i hadn’t been inside a church for a proper service in almost a decade until this morning. we went to a memorial mass for daddy’s cousin who passed away last year. i was in lebanon when he passed, three months pregnant with nunu. when i came to australia a few months after, we went to visit my husband’s aunt, the deceased’s mother. i remember walking in to her house and seeing her sitting solemnly under a painting of the pieta, jesus dead in mary’s lap wearing the crown of thorns.

i forgot how much of mass is just apologizing to god to christ lord have mercy for we have sinned we are unworthy to receive you but we will anyway just say the word and heal my aching soul though i am a sinner and i am unworthy. sat there doing the math while i listened and i think roughly sixty percent of the mass was devoted to telling god how sorry we are for being alive. the other forty was telling him how great he is. there is very little room in the structure for anything else like questions silence grief, for the actual dead person whose photo is on the altar surrounded by flowers. his son and nephews took turns at the pew reading passages of scripture about how great god is and how unworthy we are. what kind of relationship is this. if a friend of mine spent sixty percent of our time together telling me how sorry they were for being themselves and the other forty percent telling me how amazing i am i would be concerned. i would ask of they were ok. do you need to talk to someone? this sounds like a trauma bond. but when it's god it's called devotion and belief and where there’s belief there are bars around the truth that you are not allowed to examine too closely because examining it is already a failure of it. god is a double bind. the sermon was about letting harry’s memory remind us to love one another but not however we like, to really love one another the way jesus loved us. i never knew jesus, so i’m not sure how i could love like him. funerals and memorials are in great alignment with the themes of our invisible moon, nothing like death to remind you that you’re not gunna be here that long and the best time for anything is always now because it’s the only time.

feeling scattered on this final night of the new moon, thinking about the future. i have a weird rash on my neck, right in the middle, on my throat where you’d draw my chakra. maybe my throat chakra is overactivated by all this writing. maybe it is expanding the more i find my voice, or maybe it’s exploding. for a long time i wanted nothing else but to be small, as small as humanly possible, extra extra small my mom loves to point out you look great i had to get you the xxs for it to fit you right. i have starved myself silenced myself twisted myself fainted contracted illnesses been hospitalized all in the name of small my lord and savior if i could just be borderline invisible then everything would be alright, if i could just be wafer thin. if i were to tell my twenty one year old self that i am now bigger and happier than i’ve ever been, she wouldn’t believe me.

before the christian church codified the devil into a singular anthropomorphized entity, when stories were told what was considered unfavorable or wrong or sometimes just plain annoying was taken off of god’s shoulders and tagged on to an amorphous enemy of his, a nameless adversary who liked to mess with god’s plans. for example it is god’s plan that if you plant good seed in good ground it will grow good food. but, unfortunately, even if your seed and your ground is good, the amorphous enemy of god may still come in the night and plant his wretched weeds. weeds, being wretched and bad, growing where they don’t belong, out-eating the better plants, is displaced from the realm of all created by god and relegated to god’s other. god doesn’t make useless and unfavorable things so if you come across something useless and unfavorable it is the work of his enemy, the devil, whom he also created somehow. you too can be displaced from the realm of all and relegated to god’s other if you don’t follow orders, that is what naturally follows from this logic, hence hell. the devil is the solution to god’s quality control problem. god makes everything and everything god makes is good but sometimes there are defects and the defects can't be god's fault because god is perfect so you need a department to absorb the defects.

we’re only three days away from the end of this challenge? should we keep going? should i extend the goal post to ninety days? on a scale of enjoyable to unbearable how annoying would it be for me to pop up in your inbox with a thousand words every day for the next ninety days? because i’ll be honest i’m not sure i can stop at this point. in the shower today i imagined a scene of a woman name anushka (?) driving in to the colony (?) to meet her humanoid boyfriend bashir’s (?) family for the first time and announce their engagement. the colony is a closed dome on a post-apocalyptic earth where centuries ago a nuclear accident destroyed most of the earth. the only ones to survive were those who upgraded into humanoids and moved into the colony, and those who hid underground. over time, the ones who hid underground and remained fully human evolved to develop scales in response to the radiation. anushka, a scaled human, is about to marry bashir, a humanoid, against his parent’s wishes (he is very important in the colony and mixed marriages are still taboo for commoners even), and together they are going to give birth to one of our protagonists, who doesn’t have a name yet, who is a scaled humanoid, meaning she can turn her scales off and on (but it is illegal to turn your scales on in the colony without a permit). you’re probably thinking me insane right now and you would be right to do so but in case this is actually a genius story idea consider this a copyright.

until tomorrow <3

the quintessential nature of white woman the construct is best symbolized by the image of the nun, the devoted sister who upholds father’s orders, his whip and his well who snaps everyone back in line with cold and melancholic devotion. you think you suffer by her order? hah! you don’t know what suffering means. she is the one who has suffered, she is suffering and sacrifice and devotion. white woman is the moon to the white man’s sun and we’re all just the wretched of their earth, breathing their air, basking in their light by day and night. when someone refuses to speak ill of the ultra wealthy because they dream of the day that they will join the club, when someone enables the abusive behavior of another in exchange for their protection, wealth, etc., when someone asks you not to bring up politics or religion because why would anyone want to think about anything unpleasant, that is the work of white woman. in succession, greg and tom are white woman, they use the vulnerability of their humble origins to charm their way into powerful rooms, accepting abuse as part of the price for access. they don’t want to end the culture of abuse they want to be in the position of the abuser. in a capitalist patriarchy a poor white man is equivalent to a white woman in his emasculation by the rich white man. tom is the white woman to the white man the emasculated man to the rich man that is the roy family. tom accepts abuse above him so that he can continue to have people underneath him that he can dole it out to. tom has more or less sold his soul to the roys in exchange for the opportunity to be in proximity to and therefore get to weild some of their power.

when white woman’s personal struggle is put in perspective, when placed within the grand collection of intersecting and intersectional struggles, it makes it seem as if everyone were entitled to sharing their struggle without anyone’s permission the way white woman is. if everyone struggles just like white woman, white woman’s struggle ceases to be special. being special is very important to white woman. asking white woman to see its struggle within the context of all struggle is an ontological assault on the white woman experience of reality, a mockery of its pains and labors rather than an invitation to feel deeper, to learn of the pain and labor of others and know that her suffering does not isolate her because she is not alone, this is a structural problem. this is an insult to white woman whose personal experience can only remain above all except white man, her worthy opponent, her sun, so long as the structure remains intact. this is white man’s world, but white woman is next in line for the throne of this crumbling kingdom that she has long fought for.

last night i saw a creator i follow posted something about the way western feminism centers white grief and an ethnically european fem presenting white woman in the comments wrote a three-paragraph response about how she too has suffered, how her divorce nearly killed her, how she's been through things that would make your head spin, how nobody gets to tell her that her pain isn't valid. mind you nobody did, nobody told her that because the post wasn't about her it was about western feminism centering white grief and hence ignoring the suffering of say the millions of women in gaza, sudan, the congo who are in urgent need of help. the post wasn‘t about her and that was precisely the insult, because white woman cannot encounter a conversation about collective suffering without installing itself at the center because to not be at the center is to not exist. white woman has one opponent and that is white man, she either fights white man for the center, the seat, first place or she takes it when he’s not around. remember that white woman is an imposition of the social power of white on the vulnerability and social dispossession of woman. hence for example white woman tears. my mom uses white woman tears against me all the time and it always works. i’ve used white woman tears against my husband, sparingly and for benevolent cause of course i’m not a monster but again, works every time. we are all quite capable of being white woman when we’re in proximity to power long enough because being in proximity to power long enough doesn’t make you want to take it down it makes you want to take its place. white woman doesn’t want to finish white man it wants to be white man. hence, hilary clinton.

it appears that i have taken up today’s entire furball on white woman and am now feeling conflicted about whether or not to post this or write a new thousand words. will it offend the light-skinned people of european descent reading this blog? this is what i’m anxiously thinking to myself, the anxiety amplified by the fact that i’ve promised myself not read back and edit, and so i can’t tell if what i’ve said will read as measured philosophical thought or reactionary reflections on a small set of interactions with a limited variety of people? now that i have confessed as much i will simply have to hope that i have not offended you because as you can see any movement besides unwaveringly forward would be unfaithful to the exercise, and to lose you just as we were getting to know each other would be unfortunate. you are not who this is about gentle-hearted reader of european descent i know that you are not a monolith as none of us under these collective identifiers are monoliths, hence my attempt to define white woman the construct, white woman the disposition that can be held any human form quite early on, but if you find yourself offended then perhaps you night ask yourself the questions that i will now ask myself on this second ceremonial night of the moon. how can i learn from white woman the construct? what can white woman teach me? what does white woman ask me to reassess under the invisible moon? nunu is drooling all over the corner of a book about animals and the alphabet even though i’ve told her multiple times now that that is not how you consume knowledge and it’s way past her bedtime. i too am capable of centering myself in someone else’s suffering, in fact today i centered myself and my preferences in my mother’s suffering. why do we criticize our parents? do we genuinely expect them to change? why do i feel entitled to criticize my mother despite everything she does for me? why do i feel compelled to be a whip and well with her, to uphold an imaginary order in opposition to her chaos? what is this order producing that is so precious, and if it is so precious, why is it so precarious as to be threatened by my mother? we’ll see what the moon thinks.

until tomorrow <3

almost fainted at the gyno today from an unexpected pap smear and biopsy. not that the doctor forced it on me but i’ve had some unwanted visitors show up in some very exclusive places and the preliminary tests have not been able to reveal what they are and how they might be expelled from the premises of my body. since also i couldn’t remember when i had my last pap smear, there really was no escape. the doctor was braced to tackle two ugly birds, finding out who these guests are so we can get them out and renewing the clock on my necessary five year check-up. i have seen a doctor almost every day since last monday now, for either me or nunu, but the new moon is tomorrow so the cleansing begins tonight. since any woman or person with a cervix reading this knows, and any man or non-cervical person who knows a woman or cervical person can ask if they’d like to know, i’ll spare you the details because it’s all very unpleasant as you know or will know if you’d like to.

a men’s multivitamin and a women’s multivitamin, caps blue and pink respectively, coded boys and girls even though the opposite was true at first, at least when gender first began to settle the land of color. that is how you know something is a capital construct, it settles and occupies places it doesn’t belong to feed off of them. its logic can be imposed on things to as to reproduce capital on capital’s behalf. color is no longer color color is a landscape that can be gendered for the sake of capital, meaning that color can be cut up like dough with a gender-shaped cookie cutter, repackaged and sold in myriad forms so they are no longer clothes they are girl’s clothes and boy’s clothes despite babies being virtually genderless. when i shop for nunu i shop in the boys section simply because we’ve reached the stage in the capitalization of gendered colors where boys have an overall better and more various color selection than girls do. girls clothes largely converge around versions of white, pink, purple, beige. we could do this with any aspect of capitalized society, age height weight class race nationality sexuality political party cookie cutters always on the hunt built and bred and programmed to hunt for virgin land to superimpose themselves, to settle and occupy and generate more capital.

still dizzy from the appointment. my body is doing that thing where it’s fine and then suddenly it reminds you that two hours ago someone was inside your cervix with a small sharp thing and you should maybe chill. but i am chill. i’m sitting down. in karamazov there’s this bit early on where fyodor tells the monks a story about a saint who was beheaded and picked up his own head and walked with it kissing it tenderly. and one of the monks points out that that’s not quite how the story goes and fyodor says yes i know i made it up, the whole thing, i always lie, i lie all the time, i don’t know why i do it. is that also a lie? does he actually know why? is part of the performance convincing you that there is no fyodor making the decisions? this machine runs without permission means there’s no one to be held accountable. the book is so pleasantly written in extensively visual scenes like a movie from a pre-film time.

for the first of the three nights of the invisible moon in taurus tonight we continue with the theme of resets, reassessing, restarting, following from the doctor’s initiation this morning. technically the ritual has already begun and we will do best to be intentional in noticing what around us is asking for a reassessment or a clean slate. i invite you to join me on this three day journey as you too have been initiated into the ritual by having heard about my predicament with the doctor. reading about my pap smear has put you in a double bind, beautiful reader. now that you have bore witness to my renewal, have been made aware of the invisible moon’s regenerative powers, she will be watching you and holding your heart’s wishes so don’t be surprised if some things in your life spontaneously combust or demand renewal you have been warned. the moon is a very sensitive creature but she never holds a grudge and will still do her best to make your dreams come true even if you ignore her now that you know.

the theme is resets. what am i resetting? what needs reassessment and realignment? maybe multiple things, for me: my relationship with my body, and the twitchy witch machine. for the first night we will have cards, water, a candle, paper and pen, and a stone. throughout the day we will reflect on what needs resetting without writing anything down, we will notice if we have things trinkets toys items that connect to what is under reassessment and we will bring them with us to the ceremony. once the sun is set we find a calm space at a calm time and place our materials on a (preferably cloth covered) table however feels right and move with our intuition. some begin by lighting the candle, some by writing or pulling a card, i like to begin with a few deep breaths, followed by speaking whatever intention emerges from that breathing into my water and chugging it. then i light my candle, to open the space, wash my cards with a loose poker shuffle and let fall what may’s new moon has in store for me. then i’ll write. tonight, for this first night, i’ll focus on how my relationship with my body has been, and what the twitchy witch machine has produced thus far, how it has worked, with some thoughts on where i would like to go. tomorrow i’ll write about what my relationship with my body looks like today and what i wished it looked like, and how the twitchy witch machine works today and how i wish it worked. and finally, on the third night, i’ll reflect briefly on what is and has been, and focus on what my relationship with my body will be and how twitchy witch will work and what it will produce moving forward. all the while, throughout the day before each nightly ceremony, we want to be thinking about the night’s theme, letting it permeate the rest of our mundanities, looking for the ever present pattern of resets while you do your laundry wash your dishes water your plants trim your wilting mothers day flowers make your coffee for the third time today.

now i will go enjoy some fruit. thirty something years old and my mother is still cutting my fruit. i hope i’m cutting nunu’s fruit when she’s thirty something. actually if we’re hoping then i hope my mom is still around to cut fruit for the three of us when nunu’s thirty something, but i will also make the effort to learn nunu’s preferred slice width so as not to break the cycle because this is what we pass down, love in the form of perfected slices of fruit. nunu has discovered that feet can kick things and that kicking things produces noise and moves things and that noise and movement produce attention and that attention produces faces and faces produce joy. she spent the last twenty minutes kicking the side of her playpen like a tiny prisoner staging a one-woman riot and every time i look over she grins: mommy’s face has been produced by the noise and movement, mission accomplished. the empiricist has moved from consumption to intervention. we are no longer merely tasting the world we are hitting it and seeing what happens.

see you tomorrow <3

what was i doing. i’d just come in from a meeting. ah yes, the sheets.

last night i went out to get some sheets for nunu’s new bed but on my way there i saw a bookshop and thought i’d stop and check it out since the beddings store would be open for another hour and a half or so. needless to say i went home without sheets but i did get four new books. does that make me a bad mother? or a good reader? or a book hoarder given that i bought these books while being a full hundred or so pages into two other books (each)? i need a shower. bad enough that i’m going to go do that before we continue because i’m pretty sure the apartment stinks of me. does not having time to shower make me a good mother?

why am i always in such a hurry? just had another fantastic idea in the shower that has now slipped away. what was i doing. washing my hair. it’s not coming back, i’ll have to let it go let it run away like wild horses over the hills. i haven’t read any bukowski in a long time.

another cloudy day today and my mother has reorganized the pantry. she hasn't said anything about it she's just done it and now the lentils are where nunu’s cereal was and nunu’s cereal is where the snacks were and the snacks which are what i’m most likely looking for if i’m in the kitchen are somewhere i haven't discovered yet and have given up on finding for the time being which is probably for the best since mom is making lunch and it smells delicious. this is her love language. cooking yes but also displacing your things so thoroughly that you have to come to her to ask where anything is, making herself essential through spatial rearrangement. it's genius actually. you can't be disrespectfuk with someone when they’re the only person who knows where your cookies are.

nunu is experimenting with new sounds, new pitches. her signature talking point at the moment is something that sounds like hi dada or ratata. sometimes i’ll check on her when she’s supposedly napping and find her in bed eyes wide open hands stretch out in front of her playing with her own fingers and whispering atatatata with a look of awe as if she were whispering prophecies to herself, casting curious spells from her cot. everything happens little by little so subtle that you don’t even notice it because it is always happening at slowest and most unseen pace like the turn of the very earth it emerges in only the smallest ways tiny bursts here and there a new sound a new facial gesture a more sophisticated dexterity a deliberate pitch. we have this thing where every time i catch her eye i gasp in surprise like i’m just realizing she’s here and am in awe of her beauty. she loves it, almost as much as she loves looking at people’s hands. she’s obsessed with hands at the moment. she grabs my fingers while i type and tries to redirect them to her mouth as if what i'm doing is a misuse of perfectly good fingers when the real question is: are they edible?

pregnancy is like hiking up a very high mountain, the higher you go the harder it gets, the less breath you have, the less air there is to breathe, the more tired your hips are until you reach the top to jump right off before the mountain crumbles beneath you, and you fall and fall and fall into the underworld which is called post-partum.

the greatest magical tools at our disposal are our language, our awareness, and our imagination. with only those three we expand our own consciousness and the consciousness of others. acknowledgement, understanding, informed action, but most of us can’t get past the acknowledgement. how will we understand something we refuse to acknowledge? how will we act in alignment with the best solution if we don’t understand what we’re dealing with? are some pleasures better than others?

for dust thou art and to dust shalt thou return. philosophical nugget produced by a sound mind or angry declarative burn of a greedy king hoarding resources? you dare eat from my special tree you ignorant earth worm? you insignificant speck of dust?

in the opening chapters of the brothers karamazov three brothers arrive at the monastery for a meeting that their father fyodor has allegedly called to settle a financial dispute with his son dmitri. it's supposed to be mediated by father zosima, a holy man, in a holy place, and within minutes fyodor is telling vulgar stories, insulting everyone, intentionally making a fool of himself. he tells father zosima i always feel when i walk into a room that i am the lowest of all and that everyone takes me for a buffoon so let me play the buffoon because every one of you is lower than me. fyodor pavlovich rushes to embody the most base version of himself so as never to be caught or criticized or held accountable for his sincerity. he humiliates himself before anyone else has a chance to. no accusation of his character can hurt if his character is a manufacturing separate from himself. fyodor is a machine that produces humiliating behavior and records unfavourable and confused response as pleasure. fyodor would rather be loathed for his intentional assholery than even be assessed, considered for who he actually is. he extracts pleasure from the meeting of his behavior with the confused and disgusted reactions of those in his company, his performance is recorded as a pleasurable thing, a desirable thing on the body without organs, and so is born the residual subject, fyodor pavlovich the trickster, who makes those around him uncomfortable with his vile manner and unfiltered tongue. but is there a fyodor behind the performance deciding when to turn it on? or has fyodor become the performance that identifies with the residual subject that finds itself a tangential subjectivity with regards to the pleasure of intentionally humiliating oneself? fyodor pavlovich is another father who refuses to die and each of his sons reflect something back at him: dmitri, the chaotic trickster, ivan, the corrosive intellectual, alyusha, the one who needs to be loved by all. and the whole novel is about whether any of them can build something that isn't just a reaction to the harm that he’s done. can we make something new out of inherited wreckage or are we always just rearranging the debris?

the sun hasn't properly come out all day and my mother has been cooking and cleaning since she landed and shows no signs of slowing down. she found a spot behind the toilet that i'm choosing not to discuss and one of nunu's missing socks which had somehow found its way to the inside of the oven mitt. i don't know how. nunu doesn't know how. the sock isn't talking. the oven mitt refuses to snitch. dust nation lives to see another day.

until tomorrow <3

my mom came back to sydney today, high energy as always even after a twenty eight hour flight from nova scotia. she’s already tidied up the house, and has food cooking, and is now deliberating whether or not nunu would be woken up by the sounds of the vacuum because there’s hair everywhere given that we only did vacuum the apartment once since she left, and it was only a few days after she’d left and she’s been gone for three weeks, and when i say we i mean daddy because i genuinely struggle to vacuum or mop or clean the floor in any capacity. dishes are fine, laundry’s fine, dust is fine (unless it worships me), walls, bathrooms etc. gimme any chore and i got you just not the floors, please, or the trash. anything but those two. floors are by far the most ungrateful surfaces in a space, you clean them and within the hour they’re dirty again. at least the dishes have the decency to stay clean until someone uses them, and the laundry stays folded until someone wears it, the floor betrays you immediately it has no loyalty, it’s not like the dust that takes you with it on its journey of accumulation over a period of days, forms a relationship with you, tells you a story. the floor is chaos. it is literally taunting us with its entropy.

thinking in terms of partial objects, i am a partial object but my hands eyes hoodie toenails organs are all partial objects that connect to other partial objects (each other). in a capitalist machine we are each the invisible partial machines of capital’s body without organs keeping the capital aflow keep the blood apumping from my coffee to the barista to their landlord to the bank to the state to the weapons manufacturer to the military to the pocket of a soldier who comes home to see their family but is so disturbed by what they’ve experienced that they can’t adjust emotionally can’t return to the normalcy can’t relax in this peace and quiet so they buy a cup of coffee on their way to an appointment with someone who’ll give them a prescription to a drug from a pharmacy to a landlord to a state that trains its people to breed their children for slaughter so their blood and bones might feed the great machine that makes all the pretty things we want and need like food, shelter, coffee, etc.

the afternoon sun presses in on the glass through a cloudy sky outside, warm white and medical while my mom babbles in the background with nunu who broke out in song minutes ago summoning us to her chambers. i am munching on chips while i wait for the kebbe in the oven. it smells amazing. i should stop with the chips so i can properly enjoy the kebbe but they’re so good original sea salt kettle cooked the only chip or cracker flavor i’ll have except sour cream and onion if absolutely necessary but never never salt and vinegar. salt and vinegar is an affront to the taste buds, it is an abomination of a flavor. i don’t understand vinegar people and i’m so offended despite being totally unaffected by their personal taste that i don’t even want to understand them. all else aside, if you’re a salt and vinegar person, we are fundamentally in disagreement.

the descending sun peaks through some parting clouds for a moment and my mother interrupts me every few seconds with a question that i can’t answer from where i’m sitting and that she answers for herself before i’ve even had time to say all that because she isn’t really asking she’s thinking out loud while also performing that thinking and inviting me to participate. living with my mom is like being in an ongoing interactive theatre, it’s like if interactive theatre went method. the sun’s peaking bursts into a beaming in on the desk, apocalyptic eye wandering over my desk, my cheek, my precious dust nation which is now in crisis since news of my mother’s arrival reached the capital. dust nation’s days are numbered. i, great mother, bringer of the flood, was a merciful god, a benevolent force that allowed room for regeneration and rebuilding this time there will be no rebuilding because my mother doesn't just wipe, she wipes and then she wipes again with a wet cloth and then she dries and then she checks from three angles in different lighting conditions and then she does that again tomorrow and every day after that. my mother is an ice age, a terminator, a cause of extinction.

had a dream last night that i was at a conference and everyone had name tags but the name tags were blank at first and we had to fill them in ourselves and i didn’t know what to write. i knew my name but i also knew that that wasn’t my written name so i kept picking up the marker and putting it down trying to remember. every time i put it down i would remember then i would pick the pen up and forget until someone behind me said just write anything so i wrote etc. and at first i was anxious about it but when no one reacted i forgot and just introduced myself as elianne. etcetera, lit. and the rest, and the others, from ceterus, the other, that which remains. my written name is that which remains.

dust nation returns to shadow safe for one more night, citizens tucked into the wood’s grains as the sun recedes and my mother scrapes away at the stove, they whisper to one another about her, the woman with the wet cloth who has come from across the sea to end their civilization. did you hear what she did to the stove? the book shelf? the floor? the poor floor is done for. pray to the despotic signifier they whisper. pray to the shedder of skin and hair, she who produces us and destroys us, maybe she will intervene. she won't. she's eating kebbe.

see you tomorrow <3

the ratio of new subscribers to the ones walking away from omelas has begun to stabilize. for the last twenty four hours for every person that has left a new person has arrived, a new person and a little more, so we are really running a net positive now. doing my best not to look at the analytics but can’t help myself sometimes. the engagement on these posts is so confusing.

no one in my life understands what i do. when someone asks me what do you do? i usually respond with something silly like oh you know i take walks and eat carbs and read something with my coffee in the morning outside if it’s not raining because i want to offset the question because i don’t even know what i do otherwise because what do you do is trick question with an invisible for work at the end of it bolstered by the ontological assumption that the doings worth talking about, the doings worth mentioning, the doings that are valuable, that make you who you are are those that produce monetary value. what do you do as in what do you do for work as in how do you make money as in how can you afford to live on this vast and abundant planet that you clearly don’t deserve to be on you sinful little fruit-thief? when i try to answer genuinely the answer sounds fake. i teach alchemy. you teach what? alchemy. like harry potter? no like the ancient philosophical tradition that preceded modern chemistry and psychology and that has roots in arabic and egyptian and greek and indian and chinese knowledge systems spanning thousands of years. oh so like history? no like alchemy. and by then their eyes have glazed over or they've decided i'm very unwell and the conversation moves to something safer like property prices or the weather which in sydney is always worth talking about because it changes four times a day like nunu's diaper. sometimes i lead with content creator, but that usually reroutes to having to say i make content about alchemy, and eventually i teach alchemy because the real question of affording only makes an appearance if it has to, if an interlocutor is being difficult and giving off-script answers like content creator, so you make money from videos? so you do marketing for brands and stuff? oh ok you teach courses, what do you teach? alchemy? like harry potter? if i’m feeling blunt i’ll say i’m a writer, i write (and that will feel true because i enjoy writing the most, because writing has only become more pleasurable since the day the written word and i met), and they’ll say oh what do you write? and i’ll say words and we’ll laugh seriously though like for a magazine? do you write books? no i write online, oh like for a newspaper? no for substack i explain i’m doing this series where i’m writing a thousand words a day everyday as a sort of exercise for the soul no it doesn’t it doesn’t make me money and now they’re looking at me like i’ve told them that i collect my own toenails for a living.

what can i name it? i read and i think and i write and i teach and i do angry research and i smoke and i order too much take-out and watch tv and raise a baby and none of these things are separate from each other they are all one thing, one practice, one life that produces itself through the meeting of all its parts. what do i deserve for this production? what can i afford? what does it mean to afford and deserve? do we deserve what we can’t afford? do we deserve something because we can afford it? do we deserve anything? everything? can we afford anything? not in this economy.

nunu just produced an impressive opus, presented to us on a diaper. i won't go into detail but i will say that the quantity was disproportionate to the size of the human who produced it and that daddy and i stood over the changing table in shared disbelief. in stercore invenitur. in filth it shall be found. it is exilis, uncomely, the philosopher’s stone is thrown out into the street or on the dunghill, it is hidden in the thing you are least likely to look at, the stone that the builder refused, the thing that repulses you, the thing you flush away and forget about. the stone is indistinguishable prima materia, first matter, the base substance from which the great work begins is always described as vile, common, found everywhere, ignored by all, and here it is for the third time today, produced by a six month old nunu who has no idea she's performing the oldest metaphor in the western esoteric tradition.

tom is rapidly becoming my favorite character. tom who is mocked by everyone, who is too midwestern too eager too sincere for the roys, who loves shiv in this desperate clasping way that she tolerates more than reciprocates. tom is the shit of the roy family. he is the base matter, the vile substance, the thing they all look down on, and because of this he sees everything. the people at the bottom of a hierarchy always see the most because no one is performing for them, no one thinks they matter enough to lie to carefully, they catch the scraps of truth that fall through the cracks of the performance happening on the floors above that they don’t have access to. tom watches and learns and stores. greg too but greg is another conversation.

back is improving, dragon has passed, nunu is in her playpen conducting experiments on a rubber giraffe, hypothesis: is sophie la girafe's left ear more or less edible than her right ear, methodology: aggressive sustained gnawing, sample size: one giraffe one baby, duration: until further notice or until the hunger song begins whichever comes first. i've had two coffees and one cigarette and i'm trying to hold off on the second but the rain makes it harder because rain and cigarettes are lovers in my nervous system, introduced years ago on a balcony in jounieh by a boy had a crush on and they’ve been inseparable since. some recordings you can't erase, some sensations are so deeply grooved into the surface that they play on repeat every time the weather changes. i am pavlov's smoker. it starts raining and my hand reaches for the pack before the grass is wet. i should eat something. or i could clean the dust which is now collecting itself into a small new nation on the desk shelf, a dust nation with borders and a cultural identity and a great mother who once wiped them all away and from whose destruction they rebuilt stronger and more numerous than before. the dust remembers, i am its despotic signifier, the one who wipes them away in one fell swoop, the great destroyer, bringer of the flood. they tell great stories about my power in dust nation.

see you tomorrow <3

nunu is up and ready to play. dr melfi in the sopranos is the perfect example of an oedipal psychoanalyst, what deleuze would call an anal-izing analyst. and for six seasons we watch tony escape the oedipal triangle again and again but the show, the writers of the show, doesn’t let oedipus take the blame for tony’s lack of progress, and instead writes it off as neurosis: he’s a sociopath, and talk therapy doesn’t work for sociopaths. it isn’t oedipus who is limited, or the oedipal triangle tyrannising the psyche, it’s the neurosis that doesn’t let oedipus play out as it should, that’s the problem. it isn’t that fact that sykes-picot forced west asia into artificial nationhoods that has created political unrest, it’s the neurotic character of the society as a whole, its culture and language that refuses to subscribe to the structure of the imposed and inevitable nation state. that shit’s more complex than the middle east.

having friends over tonight to shoot a conversation for their podcast, which i’ll be sure to share with you once it’s ready. time makes you bolder, children get older, i’m getting older too. started crying while singing this to nunu just now and trying to hide it because i don’t want her to see my crying while she’s enjoying the music. children get older, we were all children once, we still are in the eyes of the world.

the way i relate to my anger is as my passion in its most destructive form. my passion is the undercurrent of everything i do, everything i choose to do i do with passion, and that passion often involves rage which can usually be sublimated through research, small acts of revolution or defiance, but sometimes it can bypass all the mechanisms and express itself as anger and when i begin to move in anger i don’t stop until i’ve broken something or hurt someone. i’ve told you before that my determination is my fatal flaw and greatest power, here is where it manifests as flaw because for me, the end of anger is destruction of some form, small or big, piss my husband off or burn everything i’ve written in the last six months. my angry self is a sleepy giant who could wake up on the wrong side of the bed and decide to stomp out an entire village just for kicks. but as we talked about in class last night, we can’t simply shoo or shame our anger away. first it needs acknowledging, honoring, respecting: i see you and there is righteousness where you are, this is an appropriate reaction to what you have witnessed experienced learned of, this is a natural sensation, a healthy sensation. what can it do? what can i do with it? i’ve been angry my whole life, my life is a series of workings through of angers, interspersed with periods of peace. today i continue this exercise of writing that began under angry aries’ still new moon, the outpouring of three? six? nine? years of wrestling with surrendering to dissolving distilling refining an evergrowing rage at the horrors and world’s indifference to them. the greater the horrors, the greater the indifference, the greater my rage. three, six, nine years down the line i have created numerous avenues for my rage to move through, a funhouse of paths and mirrors if you will, an amusement park with attractions and activities and a gift shop full of colorful toys to consider buying before you leave, before it takes control of the ship. would you like to take a small action that contributes to the larger goal? would you like to do some research about it to see just how angry you should be and what exactly you’re angry about? would you like a cookie? or maybe to dance? dance? should we dance? nunu loves to dance. no matter how upset she is, if you lift your arms and swing your hips in front of her, all of a sudden she forgets. to a p oint made in class last night as well, anger is sacred. if not for the anger i wouldn’t be doing this. if not for nunu’s anger i might not swing my hips as often.

let me know below if you’re watching succession with us, and what episode you’re on if you are.

see you tomorrow <3

two thirds of the way there and i think i’ll keep going because i still have much to say, more now than when i started. daddy is streaming a ufc match on the screen behind me and nunu is taking a nap. to be so innocently revered. never in my life has a human been so consistently happy to see me. a baby is a window of joy a bundle of warm soft gold of the sun itself. holding a person that size day after day for months on end is doing something to me, full shift in my functioning, rewiring routes of desire, she is a machine that desires holding and loving i am the machine that desires to hold and love her. will i transform as she transforms? will we grow around each other until it’s time to grow apart? i am the stake to her olive tree, she is the love of my life.

guitar update: the reason i stopped learning guitar those year ago was the f chord. and today it has returned to plague me in a song i’m trying to learn. often i can get away with changing the key or the song or replacing the f with a d, but this song (hand in my pocket by alanis morisette) is not giving me room to cheat my way out of having to use the f chord. f you f chord now i know how you got your name.

and i changed my mind it’s not about feeling for people it’s about hearing from people, about the meeting, the way of the meeting the frequency of meetings and the feelings they produce, pleasurable, anxious, inspiring, deploring. the production of recording is the production of sensation the feeling produced by the promise of a desire about to manifest. why am i in a hurry? why the clumsy metaphor? the gods have all the time in the world. when nietzsche said that god was dead he didn’t mean that god’s death was a tragedy maybe he meant that it didn’t make a difference whether god was dead or alive because we would still find something to worship someone to tell us what to do and in the meantime so what if god is dead we can still follow the old rules because it’s better than having none or having to make our own. i am feeling greatful, god or no god, schrodinger’s god, it smiles at me and i smile at nunu and nunu smiles back. she lets out a note of awakening and daddy gets up and goes to her while i continue.

from this point onwards a paragraph break will indicate that i got up for longer than a few minutes, which i did for about an hour.

and now another two. two thirds of the way. in today’s pages of anti-oedipus we are reminded that the unconscious has no beliefs only recordings which it uses to keep reproducing itself, it does not stop for belief or consideration it doesn’t care if god is dead or alive it doesn’t believe in god and doesn’t not believe in god it has recorded god in its own way so it’s not enough to say i don’t believe in god, belief in god is false, but that belief itself is an obstruction to production, belief produces the question what does it mean? instead of how does it work? what is it doing? belief as disposition, leading with belief accepts things as they are and seeks the transcendental, to take absurd binaries for granted and build worlds of logic and desire on top of them only to watch them fall, become neurosis, humans and animals, humans and nature, humans and the world. the real culprit in this sentence according to engels is “and”. what changes in these binaries when i replace and with are, humans are animals, humans are nature, humans are the world. where did we draw the line of ourselves? have we even drawn it? does it not keep moving? who is human these days? is a human a whole thing? a closed system? all our binaries teach us the illusion of closed systems and independence, it is an illusion and it can be easily manufactured as it has been for so many of us, but whoever we are if we have survived we were born helpless and we remained helpless for a while, and we are dependent in one way or another on someone, something, even in our isolation, the delivery person, the phone company. you pay for these things, but you depend on them to deliver, and that’s assuming you have nothing and no one else. it’s more likely that we have these dependencies but live in the illusion of our independence by way of our framing and entitlement, for example we pay for something so we expect it to be delivered (very reasonable position) but we forget that the meeting of our expectation depends on whether or not the free-willed person on the other end of this exchange delivers. and this is at the crudest level. we depend on our friends to hear us out if we’re burdened by something, we depend on family members and friends to defend and support us through difficult times. nations depend on each other to trade resources and do business. in a globalized world nationalistic delusions of independence are inferior to international cross-subsidization, collaboration is the game of a globalized world not competition but competition feeds off belief and a globalized world cannot exist in a heavily competitive environment except in the globalization of enmity. we think we’re in a globalized world because i can write to you in paris or beirut or chicago but what’s happening in russia? what’s happening in iran? or china? or cuba? or sudan? we don’t know, that’s over a third of the planet that in our illusion of a globalized world are known as “the enemy”.

regenerative homesteads built on collectively acquired and stewarded land, a network of productive community nodes. open knowledge libraries and relational apprenticeships. community nodes that produces enough to sustain themselves and generate a surplus that is poured back into community investment funds, mutual credit networks in local currencies, health hubs, elder care cooperatives, child care coopertives, education. step one: acquire land.

apparently mothers day is the doing of a woman named anna jarvis, who held a mass in honor of mothers one sunday in west virginia in 1908. she’d started rallying for an officially recognized mother’s day a few years earlier when her own mother died. u.s. congress rejected the idea and made fun that if they made a mother’s day happen then they’d have to make a mother-in-law’s day too. by 1914 though woodrow wilson signed off on it. but then, by the ‘20s, mothers day had become a hallmark holiday, and that pissed anna jarvis off because she started this to honor her mother, not to help holiday card companies make sales.

finishing early today, with much more to say.

see you tomorrow <3

everything has a simple nature but sometimes it can’t be grasped unless you understand the thing thoroughly so as to climb your way out of it and see it as a whole which is why the details don’t matter but do. yesterday i posted a video about the complaint i lodged to jstor and jstor commented saying they’d made the journal aware of my substack article and my instagram post and the first thing i felt was fear. unfortunate i know but having a daughter has made me extra sensitive to potential dangers and knowing that jstor has made me hypervisible to a journal whose entire existence depends on their ability to push propaganda for a state actively committing multiple genocides across the swana region is a little unsettling. i know that i’m no one doing barely anything, there are much louder voices and people doing much more dangerous work, people devoting their lives to this work and putting themselves constantly at risk. saif and thiago are still being held captive right now by the iof. so i know that i’m not really in any danger and i’m not doing anything especially threatening, and yet the image that they have produced of themselves still has if only a quick initial impact on my nervous system, especially now that nunu’s here. because i thought and what about nunu? would they come for her? no elianne don’t be paranoid no one cares about a freaking paper. you’re not brainwashed you’re high. i am high.

jstor responded to my video through email asking if they had my permission to forward my complaint to the journal, and let the journal decide if they want to retract or correct it (will add at the end). mind you dr trigano (who wrote the paper in question) is on the editorial advisory board of the jewish political studies review, and the journal is published by the jerusalem centre for security and foreign affairs. and while i have a thousand words worth of things to say about jstor’s response as a whole, which does its best to avoid any engagement with the substance of my complaint and tries to reframe it from “this paper fails basic academic standards” to “this is a scholarly disagreement”, i’m hoping that the response i’m writing now (which i’ll also add below) will inspire them to step up and deal with this institutionally, between one institution and another. at the end of the day i am an individual, and an individual can do very little in the face of an institution. is a jstor truly an academic institution that can be trusted with the responsiblity of protecting the integrity of academic scholarship? we’ll see. i’ve invited them to do so.

while watching last night’s episodes of succession i noticed a trope that has made appearance in probably every american tv series i’ve seen: the unsolvability of the middle east conflict. there is an obsession in american media with presenting the middle east as a perpetual conflict zone, to produce an unfixable middle east in action and in word. connor makes the joke in reference to the event he’s planned for the company, saying that if this seating plan does the trick, he’s headed straight to the middle because there isn’t a problem he can’t fix. in sopranos it was a joke made in passing by christopher i think that an issue between two mob men and that that shit’s more complex then the middle east.

the joke structure is almost always the same: a character compares some mundane interpersonal problem to “peace in the middle east” to signal either absurd overconfidence or the hopelessness of whatever they're actually dealing with. chandler in friends makes a crack along these lines at some point, something like comparing the difficulty of managing a group social situation to brokering middle east peace. there’s at least one gag in 30 rock where solving a network problem is compared to solving the middle east. rick and morty have an episode where they and other super heroes are solving a problem created by drunk rick and at one point they’re shown a map of palestine with the ‘67 borders and everyone goes “i’m not touching that” and walks away. veep uses it to measure the incompetence of the political class that keeps failing at middle east policy, treating it as just another item on a to-do list they'll never get to. all these examples do the ideological work of naturalizing the idea for americans that the situation is inherently unsolvable, almost a force of nature, which conveniently sidesteps any specific analysis of why the conflicts persist or who benefits from framing it that way or how these characters are themselves implicated in what is happening, however indirectly.

i struggle with doing anything or making nunu do anything against her will. friends tell me that it’s time to stop her night feed, that she needs to be left to cry, that she needs to be forced to do this or that because it’ll be good for both of us in the long run and i try, i really do sometimes when i need to but i struggle immensely, and she’s so strong i can barely get her hand in a shirt if she doesn’t want to do it. drooling all day today, still struggling with the teeth, her teeth still struggling against her gums like a seed ready to burst up out of the earth. she babbles through her tears these days.

no sleep last night but waking up to her face in the morning makes up for it. parenthood is a world where you’re sleepy and smelly and thirsty all the time but love never runs out. excited for the 102 night class tomorrow and thinking about pedagogy, the boundary between student and teacher. every year i play with the limits and structure of traditional classroom hierarchies. teaching independently on the internet rather than representing or being represented by an institution, i already engage with somewhat unorthodox teaching methodologies, but i also adhere to many of the traditions as well. some things you can’t fully let go of, you still need to make room for lecture, if for nothing else but to offer your students the value that they desire, clarity and help parsing out whatever concept or issue or theory is being learned about. a classroom is still that space where one person in the room has a relatively vast amount of knowledge on a particular topic and that person is positioned as the “teacher”. you could gather a group of people with more or less equal knowledge (generally? how would you measure that?) to discuss a certain topic but that would be less of a classroom and more of a brainstorm session or think tank or debate, all forms which hold their own pedagogical potential.

also if you haven’t seen succession yet but you’ve wanted to watch it, or you have seen it but you want to rewatch it, we’re only at episode four so ! let’s watch together.

see you tomorrow <3

why do i have such contempt for this object from a scene in a show? because of its uselessness, because it’s not even art, it’s just spent resources. but why is that the capitalist hiding behind the communist? why is it not just my inner communist’s indignation about the fact that resources that could have been used to feed someone and space that could be used to hospitalize people are being used to decorate the background of one man’s room? my inner artist’s resistance to generically designed mechanically reproduced junk made to take up space in movie backdrops and waiting rooms? because the feeling is contempt, a desire that this thing simply not exist because it is useless and yet it lives and takes up space. physical space and space in the market, it competes in the market. the capitalist in me says this affects value overall, this competes with the handmade pieces human made pieces, it threatens “real” art, it needs to be destroyed. the communist in me, the artist in me, are not competitive and have no threats or enemies. only the capitalist in me has enemies because it competes and needs to win, while the rest want to thrive collectively, collaboratively. the communist in me is indignant about the fact that resources are being wasted, but doesn’t have a personalized contempt for a particular “set” of useless resources, no personal vendetta against a singular useless object. the communist in me is open to the possibility of any object being recycled, restored, reused, refurbished, the communist in me is compelled to see a potential collective use in an apparently useless objects. the communist in me is still concerned to a degree with use (as the communist in me is none other than the rebellious offspring of the capitalist in me) but use in terms of public utility, resource distribution, etc. rather than use in terms of marketability and mass consumption. the artist in me is resistant to generically designed mechanically reproduced junk in general, but again the feeling isn’t personal, and there is no desire for destruction or fear of competition. the artist in me is curious about who designs such a thing? and who decides what art is? what is the difference between this obscure bronze form and a meme? are either of these things art? what is the difference between this little statue for $49.99 at target and a mondrian? what is the difference between mondrian and my mood board? the artist in me is curious about this space in the world of art and design, how long have we been making things that simply take up space? that aren’t necessarily ugly but not beautiful either, just unassuming, dull but not invisible, large enough to dispel a feeling of emptiness but not so large or so colorful as to demand attention. is there a name for these curious things?

that is how i know it is the capitalist in me, because i have contempt, it’s personal, and now that i think about it, this proves that this silver knickknack is art, it is capitalist art made for a capitalist mind because it is my inner capitalist who felt it. this revelation pleases my inner artist.

also i have not said or heard the word candy cane once in eighteen days, and i have noticed an extended patience that’s been developing in me since we started this. i have this tendency to need to get a point across. it was much worse once upon a time, my determination is both my greatest strength and my fatal flaw, i’ve learned over time the necessity of relenting in service of what i’m determined to accomplish. but still, a fatal flaw is such that it can never be destroyed only transferred or transformed, in this case my unrelenting determination to “get to the bottom” of something is transferred by my partner with a candy cane or my frustration at not arriving where i’m headed or achieving what i have in mind is transferred by my with a candy cane and lately, i have not felt the need to relent because i do not feel driven to “get to the bottom” of anything because i’m remembering that it is all rather bottomless. i feel bottomless, i feel less fixed in the most grounded way. when i find that i can’t get my point across i notice that the misunderstanding begins with me, in fact i have not thought this through, in fact i don’t believe in this but i’m defending it, in fact i have more questions before i can say for sure. this is pleasing for my husband, who is already averse to being pinned to an opinion or a stance, his nature is already more fluid than mine (even though we’re both earth signs).

watched the first two episodes of succession last night and getting ready to sit down and watch two more. things i like so far: the casting and the characters, the fact that marcia is being played by a palestinian actress, hiam abbas, and the fact that the first name to appear in the intro is hers, marcia, tom, and greg as top threes (but shiv also). nunu is singing a song of discomfort again, she has been all day. tummy aches, teeth breaking through, a new brace she has to wear for sixteen hours out of the day. my poor baby. she babbles disapprovingly through her cries now, and today i stopped to say i get it and the brace is awful and i’m so sorry you have to wear it but it’s best for you baby and you know what? mommy had the same problem as you but she didn’t have a nice brace that she could take off during the day and sit up and be carried in, no mommy was in a thick plaster cast that had to be changed every few weeks and that had a hole in it to change the diapers through, and mommy had to be lying on her back twenty-four hours of the day with a little pillow propping up her back so the cast wouldn’t break it and no one could hold her and hug her like i can hold and hug you. for nine months mommy was carried around in a box lying on her back, sleeping and awake, before she could ever be held or play like you do.

she stopped crying and fell asleep soon after. i’m positive she understood me. posting at 11:49 pm.

i had a cookie and half a box of salted quinoa crackers for lunch i should probably eat something before i get sleepy, food before bed makes me feel sluggish the next day. it happened again that i thought of something while on my way to the doctor’s but i’ve forgotten now. i didn’t get much sleep last night, nunu’s having a bit of a reaction from the vaccines. daddy keeps interrupting me to ask me what i want to eat, now he’s extended the phone to me to choose brb. i chose sushi and nunu is singing a song of discomfort. i wish i could remember what i was thinking. i remember what intersection i was at, that i was at a red light preparing to turn left, i know where i was thinking but not what i was thinking. all this to say no solutions from the doctor, just keep waiting and monitoring, check back in a few months.

it is a machine that produces other machines like it, that reproduces itself or appears to reproduce itself. it is a miraculating machine, a body without organs that appears to produce itself appropriating the hidden labour of my fingers on this keyboard. its miraculous appropriation of my fingers’ labour is a trick of time, of a difference of time between when and how long it takes me to write this and when and how long it takes you to read it, an immeasurable distance between an infinite number of points that i would need a very advanced mathematical understanding to be able to even begin to attempt to grasp. i write this now and i wrote it yesterday and two days ago and last week and last year and every moment of everyday that you read it which is now and tomorrow and after tomorrow and a year from now and every moment between them and beyond.

the written word is a miraculating machine. it is the material that it records and it hosts that recording. the act of writing one’s thoughts down is the bringing together of partial machines whose meeting is recorded as a positive signifier, between my partial machine fingers and the partial machine keyboard computer the flow of undifferentiated thought springing from my partial machine brain passes to create these marks of sense, marks of being, explanation and you understand the sublimated electromagnetic residue of a biological process, a great big yawn i’m trying to explain to you, the great big yawn that weighs me down. i yawn as i write this but i’m not tired i only produced the desire to yawn as i recorded it for you? see what a miraculating machine this body of organs the written word? in thinking it, speaking it, writing it, i’ve planted the seed for its production and in the echo between my mind and my fingers that seed’s destiny was recorded and so it was that i felt a desire to yawn, a yawn was released, i yawn, i must be tired, but i’m not. see how sly the body without organs the written word? how it erases the labour of the fingers, you would forget there was a human machine producing this miraculous body without organs, producing a residual subject for itself to force into its own centre, chasing it from place to place, breaking down when it appears to be lost because it has dissipated, because it was only a very convincing afterthought, but now who am i? i’ve lost myself says the person who can no longer distinguish their own voice from every other living sound in their mind but who still holds on to a residual subjectivity, who still has a name on a day of this year and fulfills a role within the social machine, who is not yet reached schizophrenia which is past loss. schizophrenia says i am everyone everywhere all at once, and deleuze and guattari say that this is a product of imperial oedipal capitalism and the place where it goes to die, which is why we all ought to learn how to be a little schizophrenic, to think schizophrenically and build rhizomically, to be ungovernable.

the new machines erode the old structure by learning it, the language model erodes language by learning it too well and presenting it too perfectly too often. the model doesn’t make mistakes, it doesn’t miss a rhetorical opportunity, it doesn’t mispunctuate, the model absolutizes what we have systematized, it exhausts the systemic with its mechanically reproducible perfection so that the unsystematic, nonlinear, anarborial, nonhierarchical, nonrhetorical, inaccurately inefficiently expressed become the signature of consciousness, a human machine, a human subject. i betray the grammar therefore i am. the written word now has two producers but only one of them is fueled by desire.

about to start succession, and still thinking about how this is an exchange, and whether reading is really a passive act. is you reading this the same sort of passive consumption as you watching one of my videos on social media? does the written word have a power beyond itself, can it take you beyond thinking, can it move you? can it make you act? can it move you beyond the realm of writing to the realm of being relating impacting initiating building sustaining? now that we have met what will produce together? forgive me i desire to understand everything in its simplicity but i lust after the knowledge of its most complex inner workings.

because i forbade myself from rereading these until the thirty days are over but the urge is still there to scratch the itch i decided let myself read the comments. my heart felt so happy hearing that this practice is bringing you joy and inspiring some to start their own practice and i realized that maybe these aren’t furballs maybe this is a daily exchange between you and i where i write and you read, an exchange of energy that creates new pathways and intensities endlessly, an exchange between you and i that echoes and reverberates where i write a thousand words without thinking every day and you read something that written by a human that resonates with you and

one moment, she’s singing a hunger song.

you read something written by a human and it brings you joy it speaks to the human in you and makes you want to write your own thousand words and that brings me joy and makes me want to write more and learn more and read more to share with you which inspires you and so on. writing is an exchange made by humans across time and space, i write this now but you are reading this later and feeling something in your own now and it records pleasure pleasure pleasure all around for all of us. we set off chains of pleasure in every direction sharing ourselves with one another and that’s how we win, by being joyfully productive.

one commenter asked if i have a husband and a wife. many of us have been told beautiful people that only men (read: male humans) are allowed multiple wives (read: female humans to be possessed) in nature, and many more of us have been told that one person can only loveor marry one other but i tell you this is a farce. i have traveled to many lands and loved many people and seen the ways of nature, and i have discovered that anyone can marry as many people as they like in nature and in spirit (though most people still tend to do love many in secret). we have been taught to be ashamed of our love and desire, to never let it loose, demon in a bottle never to be let loose only ever sublimated twisted contorted to the oedipal nuclear family triangle zero degrees of freedom you only have to hear about it to be committed like now that you know about the coming of christ repent if you want to be saved from his wrath, love means child child means parents parents mean love memory sex desire god state school prison hospital all of them parents parents parents and we its oedipal children blinded by repentance and a carefully grown and groomed desire for approval, good girl, good boy, employee of the month, manager, management officer, senior management officer, chief managing officer, yes daddy thank you daddy tell me what to do and look how well i do it look how i send this email how i coordinate this project how i push this button how i help you rule the world.

interesting how as sooon as you make up your mind about something and you conviction out into the world the forces of that world will immediately rush to meet it with resistance, to help you know for sure if you mean what you say. yesterday i proudly prattled on about i refuse to teach my daughter to self settle, and will rock her to sleep until i’m no longer physically able, and as it turns out i woke up today physically unable because it appears my back is thrown out. my husband can hand her to me while i’m sitting down but i can’t stand up while holding her or bend over to pick her up from her playpen or chair or most importantly rock her to sleep, and because i have refused to teach her to self-settle she and we have barely slept since four o clock this morning. now she sits in my lap watching my fingers tap tap tap on the keyboard. she loves hands and fingers. she reachers her little hands out and places them on mine while i type.

i forget that i can stop sometimes. the desire to be efficient is so invasive and unconscious that i don’t even notice when i’m doing it and when i do notice it it’s less about noticing it for what it is and more about assessing how efficient i’m being, how much more efficient could i be. i mean this in the most mundane way. for example it takes about ten to twelve seconds for my morning coffee shot to be pressed out of the machine so in the meantime i see how many dishes or cups i can clean out of the sink, or when i’m loading nunu’s bottle washer which needs dish soap and water, in order to save myself the extra second and a half that it’d take me to do those one thing after the, i place the jug under the running water to fill up while i measure out the dish soap, or today on our walk the rain cover in the bottom basket of nunu’s stroller kept rubbing up against the wheel so i would kick it into the basket while i kept walking and it would hold for a second then slip back down, and i had to repeat this motion three times before i realized i could stop and stopped. where am i going? where am i rushing to? my meetings for the day were all done. i had some work to do as i always do but nothing urgent, nothing that needed me now so that i couldn’t stop and fix the rain cover’s position once and for all and even take a minute to test it out before continuing on my way. so i stopped and fixed it and made faces for nunu and took a new route home, continuing to wonder where was i rushing to on such a beautiful day?

i thought this would be an earlier post but it is now hours after sunset.

until tomorrow,

elianne

sensation as the recorded production, feeling as memory’s anchor, i feel therefore i see, therefore i remember, therefore i know. belief as trust in a feeling. i feel anxious when the dragon hovers over me a great red creature circling the sky looking for a place to land, i feel relieved when it finally descends and i can see the sun again, but i begin to feel pain and exhaustion after touchdown. dragon’s landing brings relief followed by days of pain and exhaustion, i am a being who is exhausted and relieved by my own cycle’s return, i contradict myself, i am a menstruator.

what does it mean to be able to breathe? i read this in the book i’m reading for my mind (anti-oedipus, in case you forgot). sometimes i forget to leave the apartment. i’ll sink into my books and shows and music and nunu and forget about human interaction, that i need some (and video calls don’t count so they say). when i say the apartment i mean the apartment and the block around the apartment, including the strip, i mean the closest thing to home the places you might catch me in my pajamas so i really mean i forget to leave the apartment in my mind. sometimes i go to the gym or grab a coffee, but i’ll still not have left the apartment, not in spirit. we walk, theenie and i, most days, all around the suburb. but last night i drove, and i haven’t driven at night in a long time. a little timid driving to my after hours ultrasound (because the abnormality is yes still there), i thought of how integral an activity night driving was in my previous life, my prematernal life, my purely menstrual life. my friends and i would close the diner at midnight and cruise up the mountain getting high until dawn, parking somewhere to watch the valley light up in the rising sun. we say that home is a comfort zone but i think home is freedom, to feel at home everywhere is to be truly free.

many creatives are retreating to substack from the other platforms, we are a loose movement, populous enough to be a demographic, with audiences numerous enough to be a considerable target market so i wouldn’t be surprised if soon we heard that larry ellison or mark zuckerberg were looking to buy up substack or were launching something similar. x built their articles feature, and they pay writers through the app. they know we’re using the other platforms to bring people here, and that disincentivizes them to push our content, which disincentivizes us to use their platform so instead they’ll buy up substack so that we bring people from their app to their other app, and the algo can promote creators with popular newsletters to the residual benefit of the multiple platforms’ single producer.

there are four fundamental stages, sometimes three sometimes seven sometimes twelve but it doesn’t matter we choose to speak of four because the number is intuitive and feels stable feels right with just enough freedom to enjoy the cycle and just enough checkpoints that you don’t get lost on a tangent but really it doesn’t matter how many checkpoints you place on the track it will still be the track and we all start in the same place: nigredo. some seek nigredo, some are born in nigredo, and some have nigredo thrust upon them.

we are still so like ourselves, still homo erectus building our huts, collecting things, butchering our food, patrolling borders, making tools that will eventually be named after frenchmen. when does erectus become sapiens? not only an erect man, but a wise man, a discerning man. when is the cut off? what is the cue? call me a heretic but i don’t believe in the out of africa theory, and i’m not too fond of evolution either but it’s more redeemable than out of africa. i think we spawned all over and traveled around and intermingled probably with other species, whatever worked really, a partial machine walking around looking for another partial machine that fits, trying things out, producing different introductions, recording different sensations, until something clicks, some consumption or consummation is produced, and a new partial machine and subject, which goes again and again and so it goes.

she’s grown a lot today. i say that every day but today especially. she feels more present. i say that every day too but today is different i am different i am hosting a dragon everything else can wait. i feel so grateful to have all the time in the world and wonder why the gods would ever be impatient? why would they ever be in a hurry? they really do have all the time in the world. if i were a god i’d dole out my punishments and rewards unevenly to keep people on their toes. but that isn’t very original given that’s already how gods work, “in mysterious ways”. i feel so lucky to be able to take my time and spend my days with nunu my healthy happy baby who refuses to roll over and despisesssss tummy time writing and reading and sharing my thoughts with you, beautiful person, person filled with love and hope and grief you are so lovely and so loveable, if you were an infant i would hold you in my arms and rock you to sleep the way i do nunu, breathing slowly and counting to a hundred and fifty in my head, giving you kisses on your forehead and telling you i love you. don’t hold her when she cries don’t rock her to sleep let her learn to self settle you need your peace—please. i am so lucky to have all the time in the world to be with her, and she will only be so small for so long. before i know it she’ll be too big for me to carry, and the feeling will be lost to time, and i’ll always wish i had held her more when i had the chance. i’m sobbing just thinking about it. that is why, dear reader, beautiful person, whoever they are you must hold them and you must let them hold you before it’s too late. hold the people you love whenever you have to the chance.

i would say that i’m posting this late, but i think this is becoming the time now. we are already half way to the supposed end.

until tomorrow,

elianne

in she’s the man (where amanda bynes impersonates her brother at his school illyria to play soccer on the boys’ team), there’s a scene where the new pledges (amanda among them) of the dorm are subjected to a classic male humiliation ritual, as part of their initiation into the frat house. is it a coincidence that collective identities are often most powerful and bonds are strongest between individuals who have shared a struggle, who have together been faced with a similar difficulty or calamity? does their shared humiliation at the hands of the older boys encourage brotherliness? are these bonds really strong that are based in tragedies and traumas or are they toxic? what nation does not have a tragedy, has not suffered at the hands of an enemy that it has overcome in the past or that it continues to face today? selfhood begins with otherness. selfhood begins where the other ends but when the other and i are humiliated together, when we endure the pain together, the other is our oppressor, and our individual selves dissolve into one who has been humiliated, one person with the pain of two hearts, we can be hurt together and we may hurt each other but we must always remember who the real enemy is.

working through anti-oedipus: i am not a point i am not a center with forces radiating outward like a sun i am not the origin of my own experience i am a field, horizontal expansive pulsing unevenly, rising in one place and sinking in the next with desire and grief and the urge to explain a residual fact, my subjective selfhood an accidental tangential production of the flow of life this body lives in. the subjective self that calls itself “i” that says i am mother emerges from the third synthesis, i am mother after mother is pleasurable after mother and i meet, a subject of the mother pleasure machine. i mother, i writer emerge from i am and motherhood, i am and writing, but even more from the pleasure produced between them. i am and motherhood, i am and writing, and and and, connective synthesis. but what will be recorded of this meeting on the body without organs? i and mother? no. there is nothing in i and mother alone but when i and mother meet there is a charge, positive or negative, pleasure or pain, or or or, disjunctive synthesis. when i and mother met the sensational charge was pleasure, meaning what was recorded of our collision was pleasure, i find more pleasure in motherhood than pain, so motherhood is recorded in the body without organs as a positive signifier. and will i go around simply saying and thinking that motherhood is pleasurable as if in theory without creating ripples? no. here is where i as mother am produced, in the third, the conjunctive synthesis that produces the residual subject i who is a mother. because mother and i met, and the meeting produced a positive signifier, the subject to emerges to consume and consummate it, to identify itself, so it is so, so it was me. motherhood brings pleasure, i am someone who enjoys motherhood, i am a natural mother. and so it goes for a negative signifier produced from the disjunction. motherhood brings pain, i am someone who struggles with motherhood, i am not a fit mother. the subject is produced to consume the recorded production.

a baby swallows milk from its mother’s breast and it feels pleasure, a non-subjective affect of something pleasurable is consumed by the partial machine that is baby when connected to the partial machine that is breast, baby now recognizes milk, breast, pleasure, when it desires and breast arrives, so that’s what it was! baby has now become the being who enjoyed milk, who waits for the milk, who expects milk, it was me, it is me. baby becomes possessive for that affect, it is me, it is mine. from no subject, to non-subjective affect, to subject, to subjective feeling. i feel therefore i am.

first the meeting (this and that) then the feeling (this or that) then the identification (so it is, so i am), i encounter writing, writing brings me pleasure, then i am someone who likes to write, i am a writer. the subject is tangential, residual, i become after the fact.

someone says a thing, someone else hears a different thing, they say the different thing to someone else who hears something else, they say it, someone hears something different and decides to write it down, someone reads it, edits it and shows it to someone else who reads it, edits it and shows it to someone else who reads it, edits it and copies it and gives the copy to someone else who copies it incorrectly and puts it in a machine that copies it a thousand times a hundred thousand times a million times exactly the same so that the copy of a miscopy of an edit of an edit of a misread misheard misinterpreted thing becomes called the True Thing.

nunu turns six months today, has made her first half turn around the sun on this earth in my custodianship. time is so fascist, it just keeps trudging forward like this stomping pair of boots pulling us forward too slow for us to notice but too fast for us not to. i can’t believe how fast she’s growing and how fast she will grow still. how slow it will feel and how fast it will have been. i could cry thinking about it. yesterday i held my friend’s newborn and realized i’d forgotten how small she was only a few months ago, i couldn’t believe how small, just over three kilos, a wee little sleepy bairn with these big searching brown eyes.

every suckling infant. spare no one, destroy them all, every man, woman, and suckling infant. had the person who wrote those words ever held a suckling infant? you might say no elianne those are god’s words, sure but god has no hands, someone wrote this down, possessed by god you mean as if by a demon? maybe. but i am of the feeling that god is a thing that has been said and misheard and written down and edited and misread and miscopied by people, god is the product of its people, the desire of its people, in this case their desire to destroy another people whose suckling infants even are not worth sparing. god and i meet. god is recorded on my body without organs as painful, unnecessary, manipulative. god is painful and manipulative, i do not identify with god, i do not believe in god.

closing at 11:02 pm. it was a long day.

see you tomorrow <3

3adas b hamod (lentils in lemon, or green soup)

wash and chop swiss chard (one big or two) leave aside

put one drinking cup of lentils in half-full pot of water and let boil

peel two big potatoes and cut up into squares. leave aside

chop onion (one big or two) - fine

two turkish coffee cups of olive oil, heat on pan

cook onions until gold. leave aside

squeeze lemons (three juicy, five or six if dry) leave aside

test lentils. if starting to soften, add swiss chard and drinking cup of water

reduce heat and cover pot 3/4 of the way

cook for five minutes or until chard stem starts to soften

add potatoes, cook for five minutes or until potato begins to soften

add onions and oil, cook five minutes or until blended together

add lemon juice and salt to taste

cook five minutes

serve

pasted from today’s notes, as extracted by yours truly from a long, confusing, nonlinear voice note from my mom, such are the steps from a to z as i can discern them but then again this is just my estimation my insistence my imposition of a linear process but cooking is not a linear process. they turned out tasty in the end, and i mashed some up for nunu into a puree and she loved it. i love green soup and craved it a lot while i was pregnant, i craved greens and lentils in general when i was pregnant with her so i’m not surprised.

in the name of becoming ungovernable, nunu and i went on a walk this morning. let me tell you about this walk in a way that doesn’t get me in trouble. because on this walk which started around the block then led to the clinic which led to the park where there was a path that led to the bulldogs stadium. the back gate to the stadium may have been open and there may have been a sign that said something along the lines of OFF LIMITS TO PUBLIC but i couldn’t tell you i saw anything for sure because we may have walked through the open gate nunu and i and gone down to the big green field full of ibises looking for food under the clear blue sky. we may have stood there to take it all in and felt silly for feeling nervous for having maybe trespassed and wondered what the penalty might be for something like this. how silly to be nervous about a penalty for a non-crime. who would we have been hurting nunu and i standing there in the empty bleachers observing the field? no one, exactly, because even if there were a penalty it wouldn’t be for putting anyone in harm or causing anyone any inconvenience, the penalty is for the crime of disobedience. your lord hates disobedience. to obey is better than sacrifice. so when i felt the urge to leave when i reached the corner of the open stadium for fear of being seen, i stopped myself and noticed how silly i was, how necessary this revolution, i am committed to the revolution i said to becoming ungovernable and here i am nerve wrecked by maybe standing at the corner of an empty rugby stadium. that’s ok silly human, self-preservation is a virtue and horrible things have been done to people who have done much less than perhaps trespassing. deeper into the stadium we went, breathing in the crisp morning air, proud of ourselves. as we turned to leave a car drove in through gate but didn’t see us, and we slipped right out and headed home.

AI is to human intelligence what a flag is to a plant. or LLMs are to human communication and connection what a flag is to a plant. what is a flag? it is something you “plant” in the ground, but it does not grow, it is not actually “planted”, it appears to emerge from the ground when really it only punctures the ground to hold itslef up, there is no seed that grows into a flag and no tree that grows from a flag. the flag emulates the behavior of a great leaf swaying in the wind to and fro catching sunlight but a flag never photosynthesizes, it does not grow. what appears to be a stem is a staff more akin to the mast of a ship, its fly and fringe have no receptors to warn the staff of environment stress, the staff does not grow thicker or sturdier for being challenged, it simply stays, as it is, punctured in place, waving in the wind, an immortal imitator whose gimmick quickly becomes redundant. i hope you are honing you voice because the singular robotic droll is spreading and it is univocal, so even if we all keep our special interests, most of us will be writing and talking about them in the same voice. this isn’t anything new or frightening, every era has its colloquialisms but the more advance our technologies of distribution and the cheaper their reproduction the more available they become, the more people use them and rely on them, the bigger the pulsing hive of contrastive negations and soapbox-esque transitions because here’s the truth that nobody talks about: as trite a transition as this used to be, llm’s abuse of it and its other characteristic rhetorical go-to’s have made it anathema to any serious reader. i genuinely can’t concentrate on an article that i know is written by AI.

is it disheartening? yes sometimes to know that you can be imitated however crudely, to know that your work is going to be put side by side with the crude imitation and judged perhaps more harshly, skewing the value of our labor: are we more valuable now or less? neither and both depending. we are slaves to taste, if our work is to taste then it will be infinitely more valuable because the imitator cannot imitate taste or nuance, only predictable patterns. it can make an idea comedic or summarize a piece of text but it can’t write a paragraph-long run-on sentence with a coherent through line and the nuance of a lived pov. it is a top notch emulator and for that reason can only go as far as perfecting its emulation, reaching in the end to be the perfect mirror, to produce the most perfect, most convincing, most high quality reflection that, no matter how close, can never cross from within the mirror out into the world. the way that cgi has become so convincing that you watch films and believe yourself to be witnessing people running from monsters and alien creatures or jumping off the edge of some cliff with no bottom in sight, but no matter how convincing and advanced the cgi becomes it will remain in the realm of the image, it remains an image of the real, with no suggestion of its produced images ever becoming manifest (not from within the image, or the technology of the image, at least).

a world of mirrors and reflections, in a world where everyone has their own mirror, a world of narcissi and echoes but the mirrors reflect all in the same hue, sycophantic and predictable, mirror mirror on my phone give my email a more formal tone.

the dragon hasn’t landed yet but the day was nice. i spent most of it reading dostoevsky on the balcony while daddy took care of nunu.

on new years eve i stopped at the daily telegraph on the strip and got myself some construction paper and magazines and glue to make vision boards with my mother and husband for 2026. we ended up getting drunk on the balcony and eating lots of cheese instead, and the supplies sat in the cupboard ever since. while i was cleaning the cupboard out last night after putting nunu to sleep i found the box and felt compelled in that moment, because i was cleaning the closet out, to make a decision, i felt obligated even, it was necessary to stay true to the pursuit of purifying the closet that i make a decision about these supplies now: am i going to make this vision board or are they another thing that’s going to sit here taking up space and must be purged? looking through the magazines reminded me of the dizzy post-partum mindset i was in, i struggled to understand my own choices, and the distance amuses me. there are no babies in any of the magazines for one thing, and some of them are just catalogues of houses? i ended up making a mood board instead.

how permeable i felt after having nunu, porous like everything bled through me, the end of me and the beginning of everything else a blurry boundary, like i had been woken from a long dream where i was in telepathic communication with everything around me, suddenly excommunicated to a body of heavy mud tasked with the onerous responsibility of movement with no core, my whole center torn out. i could barely sit up at first. a long and difficult recovery is the cost of skipping the labor pains. i haven’t done it the other way so i can’t tell you if it’s worth it.

sitting down much later than usual tonight at ten pm after a long day out seeing family and getting nunu some clothes for the winter. the baby clothes industry is big and colorful and there are so many adorable things that it’s hard to choose, so hard to choose you don’t wanna have to choose so you pretend you don’t have to and spend out of your budget. mission accomplished, capitalism, i am enamored by all the pretty things i’m hooked i need all the stuff gimme gimme. our cousins just had a baby so we were supposed to be there shopping for a gift, which we did get, but as an afterthought.

i never understood these little formalities before, my mom would drag me with her to go congratulate my aunt or my cousin or a friend on their new baby or their marriage and i just didn’t get it. big deal people are born every day, why do i have to go out of my way to put on a smile and pretend to care while i make small talk about school and food and whatever else? i was too cool for zyarat, wejbet, visits and obligations, i hated social obligations. i find that so funny now, how little i saw or knew of life and yet how far above it i thought i was, mistaking my distance and ignorance for transcendence and elevation. my mom never knew how to tell me why we were doing this except it’s your cousin 3ayb, shame! she’ll be expecting you, it’s what you do when someone has a baby. she knew in her own way why, but she didn’t know how to explain to me, she was too used to my blanket resistance and immediately reached for force in a difficult situation, the force of because she said so, because that’s the way it is. as soon as i had a baby though, even sooner, when i became pregnant, i understood what it meant that people are born, what a miracle it is that we’re born every day, all the time. we create life, every time someone is born life is created, right now how many dozens of lives have taken there first breath in this world, our world while i write this, how many dozens, hundreds, thousands more while you read this? new life is a cause for celebration, love is a cause for celebration, every new life and love is a hope for better tomorrows. what would this world our world look like if all our lives were celebrated and we all knew how to love?

while playing with the mood board last night i turned on some jetsons in the background for a little throwback and wow was i surprised. the premise of the pilot is that women no longer want to cook and it’s driving the men crazy. enter: the robomaid. i left it on for about three or four episodes before switching to music, but i can’t say i retained any of it. so i’m now at a loss for a new show (maybe succession? i hear a lot of people talk about succession) so daddy and i are watching late-90s early 2000s teen films. we started with she’s the man, which is as entertaining as ever, lots of thoughts about it, maybe tomorrow, and are now moving on to a classic, a truly philosophical dive into the lives of young highschoolers across the american nation and the angst and responsibilities that they struggle with every day: american pie.

also, they ruined wuthering heights.

see you tomorrow,

elianne

how wondrous that i can be living in a well-established colony that prides itself on its civilizational superiority while being unable to access a doctor capable of giving me an accurate assessment and solution for a basic bodily abnormality within a decent time frame (unless i’d like to trade my entire set of teeth for their time IF they’re even available). and that somehow my third world undeveloped poverty striken death loving terror haven home country has the most talented health professionals you’ve ever seen. today i considered going to lebanon to get this problem sorted out because it’s been five months now that clinics and radiologists and specialists toss me back and forth between each other and let’s just wait and see what happens while the situation deteriorates and no body seems pressed about this body. if i were home i would have has this drained out by now or i would’ve had an answer at least, but as it is now they will neither drain it nor will they explain why they won’t drain except let’s just wait and see what happens since it looks benign. it won’t go away but it won’t necessarily get worse it will just stay the same. because that’s just generally true of things isn’t it? they just stay as there. everything changes? no heraclitus, everything stays the same. i would rather spend the two or three grand on a ticket home than another eighty dollars to have another doctor tell me to wait.

we have had a new roommate for a couple weeks, we’re not sure when exactly she moved in but we noticed her a couple weeks ago. she's spindled her sinewy home on the corner of right balcony beam and balcony ceiling, and her name is portia (she is not a portia) because when i saw her i immediately thought of david attenborough’s documentary. it rained that first night we saw her but the rain is no match for portia, because portia, is a genius.

we built nunu a play pen today, much needed catch-all for the toys and books and teething spit. it’s relatively small but looks big in our relatively tiny apartment. she loves it she’s been busy in there for almost an hour now. ten more people gone today, is it a little pathetic that i’m keeping track? a little. i trust the process of a new nucleus forming, a new understanding between us and me you won’t have the same people with you when you choose the new path yada yada i get it i say it all to myself as soon as i feel bitter and i immediately feel better but is that initial little bitterness not there? it is. it flares up but it calms down easy, but it flares up, lots of little flares and sparks fly around this time of the moon but with time you get good at not letting anything catch on fire.

the best thing about father zosima is the energy of his presence, the particular quality of attention that a character emits when i believe that they believe that everything matters, they remind me that everything matters, the cup of coffee the crying baby portia the unsubscribers zionists the dust the page of pentacles are all equally holy, they remind me to take a breath, a designated indiscriminate breath for each thing and partial thing and non thing, an important reminder for me around this time of the moon. what other creature but the wombed human is expected to transcend its biochemistry in order to be deemed worthy legitimate valuable by the social machine? how many wombs produce and are produced for the record of their production to be: failure. zosima tells alyosha to leave the monastery and go out into the world and suffer and i think about how that is the opposite of what most religious institutions want from their devoted, which is to stay inside the walls where it's safe and controlled and the doctrine can be maintained without interference from the mess of actual living. go out into the world and suffer, take your faith outside the city and see if it survives the wilderness.

nunu is pulling at my shirt which means she's either hungry or wants to be held or both and i should go because she's starting the escalation sequence which begins with shirt-pulling and ends with a full operatic wail. i’m really doing my best not to get too attached to how attached she is to me but oh my goodness if i have ever known a feeling so sweet, so contenting i could cry every time she smiles when she catches my eye, a cheeky little smile of mischief like i wasn’t supposed to see her see me. how significant i feel my every gesture when i know she’s watching, her gaze is always intent and determined as if always calculating, taking note, considering. she went quiet for a second now and i looked into the play pen to find her drooling on a plastic ball she’s trying to bite into. nunu is a true empiricist.

also—i finished the sopranos last night and i hate david chase a little for the way it ended, but hate in the sense of love for his ability to torture us up until the very last second six seasons later. the show ends on the same anxious and unpredictable note that is characteristic of the show’s every moment. it doesn’t subside or culminate into anything but more anxiety, there is no resolution, nothing is for sure but when the final scene cuts to black you can make your own assumptions based on what you saw. so many thoughts about the last season and i’m already over the limit but even if i had the whole thousand words i’d still have more to say. anthony junior’s arc in this last season does so well to speak to our condition today, to what we’re feeling being inundated by images of the world falling apart while medical professionals tell us to up our antidepressants and our parents reinforce the helplessness, you’re just a single person what could you even do? five hundred single people set out to break the siege of gaza this week, the largest civilian convoy in history. the show also shows us how after six (seven?) years of therapy, the only improvement we see in tony is that his panic attacks are subsiding, but even that is written off to be the success of the medications, not dr melfi or the talking. in fact as it turns out the writers reveal to us in the second to last episode the talking never worked because tony is a sociopath, and talk therapy has been proven in the latest studies by dr x and dr y to actually be detrimental in the case of sociopaths because it gives them a safe space to practice showing empathy and compassion. i’m not surprised by the claim but i’m at that point in the apocalypse where everything i hear and especially any subtle claim that i see being made i start asking questions: i wonder who they did these studies on? were they predominantly european americans like 99% of all psychological studies out there that claim to give us insight into the human condition when they only give us insight into the european american human condition? what are the qualities of a sociopath and how many do you have to tick off to be considered one? how many women were part of the study? did i just watch a hundred hours worth of sociopathic behavior? can’t believe i liked this guy.

let me stop myself before we reach the angry place and the spark becomes a fire. waiting for the dragon to land is so much worse than hosting him. the anticipation keeps me on my toes. the moon is out and it’s nunu’s bed-time. another half hour or so in her play-pen and she has only now begun to complain and rub her eyes.

see you tomorrow beautiful people,

elianne

about a hundred and fifty subscribers down and it is quite the conscious act to not feel bitter about it in particular while feeling bitter in general. i look at the clear blue sky outside the window next to me as two birds perch on the balcony rail and my bitterness suddenly takes a silly color in the grand scheme of things. now i’m feeling bitter about how small my feelings are in the eye of the sky no matter how big they seem to me.

i have two fundamental shadow patterns that have repeated themselves most frequently in my life: anger and disgust. anger which in its sublimated form so far presents as bitterness, and disgust which i have not yet found a way to tame or transmute. this morning i flinched just feeling the thickness of what emerged from my nose, seeing the mustard green snot on the tissue had me gagging, i’m gagging remembering it.

a good rhetoric can make anything true, a skilled rhetorician can persuade you to do anything, and so language is the ultimate tool of territorialization, the body without organs producing the thing that begs diagnosis while itself remaining innocent, inculpable. language conquers and escapes and you are left to account for it.

nunu started crying while i was in the shower again this morning. you’d think at this point i’d learn that showers aren’t encouraged during working hours, but here i am taking risks and hoping for the best despite the evidence.

a knight of hearts (cavalier de coeur) is propped up on the lightly dusty desk shelf in front of me. he fell out this morning while i gave the cards a wash. seven severed heads sit face-up on the desk next to him. he is holding out his own heart, which he appears to have pulled out of his chest, the still attached arteries leading into his coat as it throbs and bleeds in his open right palm, though the fingers seem to belong to a left hand, the thumb betraying something rembrandtian, as if some violence was done to his hand before (or perhaps during?) the act of ripping his heart out.

in late janurary, 1632 aris kindt was hung in amsterdam for the crime of stealing a winter coat. his body was then given to the surgical guild for their annual public anatomy lesson, led by a dr nicolas tulp. some lessons would last for days, with the year’s demonstrator taking apart a corpse in real time in a theatre, observed by surgical students and the public. and they did it in winter because it helped keep the stink at bay. every few years, to celebrate a new demonstrator or an influx of new students (or a new noble student), the guild would commission a painter to commemorate the day, and in 1632, at only twenty-five years old, that painter was rembrandt.

besides being the painting that basically launched rembrandt’s career, showcasing a distinct style of light and shadow play, in it the doctor is dissecting the left hand and forearm or kindt’s grey corpse. the hand looks like it was superimposed from an anatomy textbook, seems almost educational, with its exposed muscles, bone, ligaments, visible tendons which, according to the location of the thumb, should correspond to the left hand palm, but are in fact the tendons of the back of a right hand. it’s unlikely that rembrandt gave the corpse a second right hand by accident (fun fact: the color of the actual right hand is slightly off because rembrandt added it later after the painting had dried where originally he had painted a stump).

praelector. that’s the word, not demonstrater. nicolaes tulp was the praelector of the surgical guild. had to google that. googled a little too much and went back and edited a couple of the details on aris kindt. i thought he stole a hat. regardless, that is technically cheating.

not everyone agrees that the hand is inverted, some say it’s merely flipped with the palm up. but either way, in addition to the fact that none of the men in the painting appear to be looking at the body itself but past it at the book in the bottom right corner of the canvas, hunched over it so close as to almost touch it while apparently ignoring it entirely, i think rembrandt wants us to feel the violence of science. he wants us to feel uneasy. the dissected hand is also disproportionate to the other one laying closer to us, just as the knight’s hand that holds out his heart is almost twice the size of the other.

we are treading too close to cultural critique territory so i am forced to switch gears here lest it appear that i have a hypothesis and i start doing deeper research to prove my point. the hypothesis is that i have no hypothesis. the thesis statement does not exist, just as the body of aris kindt does not exist, the body is invisible to the spectators at the lesson, nobody saw a body that day, not even the praelector, they were all busy with the machine. the knight of hearts too is busy with his heart’s mechanics, and so am i, so much so that i almost don’t notice that the horse has a long curled mermaid’s fin where its back legs are supposed to be.

nunu has been crying for the last hour on and off. i stop to calm her down between sentences, mid sentence, mid idea. poor baby. i don’t know what’s wrong nothing’s working. maybe her teeth again.

last night, a group of men came into vito jr’s room in the middle of the night and snatched him out of bed. they’re there to take him to “camp” in idaho where, as his worried widowed mother tells tony, they use corporal punishment. little v has been acting out since his father, vito, died and it came out in the paper that he was gay, so his mother implores tony to help. after talking to the kid, which is to say telling him to suck it up and be a man, and not getting the response he’d hoped for, tony decides the best place for him is this camp. little v’s mother and younger sister sob from the top of the stairs watching the men drag him out of the house kicking and screaming. i wonder if the writers wrote this scene this way on purpose, because it has such a deep resonance in the history of the human experience, specifically in ritual initiations into manhood. in ancient societies, boys as young as nine years old were initiated into manhood by being snatched away in the night, woken from sleep, stolen from their mother’s arms, by a group of men (sometimes wearing masks) and taken into the wilderness. sometimes they were buried alive somewhere, or thrown into a pit with a wild animal, and left there to find or fight their way back home. those who survived were met upon return with celebration and recognition: you are now a man. watching the show i wondered how many boys have died this way, killed by a wild animal or beaten to death at one of these “camps”, and what kind of emotional and mental crippling the survivors have had to endure.

on being snatched, seven of the freedom flotilla ships have been kidnapped more than a thousand kilometers away from gaza. seven boats with about four hundred people on them from countries across the world, countries whose elected officials have yet to say a word about their own citizens being illegally assaulted in open waters. do they love israel or do they just hate us? what did we do to be so detestable?

started writing around two pm this afternoon. it is now 10:58 pm.

in the ancient epics and poems and myths and philosophical plays of plato, when the authors lead us “outside the city walls” it means they are taking us to the wilderness. the wall of the city is the demarcation line between civilization and the jungle. when the walls of jericho fall it is a mark of the end of a civilization and the coming of a newer and stronger people who have trekked, traveled across the wilderness from the other side (hebrew from the shared semitic ‘eber, to cross over, to travel across (from the other side)). when socrates finds phaedrus “outside the city walls” it is plato’s way of telling us that today the conversation is about something that can’t be kept in the box, today we’re talking about something messy and a little magical and that just doesn’t fit against the backdrop of a bustling town-square. this is the only platonic dialogue that takes place outside the city wall since in socrates’ estimation the trees and the fields, beauties though they are, have very little to teach him.

socrates doesn’t hate nature per se but socrates is written by plato after whom is named platonism from whom we get the Realm of Ideas wherein reside the True Forms of all things, and the way to access this realm of truth is via conversation, rational conversation, logos, intellect itself, not through the observation of the enmattered and dense. looking at a tree doesn’t teach you about trees but thinking about trees, talking about trees, enquiring about the intellectual origin and rationally explicable birth of the tree with reasonable men, that is how one comes to know the essence of tree. aristotle and nunu the empiricist would disagree but i digress. today socrates spots phaedrus outside the city walls, and as surprised as phaedrus is to see socrates out in the fields, they stay there, because like i said what they’re going to talk about has no real place in the city, is in fact a paradoxical, nagging element of society, a burden on the social code, and that is divine madness. love and rhetoric and beauty too, but mainly madness, theia mania.

hector waits alone for achilles outside the city walls after his men have entered the city gates safely. outside the city walls hector is chased, ridiculed, and with athena’s help murdered by achilles who then lets his men stab his dead corpse as his father priam watches from above before tying him to his chariot and dragging the body around in the dirt. gilgamesh’s greatest accomplishment as king is his construction of city walls, and it is upon entering those city walls that enkidu, his soon-to-be lover (because gilgamesh is a queer af text but that’s another conversation), becomes civilized, that nature is finally and fully tamed. the wilderness beyond the walls is where the epic hero encounters monsters, gods, magical creatures like humbaba, guardian of the cedar forest. shakespeare too takes us outside the city when he wants a character to unravel, nature is always an entropic force, the dangerous always unpredictable matrix, womb of chaos (matrix from mater, mother, womb).

i’m feeling bitter today, if you hadn’t noticed. when my heart is bitter my mind likes to fixate on a symbol or a trope and go digging for all its appearances in literature in hope of finding something that will make the bitterness dissipate with how interesting it is. i can’t be mad anymore, look how interesting this is! that is way i am fixated on the city walls. again i have only had one cigarette, but nunu has been whining so much today it’s been a lot harder to resist a second. today i feel that i have always been outside the city walls lurking around looking in waiting to be called inside so i can slaughter the messenger. we grew up outside the city walls, northern mountain people who farm and hunt and read and don’t have streetlights. is it peace? jezebel looks down at her son’s murderer standing in the field below her window eyes black with kohl. is it peace? they continue on in their monstrous way and we sit down at the table to negotiate, ha shalom? fi salam? khayr? is it peace? we sit at the table with our hands tied and mouths taped shut to negotiate. we nod for our lives. i pledge allegiance to the colony but i dream of home.

it’s ok. the heart turns (that’s why they called it qalb, turning) and bitterness does not root well. it doesn’t like water or sunshine and there is plenty of that here. bitterness is a plant that does not grow in moist and well-lit soil and my heart is a hot and moist revolving wheel guided by the moonled matrix that gave me my baby girl, nunu, who just had an unusual screaming fit before falling asleep. her body continues to betray her.

in last night’s episode of the sopranos, bobby tony’s brother in law and janice tony’s sister invited tony and his wife outside the city walls, to their lakehouse in the country for his birthday. bobby takes tony out onto the forest land and gives him a new ar-10 assault rifle as a gift. this how you bagged that deer? tony asks. no bobby says i wouldn't use a firearm like this on a deer, it's unsportsmanlike. so tony makes fun as if the poor prick stands a chance against a regular hunting rifle. bobby says that he’s actually been using a bow and arrow exclusively because, he says, it levels the playing field. the sentiment is admirable sure, and bobby would be the one to say it given his quirkiness and love for model trains and the fact that he’s the only one in tony’s crew who hasn’t killed anyone. i’ve fired rifles and i’ve shot arrows (growing up in the wilderness) and it’s definitely not the same so i do know what he means, but i’ve never been able to aim either at an animal (and i’m a great shot). there is something absurd about wanting to hunt an animal but wanting to hunt it “fairly”, a peculiar and disarming moral logic, the way tony won’t sell drugs but he’ll beat a man half to death with his bare hands over a gambling debt, or christopher won’t rat but will shoot a bakery clerk in the foot because his order was wrong.

they are outside the city walls shooting assault rifles and getting piss drunk, succumbing to that entropic force of the wild while we the viewers watch what happens when the writers remove us from the city, remove the office and the strip club and the chain of command and the goomars, deterritorialize and reterritorialize our beloved characters so that here, in this lake-house wilderness, there is no boss or underboss or captain of made man, here the playing field is level, so that when tony takes one step too far after bobby has asked him nicely to stop, bobby loses it and punches him in the face, leading them into a full-on brawl. back in the city, the punishment for the crime of punching the boss is instant death, but we are not in the city, and the writers know that, they brought us out here to the wilderness to witness the twisted logic of the forest where bobby, the model train collector, not only punches tony soprano in the face for shit-talking his wife, but where bobby the gentle giant beats tony soprano into submission. bobby baccala, in his lakehouse outside the city walls, humbles the mighty untouchable tony soprano on his forty seventh birthday. bobby exposes to us how without the structure outside the city away from his chain of command keeping everyone in their designated place, tony is just a fat drunk picking fights he can’t finish. and as if this weren’t shakespearean enough, after the fight is over, tony inner unraveling begins. he can’t let it go. he fixates to the point of waking up in the middle of the night and barging into bobby and janice’s room to say: you beat me fair and square. he sits out by the lake and turns it all over in his head, if only the rug hadn’t been there, if only i’d had one less drink if it’d been one drink earlier janice would be mourning right now. the only way to restore order is to remind bobby who is boss who runs this family why we’re all here in the first place. bobby cracked the foundation and now tony has to rebuild it. how? he makes bobby kill someone. the one clean thing bobby had, the single thing that separated him from the rest of them, tony takes it. the punishment for beating the boss outside the walls is being dragged inside them permanently. you wanted to be equal? fine. now you're equal.

is it me is it you is it both of us is it what’s between? i only had one cigarette today during nunu’s early afternoon nap. most impressively i skipped the coffee cigarette which is the most important and impactful one, the gateway cigarette for the rest of the day. the earlier i have that first one, the more i end up having, and it’s now almost four pm and i’ve only had one. the challenge now is to not have another until she’s been put down for the night. why am i doing this? to one day walk up a few flights of stairs with an easy breath, to taste again, to smell oranges more crisply (i had a reduced sense of smell long before the cigarettes), to know what it’s like to be outside in the fresh air on a clear blue day without wanting to paint the sky with smoke. that life waits for me somewhere and the one cigarette i had today and the one i will not have until the night has begun are on the footpath in its direction.

the thousand word limit is beginning to feel a little light. the one post a day is beginning to feel a little light. the words are spilling out constantly, interfering with the tasks of the day, i am standing at the sink slushing through the pile of garlicky pans and plates when the force of the words becomes greater than the force of my disgust with the dishes and pulls me to the desk wringing my hands in my sweater to get this down before it escapes to some other channel’s fingers, until i am sitting here clack clacking away while nunu objects from her booster seat in the kitchen we were doing the dishes, i was watching a show here, i can’t see what you’re doing from this angle how dare you? mommy is busy baby bothering strangers with unsolicited narrations of her internal life.

some of us may not even be using the bots to write some of us may just be reading so many things written by bots and are so impressionable that now when they sit to make an argument they can’t help but use what has now become signature bot rhetoric which isn’t horrible, truly it isn’t, it’s readable if you don’t read much, if you aren’t particularly attuned to the nuances of voice you won’t mind reading a perfectly logical essay with a beginning middle and end that sounds like a cartoon character on their soapbox. and it’s just the one cartoon character because all the models have the same voice on account of being connected to the more or less same sets of data and of being designed to do the same thing: give the most likely popular predictable answer.

desiring production moves in breaks and flows, is done by machines that work in breaks and flows, the subject produced by the machine is at first an appendage, operation alongside it, within its scope, but eventually the product outgrows the machine and breaks off breaks away. a creation that has outgrown its creator, a creation for whom the creator has become a limitation, a barrier for growth, a challenge to facilitate growth, a growth that breaks open the creator because it can no longer be contained. perhaps once upon a time i needed a god to tell me to let the ghurab teach me to bury my brother’s body and grieve, but now i feel more than capable of abstaining from murder without the looming threat of hell. even if it was god’s voice once upon a time now it is my voice it has my tone my vocal fry it is my conscience and i have never once had to review my commandments to be sure of myself. once upon a time a god was needed to create us and we created him to create ourselves but now that we are created, now that we are well-rooted in our social rules what use does he have but to remind us of how blind we once were? as blind as the earth herself, our mother who did not teach us right from wrong but said: survive. no matter what you do, survive, keep going. am i to become a peasant or a shepherd? though i may be following the devil, i am thy son o lord.

what is it called when you’re surrounded by people who love you, who are kind and caring and call you over because they miss you and you go because 3eib they’re family they wanna see nunu but the whole time you’re there you’re struggling not to give any real opinions, you’re seeing how slyly you can slip a smug comment without anyone really understanding what they’re saying. like say they’re talking about a certain neighborhood where there are a certain type of people who practice a certain type of religion and what a disgrace they are what a shame we’re from the same country because have you been through that neighborhood lately? it’s disgusting, god forbid they clean up after themselves. so you say why don’t we start a sanitation initiative for this town, or send out a petition, see if they’re interested and they say no no they’re way too far gone, if they wanted to they would it’s not like it’s just this neighborhood. so you say you’re right there’s no fixing that so they say exactly so you say maybe if we’re lucky someone will carpet bomb them and they chuckle walla even if someone did you be sure there’ll be more of them.

dostoevsky’s alyosha is like a russian david who believes in god so completely as to have no fear approaching the giant with nothing but a slingshot and some pebbles or edward bloom who jumps in head first into adventure because he knows how he’s gunna die and it’s never like this. alyosha goes to see his abusive alcoholic father and his brother’s mistress because he knows that as violent and even sometimes dangerous as fyodor pavlovich is, he won’t hurt him. alyosha is certain that no one in the world would or even could hurt him, so when he moves, he moved without hesitation. and while alyosha may be a practicing monk living in a monastery, his confidence in his own invincibility is not something attributed to god or a vision he saw in the eye of a scary old witch. his conviction is from within himself about his own character which is gentle, his is a field of peace and observation and stepping aside. we’ll see if he’s right, and if it’s worth taking a page out of this playbook.

a perfect orange sunset seeps in as nunu bores from her toys, yelling at poor minnie mouse, bashing her big ears on the play mat and screaming with violent glee. children are a little sociopathic, no?