Belle and Sebastian, Scotland, white fluffy bed sheets, smooth, small room, dew on the window, cloudy, eleven to four o clock, heaviness, cold sheets, cold room, clean clean smell but not chemical, fading into evening but it does not matter.

July 2024

Okay, of course there is some deep cosmic universal knowledge locked up in all of us because otherwise you’re implying that people just thought of the atom and happened to be right. Or like positing that light is a wave and then a dot shows up in your lense or whatever. It’s crazy that people were just right about the atom, it’s cause they knew. Like Plato claims, knowledge is like recalled or whatever, that’s why we can learn through questions. Through deductive reasoning alone. It’s all within us. (We are everything, we are all we know, we cannot have experiences that we are not at the absolute center of)

June 2024

It’s like comically absurd that people in banking have hella money. Like “oh yeah, we’ll keep it safe” and then they pull up in a Rolls Royce, like who payed for that!?

June 2024

My idea of a good time, a really really good time. Is being snowed in in a little cabin with 6 or so friends who all have positive attitudes. Shared bedrooms, a fireplace, lots and lots of strong alcohol that is hard to drink and not much to mix it with. Long leather bound books, dusty board games, pens and paper, canned food and ingredients for bread. No outside world to think of or escape to. That is the dream.

May 2024

When I am learning anything, math exemplifies it very well, there is always this stage of not understanding. And the thing about understanding is that until you do understand something, it feels impossible to ever understand. If you could conceptualize understanding it then you already would have understood it. Understanding is necessary to know what understanding might feel like. This often makes learning new things feel impossible.

February 2024

I order a gin and tonic. juniper and sweet bubbles. It occurs to me that I have never tasted juniper berries outside of gin. I wonder what they taste like when they aren’t rotten and boiled into weird little flasks that I don’t understand.

January 2024

Old John Brown's body lies a moldering in the grave
While weep the sons of bondage whom he ventured all to save
But though he sleeps his life was lost while struggling for the slave
His soul is marching on!
Glory Glory Hallelujah!
John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true and brave
And Kansas knew his valor when he fought her rights to save
And now, though the grass grows green above his grave
His soul is marching on!
(Chorus)
He captured Harper's Ferry, with his nineteen men so few
And frightened "Old Virginny" till she trembled through and through
They hung him for a traitor, themselves a traitor crew
But his soul is marching on!
His soullll iiisssss marrrchinnnnnggg onnnnnn!

December 2023 (not me, obviously)

Most addictions are a way of coping with life. You drink or smoke to relax after work because it’s stressful and bad on your body and keeps you locked up in a fluorescent room all day or makes you labor till you break your back. And when you try to remove these things from your life but keep everything else the same it is pretty much impossible to cope. You can’t just take away this one little salvation you have at the end of the day.

October 2023

Putting something that doesn’t make sense in an advertisement so people think about it more. Like not just something silly or crazy but like something where you’re like genuinely perplexed. Like spell a word wrong or have someone repeat the same line of dialogue twice or like make the acting really bad but don’t make it look like you tried to do that. Don’t make it look like you’re trying to be wink wink clever or washoo absurd, just do something off putting where you’re like, did they do that on purpose?

August 2023

The happy birthday song is great, wonderful that people sing to each other in celebration. Next time it’s someone’s birthday, I should sing loudly.

August 2023

The stars in the Big Dipper don’t even know they’re aligned

July 2023

It wasn’t despair. It was more like futility. Hopelessness. The overwhelming mediocrity of everything and the impossibility of satisfaction. That nature is just unsatisfying. Not just that it is non-satisfying, but it is the antithesis of satisfaction. And this is not just a property of nature, this is nature. The words are nearly synonymous.

July 2023

The road not taken, often misnomed as the road less travelled, is not a poem by Robert Frost about how we should take the less common route. The paths that diverge in the wood are just about the same. It’s about decisions. The significance of decisions and their life changing consequences and how you can never take them back, nor know what life would be like had you made the other choice. It is about his friend who regretted going off to war.

June 2023

When we were hiking up Ben More and we passed some people coming down and exchanged information about the weather at the top and the bottom. That is how information traveled by road throughout history. The Silk Road, spreading religion, rumors, practices. That is what society is. The Silk Road is the branch stretching between two roaring fires. Sparks passing between them, sharing the colors of their unique flames.

June 2023

I am riding a train west to Glasgow. Glaz-go glezga glesga I think to myself, always fighting my American accent. Home of the sell-tick football club. Spit on Thatcher’s grave. The Irish potato genocide. All the things I learned here.

May 2023

I like writing. I think I like things that writers like. Drinking, travel, negativity.

April 2023

Little proof for myself: of course there is no way to algorithmically generate a random sequence of numbers because a defining characteristic of a random sequence is that the fastest way to obtain it is to just write the whole thing down.

April 2023

I feel like people really understate how crazy dreaming is. Like oh yeah, 2 hours ago I was fighting an army of spartans but actually they were all my mom and then my dog joined their side. Now I'm responding to emails.

April 2023

I’m crying, but only because my room is full of onions.

February 2023

One of the crows is still in the tree, and the other crow is gone. The crows seem so much more sophisticated than the pigeons.

January 2023

The futility of making like any observation at all. Probably the only interesting observations are false ones, or ones that are at least derived from falsehoods. Like a mistranslation. Mistranslations and misunderstandings produce originality. But that’s not really what I was getting at. My point was more about the triviality of logically true statements. If you make an observation, and deduce a valid conclusion, you have essentially done nothing. The conclusion was already contained within the observation. All true mathematics is trivial in this way. Really, it reminds you of how stupid you are. Because if you were in a field and your friend commented that the grass is green, you would think it was a stupid comment, because it’s so trivial. This structure doesn’t disappear when we make more “nuanced” conclusions. But really, we are operating within a world of humans, all of whom have nearly equivalent cognitive capacities, and so, there are conclusions which people might find interesting just because a large amount of logic must be applied to prove it to ourselves.

January 2023

Music theory, and especially western music theory, is interesting because it is both entirely human made, and yet deeply natural. The simplicity and unity that is understood when examining music in a mathematical context compels me to believe that it has some deep natural properties. As does the seemingly preordained ability that we have to predict the next note in a harmonic scale, or to separate dissonant melodies from pleasant ones. Although, perhaps that ability is just an example of pattern recognition and prediction. Like, if you think of the 5 notes in a harmonic as a group in the mathematical sense, then when we hear the first couple notes we understand the elements of the group, and the group action that transfers between elements. I.e. we understand by how much the frequency increases from one note to the next. So perhaps we have an intuitive understanding of this thing which is clearly manmade (if you’re not convinced consider the fact that the West typically uses a 12 note scale with 7 modes while traditional Indian music has like 300 modes that I won’t pretend to understand.) not because we have a deep rooted understanding of music in its own right, but because we have a deep understanding of mathematics. By this I don’t mean that we are born knowing what the symbol for an integral looks like, but that we have an intuitive grasp of sets, their elements, and how they relate to each other, ie. the most fundamental aspects of mathematics.

January 2023

I think it's unnatural not to be depressed in the winter. Everything else is. The plants, the trees, the bears. They all just go to sleep. Tune in to nature and hibernate.

January 2023

How do those people that paint themselves silver and pretend to be robots for money get into it? Do they have like a buddy that does it? Did they go to clown college? Are they dancers? I bet most of them can dance.

January 2023

We’re just serving yeast. Yeast has dominated our species. Bent us to its will so we keep making beer and bread.

December 2022

The tragedy is that I should just drink some water and go to sleep.

November 2022

Isn't it weird that jeans are blue. Denim is blue. Like I didn't intend on wearing blue today. I didn't even think about it. And yet, I am wearing bright blue pants. They must dye it right? They must make it blue on purpose.

October 2022

Næss characterizes deep ecology through seven fundamental tenets. Here, I list each one with a brief description:

1. Rejection of the man-in-environment image: The notion that humans are isolated entities existing in an environment is replaced by the idea that humans, and all living things and their habitats, are deeply interconnected components of an inseparable net that makes up all of nature.

2. Biospherical egalitarianism: All life has inherent value and should be given the equal right to live and flourish.

3. Principles of diversity and symbiosis: Diversity among different forms of life, as well as among different cultures enhances the richness of the environment. And the ability for different forms of life to coexist peacefully helps all life flourish.

4. Anti-class posture: Exploitation among humans through the separation of classes and disparities between developing and developed nations is a net negative for all forms of life and should be avoided.

5. Fight against pollution and resource depletion: This is in essence the stance of the shallow ecologist, without the underlying anthropocentrism. Pollution and resource depletion is a problem for all life, and we must work against it.

6. Complexity, not complication: There is inherent complexity in nature which should be cherished. Take the tremendous amount of diversity among plants and animals, or the incredible mechanisms at the foundation of biology. Acknowledging this complexity is a good thing in part because it helps us realize our own ignorance of biological relationships and how we might inadvertently disturb them. Unnecessary complication on the other hand is a bad thing. Overcomplicating our systems of labour for example leads to inefficient bureaucracy.

7. Local autonomy and decentralization: Individuals and small communities should strive to become self sufficient. This not only helps in the fight against pollution, as energy is saved in transportation, but it also helps individuals to realise their role in the environment with which they physically interact.

October 2022

It’s crazy that in San Francisco we have “the big one” coming “the earthquake” like if there’s an earthquake it’s not like there was “an earthquake” it’s “that was the earthquake”. Like living in the shadow of a volcano.

September 2022

Running away from graveyards (moving west)

August 2022

Burning eyes
Throbbing teeth
God please let me
Get some sleep

July 2022

Cal: 19 | -10 | 0 | 0 | (9)
Rob: -5 | 0 | 15 | -36 | (-30)
Alex: 2 | 25 | -9 | 0 | (18)
Sis: 0 | 1 | 11 | 0 | (12)


July 2022 (I shot the universe, scored -30. That's why it's on here)

“You can have a hotdog or a hamburger.”
“…Can I have both?”
An inquiry into the truth table of the disjunction.

March 2022

When you’re driving, when you’re really driving like how we were when we went to Death Valley or when we came up from Big Bear, you’re forced to see the country. I was too young to take in those incredible landscapes and those dreary towns and the endless Mojave desert. And at the same time, it was perfect. We were really out there in that green Volvo. You can’t help but be awestruck by the glory of how big and beautiful the world is. We really didn’t know what we were getting into. Stop for food and gas in weird little towns like that place with the Pizza Hut where the guy in the parking lot showed you bones. That was real travel.

February 2022

"The life of the pirate was a brutal one" yeah, they just teach you that so you don't become a pirate.

November 2021

Scotland is a secretly bright country

October 2021

My fucking stupid ankle is fucked and the whole fucking inside of my leg too fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUKCk!!!!!

September 2021

When you dream your mind constructs perception rather than perceiving construction

September 2021

The US will kill a little girl for vengeance against the Taliban but they hate when black people take action for their dead brothers.

August 2021

That story about how you blacked out at Eloise's party and then a week later you saw a kid from that party at another party and he thanked you for all the advice you gave him and he was like bro that's life changing and I didn't even know who he was. Silly. Not good, but silly.

July 2021

I prefer to die with my boots on.

July 2021

And then somehow things become desperate. Running out of time. Somehow somehow it fails.

May 2021

Laying on the deck in sleeping bags with Edward during a meteor shower. It's cool for two people to see the same meteor. I want my kids to do that.

April 2021

The house drops an inch
Linoleum folding up into the wall
A twitch or jolt from time to time
The refrigerator sings it's timeless hymn
The sun sings through the west window
A droning melody cast upon the couch
We have just come back from the river
We are simple in our isolation
We've gone to Walden and gone to Walden
For the greenery seems to have weaved it's vines behind our eyelids
And taken root in the deepest part of us
So quickly did it grow
Our bodies like fertile soil
After a morning rain
All the things I'll forget to miss
Stories we tell ourselves.
We think the bees are dying.

April 2021

Few things more special than skating hard with your shirt off

March 2021

Mount Tam will burn. All that was once green and good in this world will be gone. There won't be a shire Pippin.

March 2021

Just make the whole thing a book: Notes
This is the best idea you've ever had. This is the thing that the artist actually did. There's some postmodernism in there. Hahaha. This should be the cover That's an even better idea.

February 2021 (this did not end up being the cover)

And, read this next one, (1) we seek to make meaning in a meaningless world.
Self evident.

February 2021

The mountain gives off a crazy amount of heat, you can feel it when you face it after rounding a corner. I can see why people like it so much.

February 2021

What's the difference between a hallway and a room? A door.

February 2021

You're not free in America, not at all. You truly are imprisoned in capitalism.

February 2021

Monism - all one. There is literally one thing, the universe or God or whatevuh.

February 2021

Ghosts are real, they are the person's influence after they die. Like if your grandfather was always telling you to fix your posture and then he dies and you feel yourself having bad posture and fix yourself because you kind of hear his voice in your head, that is his ghost haunting you.

February 2021

I saw a man having a cigarette on a sidewalk corner in the suburbs and then I saw two other men coming from different directions join him. I thought that was nice, ritual among friends.

January 2021

Please don't start getting sad again.

January 2021

Your memory comes through to me in waves
And I'm trying to study their behavior
It'd be nice to know when they're peaking once again
It'd be nice to predict when I'm in danger.

January 2021

Start a campaign where people go let wild polar bears eat them as repayment for climate change.

December 2020

This is me. This is what I am manifest. These documents. My entire life, all the important bits at least, laid out on a page.

November 2020

Guacamole tomorrow

November 2020

Maybe if I do the dishes enough someone will fall in love with me.

September 2020

There is a bug in my house. I will kill it. And then, perhaps by the bug's psychic influence, or divine intervention, I hesitate. I am right to kill it as it will not suffer. It will never know that it died. It will not know anything. And yet, maybe there is hope for this bug. Our interaction is the product of a mistake, but should that alone be enough to bring death upon it? Perhaps this bug will be something great someday. It cannot live here with me. I cannot care for it. I don't know what bugs need. I have no experience raising them. But I could endure a briefly uncomfortable moment. A short struggle. And put the bug under a cup so as to escort the bug outside. To let the bug live a life in an environment that can support it. This bug is relying on me. I am it's only chance.

August 2020

June 26th, first kickflip

June 2020

Growing up is death - well, obviously.

May 2020

Am I having a crisis because I have to write something down before cutting my pizza? I'm salivating.

April 2020

Everything is simply simple and infinite and simple and infinite bacteria culture bacteria worlds.

April 2020

Civilization is three meals away from anarchy.

March 2020 (I didn't come up with this one)

Holland Notes. A Dutch Hall and Oates cover band. Hilarious.

March 2020

March 13th 2020, University of Edinburgh exams are cancelled due to coronavirus fears. Students scramble to get home as soon as possible. James has gone to Wales for a race. Edward is scheduled to come to Scotland on the 26th. Lucien is flying home on the 18th. Sophie is leaving at 9:30 tomorrow morning. We haven't figured out accommodation. I don't know when I'm leaving. This is very likely the strangest and one of the most significant days of my life.

March 2020

Musicians sing my thoughts so I don't have to. They carry my burdens. Like Jesus

March 2020

Being together is great because you are together together. You are both together. We are together.

February 2020

Affirmative. Affirmation. Saying affirmative to demonstrate affirmation. Hilarious.

February 2020

It's crazy that in the UK teenagers don't have the thing where you listen to music while you drive around. Group music listening pretty much only exists at parties and clubs. This is one of the biggest cultural differences between our countries. There's this whole experience that American teenagers get that they just don't have in the UK. That shaped my relationships. That shaped my time with Alex. That shaped my bonding with people over folk punk. Driving to parties, driving to LA, such cherished memories. Music means something totally different in the UK. It is almost exclusively paired with drinking. This is entirely different in America. All driving is paired with music.

January 2020

The world is the mind. The world is entirely the mind. The mind is the world. Intuitively. There is nothing else, there never has been anything else. Nothing else has ever been perceived. What is the Roman Empire? It is the thoughts that exist in your mind when you consider the Roman Empire. It is not a physical thing. There are no physical things. There is only the consideration of physical things. The past is thoughts which we consider to be the past and the future is anything we think is the future. Being caught up in “truth” is ridiculous. Philosophers are too wrapped up in their realities to understand this.

December 2019

My life may be tragic but at least I'm not a flightless bird.

November 2019

Something must really be wrong with me. I thought that natural selection would have fixed this by now.

November 2019

Operation Northwoods. A plot by the department of defense to start a war with Cuba by committing acts of terrorism on US citizens. Possibilities include hijacking planes. Kennedy rejected it because he didn't want to go to war with Cuba because he thought they were too busy in Berlin. Not because of the war crime shit.

November 2019

This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me in my life.

October 2019

Socrates is STILL corrupting the youth!

September 2019

The idea of insulting someone by calling them a neanderthal is funny. We're still making fun of those guys.

September 2019

I did not know I would know before I knew
We were children in the purest form
Playing like we were grown
All the while aging.
Time danced through us
Moved us like marionettes
Through sin and vices
Divine salvation.
The sort of thing you can't know before you do
The sort of thing that needn't be proved.
Love is humbling when nothing else is.
Love is love is love is love
I want the truth to fill me up and choke me.

September 2019

Radiance father
Haven't you arrived?
Isn't your memory from the next bell?

Porcupine (microphone) fairy
No clamp (pork) to call her deary
May it sing a dying song.
May it sing a dying song.

November 2018

To Be Or Not To Be

And so I’ve heard the choirs sing
Of art and love and everything.
How beautiful they make it sound
To live in a land with such joy abound.
And yet I ponder what I’ve felt
What I’ve bet and what I’ve been dealt
And after careful consideration
I still can’t seem to find relation
Between myself and the songs they sing
Of art and love and everything.

So what is left for one to do
When songs as such do not ring true?
Ignorance cannot be bought
Once one has given it some thought.
A sad life seems to lie ahead
At least someday the road will end...

But a fool I feel I am to wait
When I can arrive much less than late
To bow before the curtain calls
To jump before the tower falls.
The audience may not take it well
They must have heard the book foretell
Of pain awaiting those leaving early
Still afraid of children’s stories
But I must admit that I am too
For here I kneel at the pew
Fearing hearing “I told you so”
I must say now, I do not know
Ay there’s the rub, as Hamlet said
Perchance to dream, when I am dead

July 2018

I understand that this essay, especially the latter part, is extremely vague. It makes sense to me but I can’t imagine that it would make sense to anyone else. I suppose my writing of it mostly exists to help me practice my typing. That is what I have gained here today. It’s not good writing.

June 2018

X was shot

June 2018

I'm afraid of the government and I'm afraid of being afraid of the government

May 2018

The Cats: I can hear the bottles clinking on their rings.

May 2018

Sometimes it seems
That life beneath the sea
Is sweeter than that of the land

And sometimes, to me
Freedom, or so it seems
Is crueler
Than the grasp of your hand.

March 2018

Morning
Mourning
Dances in the chlorine
Suffering then silence
On a cool fall morning

March 2018

Crystal cats
Sapphire snakes
Walk with me
To the desert lake
Misty water
and a cold grey shore
Black cloaked men
On horses four
Nashville girls on one track roads
Lust fueled rides headlights forebode
Jazz clubs sax and cigarettes
Red brick walls and casual sex
Nazi boys King Leopold
All my children do as they're told.
Leather jacket against the wall
Switchblades make for hasty brawls
Musket balls or incense halls
Either way, alone we fall
Cowboy hats and garter belts
All wrapped up in lion pelts
Sacred ritual in Tokyo
Where the night will not dare show
Are you afraid...
of what you don't know?

Ivory chess sets
Get some bed rest
Helpless souls among the deer nets
Creatures of the ice and snow
I'm so sad to see you go
Your sacrifice is a gift to us all
Forever commemorated in the hall
Rainbow men in crowded lands
Little boys are holding hands.
Together down we crawl to hell
Rusty worn out mission bell
You're looking up and no one's there
Praying can not mend your fear
Cowardly stupid worthless girls
Silk blonde hair in bouncing curls
Weak broken helpless boys
Hunting with the Iroquois
Spaniards search for the promised Land
Exterminate what you can't understand
A tribal man an office fan
A bloody successful five year plan

Thoughtful ones are parasites
Take away their voting rights
Welcome to the land of love
Animatronic turtle doves
A shimmering bed of broken glass
Come on kids let's head to class
An artificial apple pie
Your life's an orchestrated lie

All memories becomes nothing in the incomprehensible vastness of eternity



December 2017

Yearn
Turns to
Yawn
On the
Cool
Green
Lawn
Hearing
Soft
Silky
Swans
On the
Cool
Green
Lawn

November 2017

Burn money.
You've gotta rob the internet.

October 2017

They've got the guns but we've got the numbers...
but they've got way too many guns

Jack McSweeney - May 2017

Things are getting weeeiiiiiirrrrrrrd!

May 2017

responsibility is the norm

Jack McSweeney - May 2017

You boys smoking that OXYGEN??

Jack McSweeney - May 2017

Hoverboards are insane

April 2017

Language: how good must an invention be if it's illegal not to teach your kids how to use it.

April 2017

watch the diary of a wimpy kid movie SOBER and write an article about it. it is beyond belief good. an epic poem commenting on the true nature of modern society.

April 2017

why do I keep having to remember to write shit down?

April 2017