#i dont get obsessed with fictional characters ever but i do get fixated on some fucking guy from real life who makes music

[mellotronmkll]

It's always funny Almost completely relating to people's posts about being obsessed with a piece of media but it's clear they mean like a TV show or movie and are obsessed with one of the characters but for me it's literally always always with no exception some fucking band so it's not really the same but it does have the same completely all consuming effect on me

[noxiatoxia]

even as a small kid i felt like i didnt belong in this world. not in qn edgy way either but genuinely in a "i was born in the wrong lifetime" sort of thing. and then as i got older i got obsessed with the idea of stories and characters and people that were fixated on suicide from the moment they were born or people who never felt like they should have been brought into society or be human. i got obsessed with stories about unconventional means of happiness and love and living. ways of living life or being happy that most people would be perplexed at, i found comfort in those sort of stories, because i felt it was the closest id ever get to feeling like i belonged.

noww not to say i DONT like living. in fact i do. i have fun & despite all the bullshit in my life i do not want to end it all or w/e. i can have fun and be happy but that does not change the fact it all feels like a lie to others. hanging out with friends and talking to family feels like an eternal game im playing, never actually connecting with anyone or anything. and thats fine, bc its still fun and i still have fun, but living life day to day feels as real and sincere as a video game. i could play games for hours, get immersed and invested in them, fall in love with those pixels on the screen and cry at the story, but theyre still made up lives inside a digital world at the end of the day. thats what my life feels like. a very very fun video game! but its all shallow anyways. idk if that really bothers me exactly. i do often times find myself yerning for that place i belong that ive dreamt of before i could even read. as an abstract concept, one with the earth, or somewhere in the atmosphere, in space, dunno. i know ill never find it in this lifetime, and thats fine, as long as i can have fun and adventurw right now. and then when i die, i hope i can find where i truly fit in, and what my soul truly was meant to be.

i could go on abt how its likely this is a big reason i project myself through media and rely on it heavily to express myself, since im not really myself in real life, dont really have a being in real life, so i can pour my base desires and wishes into a fictional world where it all makes senae to me. and i could also acknowledge that i might be a bit mentally unwell, but if i have felt this way my whole life, perhaps this is just who i am. as ive always felt, some people simply are not destined to be human or to be alive. what some people want or how thwy feel cannot be changed through reprogramming or drugs. they are "lost causes", those who want nothing more than to dedicate their lives to killing, to killing themselves, to drugs, to living in the woods, to living with wolves. their happiness and desires are unconventional and perhaps can never be changed. maybe theyre "broken", but theres a lot of them out there, and i feel a connection with them. we get one life, lets live it how we want, theres so much more outside of this constructed society. normal is weird and weird is normal. for me, ill just wait.

[illknight]

i used to hate white noise

it was something i read for a book report at some point early in high school, off a huge list of potential books to read. im sure most of my classmates picked names they heard before, or based their choice off of some amount of research or asking around. i just picked white noise off of the name

sometimes i think about things that must have shaped who i am. was it homestuck? was it my extracirriculars? my teachers? all these things i liked

but i think that most of what shaped me was things i didnt like

at some point my assignment with white noise seemed to drag on, and it became something that i needed to joke about to continue to put up with it. i didnt have any friends who were also reading it, though, and i didnt even wonder whether it had a fandom, let alone look for one

some aspects of it have stuck with me in a way thats turned out to be unshakeable. ive read a lot of books for school, but i think of few of them as much as i think of white noise.

i suppose most books i have read are somewhat rarefied in concept. the ones i think of most are usually ones that had some kind of political commentary, or some kind of aspect that reminded me of myself. the things that seem ever-present and inescapable.

but as i get older and as the specificity of ad targetting and marketing becomes more invasive and granular, the themes of white noise become more and more relevant. everything becomes a generic object in a shopping cart, or a looming threat that everyone is responding to with simultaneous hysteria and apathy, or a television in the background of a conversation-- interrupting thoughts with irrelevant but flow-altering noise. a constant butterfly effect of unacknowledged but unavoidable signal, deviating us further from what we were thinking to intend before we lost our train of though

i guess as i get older i also realize that people, as a rule, are frustrating and bizarre and objectionable and idiosyncratic. the constructs of society reinforce and amplify that.

white noise just feels a lot less stupid every day and all my ungotten jokes about it are perpetually coming back to haunt me

also while i tend to claim internally that my pointlessly pseudoanalytical tirades are a side effect of strilondian stridings, just attempting to Become some characters i enjoyed in a comic once

but i think that, being frank with myself:

my tendency to think in unnecessarily complicated symbolism and rely on a variety of systems of thought and philosophies to justify vast conclusion-jumping all for the sake of intrigue or mild “things that make u go hmm” moments probably derives from my youthful exposure to sermons written by pastors desperate to extrapolate their cultural observations and personal pet peeves into full sermons that will permanently integrate into the views and thought processes of their congregation, all on a weekly basis

however, my tendency to direct that symbolic extrapolation at social and economic constructs and then spout off about that shit for several consecutive minutes with no prompting and no expectation for a response ?

thats all white noise babey

theres something hilariously immature about me fixating on the notable fictional, capitalism-obsessed pedants which comprise the new york professors of the college-on-the-hill, deciding somehow that they were cool despite hating their fictional context, and then carrying their patterns of behavior into adulthood despite the fact that this course of action has never served me well.

at this point it would probably be too difficult to shed this tendency, but while rereading white noise it seems sort of clear that even though they are detachedly analyzing the colorful trappings of a superficial, capitalist world, they are just the same as every other person who is subject to the background radiation of the marketing and culture they so curiously dissect

rereading the early words of siskind about the barn was both like a mirror and a grim reminder. he rants and raves about how nobody sees the barn, only the signs about the barn and the photos take of the barn. it is easy to think at first that his concern is that the barn is lost, but then jack amends his narration, saying that siskind “seems immensely pleased by this”

is there a joy that is derived from criticism of the culture that sucks away the actual critical nature of the analysis? does our investment in describing, cataloguing, and naysaying this society’s workings cause us to become subconsciously invested in its persistence?

there is something clearly off-putting about jack’s hitler studies. it seems clear that, while it is assumed that jack is aware that hitler was an atrocious figure, the meticulous cataloguing of hitler’s life and the lives of those around hitler, as well as the enthusiasm for that life necessitated for jack to name his kid fucking Heinrich, seem like they must derive from some kind of inappropriate affection for these figures. it like critical obsession is only the acceptable cousin of admiring obsession. like the person who studies a subject is not immune to the psychological contagion which eminates from that subject

the american cultural studies are housed in the same building as hitler studies and with this sort of retrospective glance at the subject, it seems like the new york professors have an almost inappropriate attachment to their field of expertise. but how else do you become an expert, but through fascination and some level of sincere admiration? do the new york professors see beauty in marketing rather than treachery?

for some reason, (maybe it was my raised-jaded, “it was recently the 00s” brain) i read their discussions as inherently critical when i was younger. this was likely just because they were pointing out the oddities and details of something i had already accepted as ubiquitous. however, pointing at something that is ignored isn’t the same thing as taking a stance on that thing. being aware that there is a trick is no better if you’re still being tricked

all this is sort of to say that rereading this book makes me wonder about how my behavior may be patterned, if not after, at least the same as these characters. my awareness of certain issues is only based on my prior enthusiastic involvement in those issues. some of my awareness in certain issues is based on my current involvement in those issues. does my close examination of these latter issues draw me nearer towards them, like a moth to flame? do i complain about the punishment only to repeat the punished behavior to receive the associated punishment as a sort of backwards reward?

do i go to starbucks just so that i can more effectively gripe about their poor working conditions and their shitty playlists and the alarming late capitalism of their company structure? or do i just go because my friends go there? should i stop spending money there? or would that be a pointless gesture?

i complain about the school system, about workaholicism, about corporatism, about cultish religion, about pedantry, and so on, but i don’t take any meaningful action to distance my own functioning from these things. is it for research’s sake? no. i dont even try to justify it like that. and i don’t think that my willingness to discuss the details of these things distances me from them. i know that i am in the barn photo’s aura. i know that i can’t unsee the signs. but i’m still standing here, eagerly talking down about the people snapping their cameras at the barn

i kind of love white noise