Journal 2025-05-21

I’m struggling lately. I think it’s the weed, it’s really just making me so tired and absolutely useless. Hence why I’m currently up and going in the morning to really try and counteract any dopamine dependencies I’ve got going on right now. I’m just so warm all the time, like I can feel the heat radiating off my skin.

I also still feel weird about people reading my blog. It’s good — having people read it is indeed the whole point! — but it still feels weird to have people reach out and comment on things. Aunt Karen is doing so in her usual way, but even some strangers have reached out and commented on it, which is odd and something I really would like to become slightly immune too. Because even these minor comments I can tell kind roll me around, in the writerly way of simultaneously thinking that I’m the greatest in the universe and also that they’re entirely wrong and unjustified. It’s a bit like the Thich Nhat Hanh quote where he says that love must be infused with understanding, or else it won’t feel like love, and that feels true to me. To some degree, I chalk it up to my own writing being a mere imitation of whatever it is I’m trying to point to, and thus that whatever it is I’m writing is even more removed from my target. That’s the nature of writing though — I don’t think I can one-to-one transmit exactly what I’m experiencing at any given time. But I can try.

Anyways, I don’t have much more to say at the moment. I have a mild headache — again, edibles — and I’m partially writing as a bit of a salve for that. It doesn’t really help resolve the headache, but it gets my mind on other things.

It’s kinda funny that I worked for years on meditation in order to get my mind to be less active (or Is suppose just less in-control) and now my daily ritual is basically to get it up and running every second of every day. But it’s nice when it’s running, and when it’s running now it’s generally on target for whatever it is that I’m trying to think more about, like characters or essays or what have you. And so it’s a more pleasant kind of thinking. I think my rationale for taking edibles is that I’ll think more outlandish thoughts or something, but that doesn’t seem to be true since I can’t focus on basically anything while I take them. The other reason for taking them is just that they tickle all my dopamine receptors to excessive degrees. They feel good, in short. There’s a reason people like them. But it’s also a more pernicious sort of decision in the dopamine-dependency hierarchy, because it’s a single decision that, in a split second, can essentially swallow your entire evening. It’s not a huge failure to take edibles every now and again, but taking them regularly while you’re on the road is kinda a disaster. (To clarify for future law enforcement officers who may be reading this: not “on the road” as in actively driving, I just mean while I’m traveling and staying in hotels/hostels/etc.)

(Honestly, a pretty funny character would be someone who’s hyper-alert to the surveillance state and thus narrates everything they do as if they’re being wiretapped.)

What else what else, I’m going the Getty after this. The name just makes me think of Getty Ritter every single time, what a wonderful human being. And then I have Craig’s event tonight, which is exciting! I don’t really have anything big to add or to poke and prod him about, but I think it’ll be interesting, as I’ve mentioned before, to really just embed in his community, which I think is mostly people who are Making Stuff and so on. Or at least people who are aspirational about it. I imagine that to some degree this crew is probably a bit of an older crowd that I would meet in a writing workshop, just imagine that with better taste and in a wider variety of interests (e.g. writing and photography and travel and language learning etc.).

But anyways, we’re getting to basically the end of what I have to say for today. And by that I really mean that I’m getting to my 750 word count — I think I could probably continue going off about the whole homelessness thing here in LA, and how that’s probably the single largest policy failure in the US right now. If I were a foreign visitor coming the US, I’d be horrified. Anyways, for later.