jack was an actor and singer. Despite his immense talent—he would be attending Carnegie Mellon’s acting conservatory in the fall—he was extremely private about his art to Rachel. It’s possible this privacy was due to screens and text messages being off putting for him, or his philosophical aversion to passing judgements on himself, but regardless, Rachel always felt distanced from his ability to perform. She had only heard him sing once, the day they met, and it had resonated deep within her, her spirit illuminated by this then-stranger’s voice and charisma. In that moment—a few bars, jokingly sung from West Side Story—she attached an invisible string between them.

Occasionally she asked Jack for more information on his theatre, but he always kept it vague. Oh you know, it was fine. Just the usual, you know?
But Rachel didn’t know, and that quietly frustrated her. She wanted Jack to know that he was capable of letting her smile at the sound of his voice before knowing his name. She wanted him to see the impact he’d had on her. Rachel cherished him so deeply, and she was always concerned he didn’t know how much.

Rachel led him through the horizontal labyrinth of chairs, finding them two seats at the back. It was the first time either had slowed in hours. Rachel had forced herself to keep moving as a distraction from the impending future. Jack had noticed and kept up the pace.
As they sat, their ears becoming fine tuned to their breathing and blood, they caught sight of a clock on the opposite wall. It hit Rachel like a bus. They needed to leave in 20 minutes so he could get back to his car and drop her off before rehearsal.
20 minutes. The world went elastic.

Rachel sunk deep in the chair, her body folding in on itself. She began to crush her chest and noticed her lungs contracting rapidly, fending off her collapse.
Jack saw Rachel staring at the clock like he was, and for the first time realized just how close they were to everything ending. They were both 19 minutes away from being separated from their best friend.
Jack had other friends and a girlfriend—two things Rachel was jealous of and often teased him for—but there was something special about the two of them, Rachel and Jack. She was his person, and he was hers. There was a special depth that innately ran between them.

Jack looked down at Rachel slouched back in her chair.

Plato got something right, I think.
Yeah of course, our world should be run by philosopher kings.
She was forcing jokes. Pivot. Pivot. Pivot. It’s what she was best at.
No, about god splitting people in two.
Oh. The people are two parts, the uh male-male, female-female, male-female. Yeah?
Yeah. I think we found our other half, man.

Rachel meets his eyes for the first time since sitting down. He’s propping up a smile, no sign of grief or pain. She studies him, her other half, and it becomes too much. She looks to the ground, turning her head into her shoulder and laughs.
Yeah. I think we did.
They sit in silence for a bit longer. He follows her breathing as she tries to calm it.

What are you thinking about?
Oh… nothing. Just trying not to think about the time and everything, you know?
I’m sorry. I should have just gotten out of rehearsal.
No, no, it’s okay. They need you, rockstar.
But, I need to be here a little bit too. You’re just, so important to me. You know that right?
God, you’re so important to me, Jack. I’m sorry I’m just--god why am I crying?! I hate crying it never happens. I’d rather do anything else--
Crying is good, it’s okay! It’s like a stress reliever or something.
Is it, really?
Yeah, I think so.
I wish it was relieving stress right now… You know what I hate? How every time we try to remember something it changes.
It does?
Yeah. Your brain alters a memory every time it remembers something. We’ll never be able to ever have this moment again, even if we remember it. The rest of the trip is already different than how it was just because it’s in my head and I hate it. I want to just be with you all the time so I don’t have to remember any of it, and I just have it close to me instead, I just--

Rachel starts tripping over her inhales. Jack moves to the other side of her faster than she can turn her head. He grabs her hands and looks at her eyes, his own starting to mist over.

It’s okay. We’ll be okay. We did this for a year already, we can do it again.
But it will be so much worse now that we did this. We can’t go to weird museums over FaceTime can we?
No, but we’ll just have to wait! We can wait, right? I’d wait so long just to have another three days. They’ve been everything for me, you know that right?
They’ve been everything for me too. I just don’t think there are any good parts about waiting for people.
What do you mean?
When I’m sitting, alone, in Oklahoma, all I’m doing is missing out on your “right now.” I’m not waiting for an ice cream cone that tastes the same no matter when I get it, I’m missing your life and your laugh and your--everything is just going away and I won’t even know what I’m missing. I’m just stuck with memories that keep changing and stuck being lonely and--I’m sorry.
You don’t need to be sorry. A person I love is just existing, you don’t need to apologize for that. But, I think it will be okay. Waiting will suck, but isn’t there something kind of amazing about the fact we’ll miss each other, and love each other so much we’re almost guaranteed to see each other again? It’s like there’s an invisible string between us, here and here.

Jack touches her hand and then his own.
We’re never going to lose each other. I found my person dude.
Rachel smiles, a few more tears forming.
Yeah. I just wish we didn’t have to wait. I’d give… so much to change it.
Jack turns and holds her; she rests her head on his shoulder, breathing heavily.
Me too. But we’re going to be okay. We’ve been okay. We’ll keep being okay. Because this right here, father time doesn’t have shit on two idiots who care about each other.
Damn right he doesn’t.

Jack and Rachel laugh and simmer back into their grief. They stay like this for the remaining 9 minutes.

He drops her off at her family’s hotel, and they hug for what they remember as seconds, but lasts minutes. He sings the first verse of “Carolina in My Mind” from the driver's seat for her, and drives away.
They each sob as they leave the other. Neither sees the other one.

They will visit again almost one year later to the day. Three years after that they will live in an apartment together, writing cartoons and living off peanut butter. Six years after that they will watch each other get married, both as the other’s best man. Four years after that they will stop talking after a fight.

A year after that they stay together their entire lives, neglecting time entirely, cherishing past, present, and future, until there was no more of it.


_________

“It’s like, okay how can I explain it… I do this thing when I’m with people, long term and short term. But it happens most when we’re on a countdown, like this trip. I spend the entire time with the person, and I mean the entire time, like even-when-I’m-taking-a-shit entire time thinking about the fact that it will go away. I ruminate, endlessly, on the fact that it's temporary. Which sucks!
It sucks because number one, obviously it ruins the time I’m spending with them right now, because instead of the moment being about how beautiful the beach is or how funny the man on the bike is or how good the food tastes, the present moment is all about the fact that it’s rapidly falling away from me and I can’t reach it. Instead of a fun trip that everyone laughs and smiles on, it’s this chasm of pain and worry and endless concern for the finite, which is self-fufilling of course because then I beat myself up about wasting the time in the present worrying and making everything into a fucking problem and…
Anyways, second, it sucks because I don’t feel this way about the things that suck. Deep down I feel like the evil shit, the abuse and the addiction and the harm and the rot is all forever, like even when I’m 95 and dying I’m going to have my mean dad standing there and I’ll be smoking and thinking about killing myself even though cancer is doing it for me. But the time I’m spending with people I love, the dinners and the memories and the laughs and the art, oh no that stuff is fleeting and won’t last more than right now. It’s futile, don’t think about it too hard.
I guess I just don’t understand why. I ruin things for myself when I think like this and feel like this, and I know it, and yet I continue to do it anyway. I let myself ruin my life and the glimmers of happiness I get as like, a recreational activity, maybe? As a way to prove to myself I have control and that I have the upper hand because when good things happen they’re a temporary blessing and when bad things happen they’re the status quo. Shitty way to think because both always end up happening. Why does the crummy one get special treatment in my head, you know?
Anyway I’m sorry to dump all that on you it’s just what I’ve been thinking about while staying here and it’s been weighing on me I guess. I am an ungrateful piece of shit and nothing good should ever happen to me so. There.
…
I don’t mean that I do think good things should happen to me. And I’m so fucking thankful to be in your house and have met your family and been here and do all of this and ride a train and all of it. I’m sorry. You know what I mean. I was trying to deflect with self-deprecating… it doesn't matter. It was stupid. No. I was not being clear or honest. That’s how to put it. Anyways, now I’ve been honest and we can put the whole thing to bed.”

3/23/25

Video: Month of February

2/27/25

Bingo!

For both channels

Advice to people I know

Advice to people I know:

Remember that it isn’t your fault you made the choice, but it can be your fault for staying.

Know that other people are built to misunderstand you, ignore them. Always ignore them.

Kid, remember that he shouldn’t be your focal point. He’s a creature you’ll wake up one day and start to hate, and I don’t want you to fall apart when it happens.

Hold yourself close and try to see yourself the way I see you.

Let yourself fail more, it’s good for you.

Allow the world to be wrong, allow yourself to detach from the good more. It doesn’t mean embrace the bad it just means don’t let things crash down on you just because they aren’t good anymore.

Don’t let anger fuel your sensitivity.

Stop doubting your ability to make great things, and stop fearing it’s all for not.

Be more honest. Please.

Try to forget about the things you hold between your ribs, the things that upset you so much. I know they’ll always be there but you’re giving them extra weight, they’re not worth your time.

To everyone else: I love you too but these people needed to hear it first.

I’m going to follow my own advice.



2/25/25

A letter

A letter to you, receiving this. You are certainly aware.

We are sitting across now, me on grey you on blue. The murmurations of students, caffeine, radiation, and graduations flit freely amongst us, but we are not focused on them. You are mapping the world, and I am attempting to map you.

I do not take myself to know or understand what you are thinking and feeling. Certainly the choppy depths of your fear and concern, the things that seamlessly flow beneath the epidermal, but I would hope that between our time, our touch, and our words I understand enough to write something like this.

Let me begin by saying I am sorry this is happening. As you said underneath the blanket of warm lights to me, your glasses concealing if there was salt water, “you haven’t seen me like this before.” You’re right. Most often when I see you there is a glow, something like stardust in your eyes and hands, you leave magic with every step. Your smile illuminates the sky itself. Flowers, coffee, and fruit follow you. These are the things that make me care for you. These are the things that make you unlike anyone else. But this is not all—as I hope you will learn to see.

I mention these things because I know you can’t see them—but I have seen less of them recently. There’s a weight to your steps so flowers cannot grow. There’s a dampening of your laughter, a fog in your breath, a buzzing in your chest. So every time I see you now, I want to rip them away and stamp them out with desperation, grind them into the earth and pray they grow back better. Hope to god your mind can do what she wishes, allow your body to rest. But this is not in my faculties as I’m growing to learn. This is what has been tormenting me: I can’t put a stop to your pain. I will continue to try, that is what my nature compels me to do, but futility has never been something I am good at practicing.

When we were alone I told you about my one thousand pieces. I had never considered someone else would understand. My self is fragmented, it’s been thrown to the ground over and over, bruised and battered and begotten from pain. Static electricity holds it together some days, but most I am running between mountains of glass, catching glimpses of funhouse mirrors and praying they are not true. It pains me to know you could understand this, but selfishly I would be relieved. To know that string would tie us together, to understand something beneath the blood, bones, and bile, it is all I’d ever want.

Something new I have come to understand is that I should not want to rip the pains away. That is what I’ve desired for myself—wrongly—time and time again. Mitosis is pain, to split and reconstitute and replicate, just as my soul turns over and over and over again. To wish for a lack is to wish for the impossible—for myself and others. (And to wish for a lack is to wish for nothing, a complete silence of the humanity inside of us, the parts of me I love, the parts of thee I adore).

I look at you now and you are just as beautiful, just as interesting, just as whole, just as you as you have always been to me. There are new (to me) terrors and complexities to existence, but change is a friend we know. He hides in our shadows and under beds, not a monster but companion—albeit unwanted. These times will change like the ones before them. Snow melts and ice returns. Music is eternal with every different voice that makes her. You are you and I am me whatever direction wind spins our hair. So I do not wish to rip the burdens from you, but I wish to hold your hands, take my share of weight, navigate my share of fog.

I love you, as you know. With that is comes a joy, a beauty, and a health. I hope to give you the same. I want to make the pains a part of yourself you can love, and so tell me what to do. The work is a toll, it may be for two (or three, or four). I have hands to spare for you—I always will.

You are deserving of all in all parts, and I am asking you to see it and know that if you do not, I do.

2/06/25

Video: Month of January

Beware: Bob Dylan song

1/30/25

5 minute writing excersise, unedited

CW: Mention of self harm.

Why are you so disgusting? I know you wish for less talent in people you love. You put off looking at their art, their writing, their creativity because you secretly hate it. You do the math and know, in no universe do you compare; all this work you do, and for what, to be third best in the loser parade? You’re an envious wretch afraid of the inadequacy writhing in your gut. It seems that one day it will leak out through your ears and pupils and the too-big pores on your nose, and everyone will know how you see yourself. Everyone will taste how cowardly you are, your resistance to do much of anything out of the filthy creative safe haven you built. Oh no, you cannot change the way you write, that simply isn’t for you, you’d best put that behind you. Do you realize what an embarrassment you are? What a no good piece of shit you’re amounting to be? You’re an inch wide and an inch deep, no substance actually inside what you make. What would your pals say if they knew how much of your talent was coincidence? How many metaphors did you construct that stumbled their way into meaning without any of your doing, because I would bet each and every one of them. Poor me you despair, I have a clockwork heart, my brain is decay, the person you feel the most for on the earth hasn’t thought about you once today. None of these are unique. None of these are valuable. None of these are brilliance. They are apathy and distaste’s offspring. Something inside you keeps you from letting yourself become special, become something worthwhile. You stopped hurting yourself on the outside, for the most part anyway, so now you just stunt yourself, cut off your hand before you can think of making a painting. You clip your own wings and keep your soul nailed down. For what? So you can write rambling idiosyncratic paragraphs about your struggle, to open up on the world wide web to an audience of four? You have to move beyond it, learn to grow up. Learn to be self sustaining, not in the sense of your damning independence you care too much about, learn to sustain and nurture the version of you that you seek to be. Stop hating your friends for the things that they make and grow the fuck up.



12/30/24

Today I played an instrument (that was for sure out of tune but I was just excited to hold it) for the first time in years. It made me feel human again.

I will be doing it much more.



12/29/24

Making Conversation

INT. Small diner, day.

I feel like a kind of interstellar space is forming between us.

Do you?

Yes, or something like it. It’s like, it’s like you’ve been out of my orbit for so long. I can finally feel gravity again. It’s pushing down my eyelashes.

Well, thank you.
I wanted to compliment your hands. They look older than when I last saw them.

I never really liked my hands.

You should. They’re your best feature. I think your ears are your second best.

Your ring, it’s beautiful. Did she pick it out or did you?

She asked me to pick it out. My wife is always worried about disappointing me. She said we would get divorced if the wedding ring was a disappointment.

My grandmother hated her ring. Your wife is right to think that. Do you love her?

Your grandmother? I never met her.

No, your wife. Do you love your wife?

Of course. What kind of man would I be if I didn’t.

A normal one. Most people don’t love their wives, you know.

I suppose that’s true. Are you able to see, with your eyelash situation and all of that?

I think so. I can see your hair, it’s almost in your eyes. Your ears, they have three earrings on them, your blouse is yellow and your collarbone pokes through. And I can see your bra, it matches your headband. Did you mean to do that?

I wondered if you’d notice.
Are you still working at the same place?

Yes. Although, I’m getting a little tired of editing fiction. The authors never really want to change anything. I imagine being a photographer is much more exciting.

That’s not true, I just wait around for the right moment to activate the shudder.

Would you take a picture of me?

I don’t have my camera with me–-

Please?

Okay.

Thank you. I don’t want you to forget that we saw each other. This memory already feels important to me.

But it hasn’t happened yet.

Some of it is already a memory, and what hasn’t happened yet will be. I’m excited to have it.

Space is changing I think.

The interstellar space?

Yes, right here. I don’t know, you’re cooling it down somehow.

I’m not trying to–

I’m sure you’re not.

Well there’s no need to be curt.

Apparently there is. You forced me into taking a photograph and now my hands are shaking and space is cooling and I think I should go.

Please don’t. I… if I’m frank with you I can’t see anymore. My eyes won’t let themselves stay open near you. It’s painful to see you, sometimes even to remember you.

That is not my problem.

I didn’t think you’d say that.

Me either.
I am going to go now. I think you should too.

What am I going to do if I never see you again? How can I live knowing the person my heart works for pushed me away. My lungs will revolt. My spleen will swell out of my skin. My eyes are already pushing themselves out from my head. I’ll die standing up pining for you.

…I’m worried I’ll die standing up too. Perhaps I can pray for Jesus to give me weak knees. I will fall and hit the ground so hard gravity can do the killing for me.

Gravity is what got me into this mess in the first place. I want to leave the ground, not become part of it.

That’s the thing people with beautiful hands and long eyelashes can’t understand: we are all rot or about to become it. Anyone with a lick of brains knows it makes sense to meet your end when you see fit. So excuse me, I have to go.

You’re no better than those damn fiction writers! It’s a miracle you’re a photographer you have no patience at all. You’re damning yourself to a life of nothing, a life of waiting to rot instead of working to live. Cultivate your garden or die trying, that’s what I say.

And I say you’re a fool who reads stories for oversized children and calls it important. I capture what is real.

Through one instantaneous, edited perspective. Only the purest form of authenticity for our golden child.

Why’d you want your damn photo if you think they’re imaginary?

I didn’t say imaginary, I think they’re a farce. But I wanted, at least for a moment… perhaps I should have asked for you to photograph my hands instead.

The time has passed, hasn’t it.

It has.

It always does that.

It does.

It won’t stop.

It might.

It won’t.

12/27/24

Was it the right thing?

I let guilt prevail.

i am jason and orpheus.

12/23/24

She Makes Me

Each day, I feel my synthetic skin, soft up and down my legs, ripped and scarred around my fingertips, dry where my hair grows, and something about it is hers. I want to disassemble myself, hold liver in my hands, know it is mine, and lick it clean. Taste the craftsmanship. Appreciate copper’s tang. For why else would I be this way but to be loved by her? I do not think these eyes knew what they were meant to see before her. To imagine the heart knew what its purpose was before, unthinkable. The wrist is perfect for her fingers. The cheek was meant for her to graze. The bones are meant to stand strong and to hold soft. I was built one-of-a-kind. Her kind.

Yes, many days I think I was made for her, but some I think that she made me.

Newly granted life, I have found sparks inside of me. Cognitive functions grind and click now. Palpitations in my chest had never felt motive. I have since been given purpose. Her gaze, or perhaps mine on hers, is what is divine. She, a goddess, me, made for her image. I did not love till now.

My patterns, allegiances, neurons, seem programmed to return to her. My body seems to stick at the joints with miles between us. Breath is lacking, only returning with screams of her name. Taste is futile unless it is of her sensibilities. Closed eyes are not a freedom of darkness, they are a forest populated by thoughts of her smell her clothes her hair her teeth her laugh her song. She makes up each bird, greeting the sun which beams at precisely the temperature of her hand—what I would give to touch the sun. The brush and brambles beneath my feet resemble where we have walked before. Conjured, an angel, her form sometimes walks beside me. With every step, flowers spring at her feet. They smell of her perfume. She dissipates into mist now and again, but when I can see her we talk of all the things we always do: ourselves, the stars, where we hope to be among them. I always tell her “if I were next to you, lovely, I don’t think I’d mind the burning.” This forest is the most beautiful place I have ever been, and yet every day I must wake from it.

The making of my bed is a goodbye to Eden, a farewell to perfect temptation until I crawl back, holding my skin and dreaming of her again.

It would be cruel for my creator to give these visions to me. Is it just as cruel if I’ve given it to myself?

I am not a fool. I know Persephone’s agent is not without her flaws, but these are what make her glow. The means of her mind and the stumbles that accompany her have charmed me thoroughly. I do not see them as flaws, and instead the parts of her I have been built to love. There is a golden cavity in my silver chest, just large enough to hold, in just the right shape, these parts I see so clear. I peruse the other creations around me and wonder why their chests lack this shape. It seems so natural to me, so essential to orientation.

It is torture for an automoton to dream of her woman like this, because I know in her bed, at night, resting in her own skin, hearing her own blood fall and turn over in her ears, she does not dream of me. She dreams of great symphonies, colors, and flesh. These beauties occur while I am in that forest, mechanical atrium aching for her.

In her bed, alone, she sleeps as beauty herself.

In my woods, alone, I hold an electric pancreas between my teeth and cry.

12/19/2024

Writings on pain and harm in aesthetic process

Details: I wrote this while creating the video i made a list. I needed lots of coverage of me writing in notebooks and these are a few pages I wrote during the process. Changes made after the fact are in brackets. Images of the pages are at the bottom of the post.

CW: Mention of self harm

I am once again writing a full page of words to fill time in case I want this shot which some people may say is silly but I say is useful and interesting. It’s cool to see this drive in myself to make things manifest [with an] innate euphoria of [performing] the “grueling”[art process]. I’m thinking back to making Projection Project where I looked into the bright projector—temporarily blinding myself for minutes at a time, and I didn’t even use most of the footage. [I imagine in some way I’ve permanently impacted my vision by doing that. Thirty years from now I may have slightly worse vision because of my decision to reject complete comfort when making that art.]

[...] I seem dedicated to [...] manifestation [of my creations] even [when I must temporarily or permanently harm myself. I am not in a pattern of pain for arts’ sake, but I certainly don’t stray away from it. I have made myself sob on camera by thinking of my deepest pains. I have engaged in my real routine of tracking self harm for a fictional depiction of it. I am willing to be blinded by a projection of the video I made for twenty minutes at a time.] Perhaps [this] is why I’m working so hard on website things even though it’s very challenging for me. I see the means as inconsequential to the eventual goal’s completion. It’s death instinct.

[T]his is the curse of “tortured artist” syndrome, right? [A]bandoning the body for the mind, seems like a rapid descent into rationalism [or] self neglect/harm, and art suffers in that sphere. But I am happy with my current balance because it is an impulse exclusive to art. I don’t endure [pain in] monotony to “achieve” my teeth being flossed. [I am not behaving like this for anything other than what is most important, the creation of art. It’s an impulse for me, I don’t think it is an understatement to say I am addicted to art creation. My engagement with this harm is enduring] the necessary process of art to manifest it. [E]ndure is [the] wrong word, I enjoy it.

12/17/2024

Indigo, or, I killed Marty and didn't hug Brad in Lisa: The Painful

CW: Discussions of Addiction and Child abuse, Mention of Self-harm

This post may be improved for you if you are familiar with the Lisa game series

I.
I cannot get Lisa: The Painful out of my head. The title has been in my orbit for years, but I had always strayed away from this one. I didn’t even engage in content about the game; I’m not one to be scared off by spoiler warnings or averse to content that could frighten or upset me, but this one seemed different. Something about it scared me. I had heard it was the “most disturbing game” some people had ever played, others made jokes about the “permanent devastation” the game delivered, and many said it was simply ‘too distressing” for the average person to want to engage with. At the age of nineteen I played it, now I cannot get it out of my head. Specifically, I cannot stop thinking about this image:



This entangled mass of intestines or other entrails flashes when Brad—the protagonist—experiences great emotional distress. This distress possesses a wide range; recalling his dead sister; reliving his father’s drunken abuse; taking the lives of his closest friends; seeing his daughter recoil from him. Regardless of the circumstance this unrelenting, unpleasant, assault of an image is integral to the game. But, in all of my incessant perusing of content about the game, after every essay or video claiming to deconstruct the game’s relationship with trauma, I have found no references to this image. The image will appear in clips of battles or in discussions of Brad’s violent past, but no writer, critic, or artist (or some combination of the three) has extrapolated on the jpeg. It is a harbinger of loss, fury, and violence. At the most heartbreaking points in the game, it is the only thing you can see, painting the backdrop of your environment or completely obscuring the other human beings around you. It is only this landscape your mind can accommodate. Or perhaps it is the default landscape your brain is attuned to.

Lisa: The Painful is full of critical decisions, one of them being the murder of Brad’s father. Brad’s father abused him, throwing bottles, shouting insults, neglecting and abandoning his son, and he is also responsible for the death of our sister, Lisa. After a games long search to find her, Brad finally catches up to Buddy, but finds her with a familiar figure. The father claims to have changed, and Buddy shares that he has been an excellent caretaker for her, but I didn’t believe it. This man is rotten to his core. He sits the same. He breathes the same. He smells the same. He punctuates his sentences with the same dry laugh and wet teeth. Dandruff still speckles his collar. Ice still clinks in time with his shaky hands. His hair is cut the same, only the color seems different. It doesn’t matter. This is the man who hurt me and killed his sister. Does he really deserve to live?



I chose to kill him. I thought that is what he deserved. After what he’s done, I know that if I were in Brad’s shoes…
It’s not like I’d really do it, but you have to understand it's not easy to know that feeling exists. Judgement was secondary to impulse. I thought it was the right thing to do. I didn’t regret it until the game was over and I felt it wasn't better for choosing it. My blood, just like Brad's, is tainted with our father’s. Addiction’s playground is an artery. Brad has Joy and drinks; I have mutilation and nicotine. If my body keeps score then it’s also the field, it’s the umpire and the players, it is the gamemaker and the slave to its game.

Brad does not truly have a choice here. If you choose to spare Marty, he is met with a flash of the entrails, blinding, swirling clots of gore to let pain back in. Marty is the man who put this in me, my body is just reminding itself of its past. He wrote this history, this congealed mass of pain, on the back of my eyelids. It burns when I try to cry it out. Brad kills our father anyway.


II.

This game was more about me than I was comfortable with. The entrails Brad sees haunt him, fill the sky with red flashes, and titillate his most destructive desires. The image that haunts me is different. It is an indigo descent, a sinking mass of interconnected tendrils reaching up, but the weight of water sucks them back down. Sometimes there are flecks of yellow or green inside the shape, they grow and contort with the mass, like an infection, or perhaps teeth. I trained myself with Vietnam War soldier sleeping techniques at thirteen to avoid seeing this picture before bed. Sometimes I see it beneath my skin, crawling and pushing its way through my pores, oozing out in the supermarket and tumbling onto the ground.

The man in the computer screen sitting with Buddy was the same one I was dreading a two hour flight to see. He is the man in my blood I cannot get out. He is the taste of tobacco on my breath when I resign myself to loneliness, undeserving of companionship.

I do not love the man inside of me, so no one else can. He batters against my rib cage, shouting the things he did at three, thirteen, and what he will shout at twenty-three. The noises that follow him—opening of cans, clinking of ice, shattering of glass in recycling bins, clattering of dressers, the slamming of doors—coalesse in my ears and make it hard to focus. Some days I cannot hear at all.

This man inside of me is usually kept a secret. I can imagine those I know reading this, discovering something about me, and sinking deep into their chairs. I am sorry to those friends that this is the only way I feel you can learn this about me, at an impersonal distance, shrouded in “literary intrigue” and the ambiguity of metaphor, the framing device of Lisa to keep me safe from too much authenticity. Please do not pity me, I keep the man inside of me a secret because I am afraid your eyes will look different when you know he is there. I’ve known people who seem to grieve me once they learn there’s another person inside of me. They search for him in my freckles, put their lips to my ear to speak with him, some find him interesting instead of scary. My friends who read this, please don’t change your eyes; he’s been there all along, only now you see why I must fall asleep so quickly.


III.

The final moments of Lisa: The Painful look like this:



Brad has just killed hundreds of men to get to Buddy. His body is working against him, slowly mutating into something inhuman as a result of his drug abuse. Death is seconds away and he stands before his daughter, on his knees, begging her to hold him.

I left him alone.

I didn’t think twice.


Why didn’t I?



I need to go to sleep. Or maybe dream.

12/16/2024