#having thoughts out loud! without prompting! is this progress? i am hesitant to label it as such

[erstwhilesparrow]

a list of thoughts i am having, stated with no regard for their truth value outside of my head, under a cut for length:

i used to have icarus. and before that i had whoever was wearing glasses in a given cast. i had robots and dogs and the very clever black cats they like to have in fairy tales. i... don't anymore? it's like i've skipped out past the end of the lines that were written for me and now i look at myself and find [ERROR UNDEFINED]. i'm not, like, doing anything that i feel could meaningfully define me, and it's hard to tell where i end when i don't bump into people very much anymore. i don't really understand what people are getting out of their lives that makes them find death so unthinkable.

minecraft is really good for... symbols. big, sweeping gestures. it operates on the level of the operatic, the mythological. it suits c!emerald duo really well, i think. they suit their environment. i think a lot about the fact that 'waving' at someone in minecraft is a punch, really. violence is embedded / implied / implicated in even their body language. i'm thinking about how if you want to protect someone in this game, the most obvious way to do it is to put your whole body between them and danger. phil decides things are true about people, and then gets surprised-frustrated-unsettled when they are not that way. techno makes sense of his world through myth. in a fairy tale, you are only ever one thing. that quote about how in a story like that, form is function and function is form.

there's this podcast i listen to where a bunch of poets get together and discuss a poem like once a week, and i'm kind of delighted by the way they like to say a poem astonished them. the way they say it, it sounds so lovely. not a shock, or a scandal, but something warmly unexpected, something that disrupts your expectations and makes you glad of it. they have a way of looking at poetry, and perhaps the whole world, that feels (and now i'm quoting a news article about mary oliver) "tender without being soft". on one hand, i can imagine the infrastructure necessary to get to where they are at is not always accessible. on the other... i am not above wanting that for myself and for others. i am not above wanting to see the world with that much consistent tenderness.

actually, i'm thinking about that first bullet point again and this is fucking weird. nearly everything i think is true about myself is information from, like, three years ago. it feels like i haven't... updated since then? not really sure what to do with that, and odds are i won't be doing anything with that, i'm just suddenly struck by how much of my understanding of myself is based on outdated information. i... okay? for once, this isn't performance art. you'll just have to take my word for it here.

i think people get freaked out when you are very, very quiet. certainly, people were uncomfortable enough with silence when i was a kid that they would fill those spaces for me, going so far as to playfully narrate how silly i must have thought they were being, since i wasn't saying anything. the upside of this is that i am well-trained in the art of doing one (1) cool thing and then going radio-silent. this is extremely useful for convincing people that i am cool. it's also really funny, on reflection, though i'm not doing it on purpose. i've had people call me scary. something about perceived competence. i kind of like that, but i don't like making threats i can't back up. i have a suspicion that this is part of my interest in ropes. i would like to have the skills to back up that projection of competence, and being able to tie people up well / interestingly strikes me as very much a skill that cool and competent people have.

okay, i don't think there's anything else i can say that is going to feel like a genuine thought i am having right now, as opposed to a thought i've had enough times in the past that its expression has been engraved in my brain. but this was fun! i have no idea who this is directed at. i have a friend who told me i should write as though everything i produce is going to be read by my smartest friend. so i suppose that's what this is too. i am trusting your understanding here, if not of my thoughts directly, then of the fact that this is not a carefully drafted and revised post by any stretch of the imagination. (and this i know is because i'm in a funny mood, but maybe i love you. maybe this is one of those nights where i am heart-struck to be alive, and i love you.)

wait no one more thought: i should get to have pointy teeth and flappy ear-bits. for fun. ideal form should include bonus ways to express emotion, if desired. i am already jittery-nervous-snippy so much of the time; i should also get to have the cool aesthetic perks of being a weird bite-y little prey animal.