Okay...we're so back

Hello from the other side of a year

The bike tour ended one year ago this month, yet conditions remain as abnormal as ever. I’ve decided to revive this substack, or, more accurately, to give it a new life. No longer a catalog of events, but a space for curiosity. Welcome to the current paradigm. (It could shift at any moment.)

Here are a few of the ideas-concepts-entities-occurrences I’m exploring right now. Let’s talk about them?

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Nostalgia as the opposite of truth, as a practice grounded in the fictions of aesthetics and mythos. What does it mean to be seduced by nostalgia? What does it mean to mythologize? What are you nostalgic about in this moment?

Currently, I’m nostalgizing the early internet, probably as an emotional escape hatch from consumerist entropy and capitalist dread. Hypnotic 3D graphics on infinite loop, please save us? Take a break from reality and join me in Cameron’s World ~

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The mother wound as the oozing site of desire/shame. I mean mother wound not in a particular but in an existential sense, in the Lacanian sense, even, wherein life itself is the traumatic interruption of perfect symbiosis with the mother by forced expulsion into the law of the father. This rupture introduces lack and thereby generates desire, and shame. I should not want it, I must not let them know I want it, I have to stop wanting it…

But what is desire without shame? Is shame what makes the fulfillment of desire exciting? Have I been spending too much time with therapists lately?

shout out to stacey for the perfect birthday gift (this book)

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The concept of calcification (physically + emotionally). Do you think aging is necessarily a process of hardening? In 2025, I entered my 30s and my hip formed a calcium deposit. In 2025, I entered my 30s and watched some of my peers begin to lose their elasticity, to become set in their ways, to reject whimsy in favor of the performance of maturity.

Molting as the antidote to calcification: If, physically, to molt is to shed what is old to make room for what is new, what does that look like emotionally? To me, it looks like a constant emptying-out¹, a neverending pursuit of sustained ego death. Rejecting the urge to take yourself seriously, remaining curious, seizing every opportunity to play. If you are constantly becoming new, you cannot fossilize.

How are you fending off calcification? What was the date of your most recent ego death?

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Nothing that can be said is true. Anyone who’s talked to me this month has had to hear about this section of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: “He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that any more than for pride or fear.”

If we don’t create or represent truth through language, then how? Recently, I’m drawn to Heidegger’s theory of attunement, which posits “moods” as the foundation of reality in our anxious world. Does truth-production happen energetically, i.e., via the generation of vibes? Are vibes our singular source of shared reality? Let’s get into an argument about this one.

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Thanks for entering my marketplace of ideas. More to come. Send me your replies, your theories, your curiosities.

I’ll leave you with a blessing that was once texted to me by a friend ~

I pray that you’re always warm. I pray that your light never diminishes. I root for you. May all your obstacles be overcome, and may you be enlightened and abundant in peace and prosperity. You’re gifted, and lovely and powerful. I pray for your safety. I pray erudition and appropriate cunning never cease to find you. There’s never a bad time to practice your knife throwing. Guard yourself. Protect your soul. Protect your body. Protect others.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/awakened/comments/165cuja/how_to_dissolve_the_ego_complete_breakdown/