2025-04-09 Journal Entry

I’m sitting here in the plane back home. What’s perhaps strange is that it doesn’t quite feel any different yet. This doesn’t feel like some huge homecoming, and to some degree I think that’s a good thing. It lends an air of normalcy to all this, which is really what I want – for things to continue on this way. Maybe someone rents out the house or it sells, and then I have all the freedom in the world to do as I please. I can spend all my days in the library or writing beautiful books, that would be wonderful. To have freedom is a wonderful thing.

It’s not as if I didn’t have freedom before, but it’s freedom in the Marxist sense I guess, not in the sort of standard neoliberal sense. I feel the need to clarify every time I mention Marx to be like but I’m not a Marxist or something – if the FBI reads this some day, rest assured that I’m not working towards an upcoming revolution or whatever. I’ll wait for capitalism to collapse on its own, thank you very much. That seems to be happening already, so we’ll continue watching with baited breath.

But anyways, I see this as a big step in my life towards the direction of more freedom. It’s being unencumbered – if one does not need money to survive, then one cannot be swayed by money either. A big salary is not as addicting if that money just goes into a savings account or whatever. Aesceticism is sometimes touted as this purification process, or that it does something to the mind, all of which is true, but the simpler answer is that it just requires you to cut off less of yourself. I think I cut myself off from creativity and freedom for so long that I don’t hardly even recognize it in myself sometimes. But at momemnts like this, in the dim lights of the plane, floating up closer to heaven, songs in my ears, I know it’s still there.

I watched a YouTube video earlier about how this guy journals, and I think it was something like something that went well, something that went poorly, reflections on making the bad thing go better in the future, and then zooming out into how all of this plays into your life narrative. To some degree that’s the way characters in a story are made too. Henry, my character in the woods, that moment is just a beat in his whole story. It’s a moment to get some distance, literally, to get some space, literally, to get some fresh air … [literally]. It’s the space where he allows for something new to happen, but he carries all the old things with him. He can’t pack many things with him, but he can pack a photo of her, he can carry around the ring he meant to give to her, the ring that belonged to his mother. He can encounter all of his insecurities, the way he hid himself for so much of the relationship in order to appease her, to make himself what he thought she wanted.

For Caroline, she’s always attempting to bend herself into the right shape – the shape of perfect productivity, the shape of perfect calm – the right shape to present herself to others. She feels she has so little time, and so each moment must be wrung out, her days must be so full and Productive and yet she doesn’t really want to do anything. She should write a book, should climb Mt. Everest, should climb the corporate ladder, but what the only moments she can be herself are these precious moments of forced-quiet, her cell phone dying or going way out of town and not having service, forgetting something, etc. Hmm, that doesn’t feel evocative enough yet. What I think she wants most, perhaps, is to be seen as self-sufficient. She watched her mother be stuck with her father when she was a child; her mother had stopped working many years ago, and when her father slowly started slipping, she had nowhere to go, nothing to fall back on. Caroline compensates for this by being imperially alone, by giving and giving but only to herself. She’s a hoarder of her emotional capacity, being a serial self-help reader and expert on journaling, meditation, surface-level practices (and the occasional more woo Reiki session, which she sees as silly but forces her self to go to with the idea of being open-minded), all the while self-medicating and self-soothing with excessive work, caffeine, alcohol – again not to drunkenness, but to numbness, as self-care.

What’s up with pot jerk-off guy? Good question. I think Pete is searching for something mysterious, something he knows to be there but doesn’t know how to get there. That’s partially what the pot sessions are for: communion with the divine in the only way that he knows how, justifying his somewhat disgusting habits by claiming he’s marrying the divine and the profane, again aligning himself with tantric Yoga practices in order to give himself some justification. He earnestly does think that he’s doing the right thing, but he’s so entranced by pleasure and a felt-sense of comfort that he never learns self-soothing, almost the opposite of Caroline.

I think my conception of Pete (and kinda Caroline) need some more fleshing out. I think I have some interesting perspectives on Henry, on potential ways these things could go. Maybe his partner drives out to see him unexpectedly, maybe they start writing each other letters. Anything to turn him from life-aversion to life-affirmation. Pete’s probably the one into occult shit, the Cult of Dionysus maybe, or any of the other Dionysian-types.

But of course I still don’t have a great sense of how all of these people come together. Maybe they all do live in the same apartment building – Henry’s girlfriend/wife (well and Henry, when he’s not in the lookout tower), Pete, and Caroline. Caroline can smell Pete’s pot through out the window because she lives above him, or something, or she sees a Buddha statue in his doorway and asks him about it, and Caroline and Mrs. Henry somehow know each other. Hmmmmmm. Thoughts thoughts thoughts. All intriguing.

My thought changed a bit re: Henry. It would be cool to have him be a wanderer instead, a Cragig-Mod-esque ascetic who essentially packs up his things, walks out the door when $bad_thing happens and he leaves. He becomes more like a wander ascetic or monk, someone going through purification.

I’ll leave his name as Henry, as a little Easter Egg.