It's the Daily Scream!

03.18.2021 “add current societal norms”

Setting up a reality for my present state. Initiate a personality, start with the traits of your ancestors and add current societal norms. Reject those norms and create a personality in opposition. Revel in your self worth until you hit an ego wall. Break through to the other side of self and feel one with the world. Break down the separation between yourself and others until there is only now. Wake up a week later with a headache and wonder what led you to this point. Go down the hall and ask your roommate for an aspirin. Your roommate looks at you with no recognition and hands you a pill. You swallow it right there and now. The floor falls from beneath you, and your knees cripple. You feel someone handing you a cold glass of water and realize you were just really hungry and the pill tasted gross. You drink the whole glass and walk away without a word. One week goes by and you remember you had an appointment to see the dentist but you can't remember for what day or who your dentist is. You start obsessing about how your teeth feel and start wondering if you should remove them. You think about how fun it is to eat and how much you used to love diner parties. You remember a time when someone baked you a pie for your half birthday and you try to piece together how old that makes you. You give up after a passing thought and look out the window. A bird flies by. You wish you were closer to the window but feel so tired and don't feel like getting up to get closer. You end up walking to the fridge anyway and look longingly at your condiments. You close the fridge without eating anything. You leave your house. You enter your house. You leave your house again. You walk down the street till your legs hurt and then turn back and sit on the curb for a long while till you start feeling tired. You walk one block further and you are home. It has been a long day and you sleep instantly. You wake up and this is your dream.

03.17.2021 “about the reasons religion sticks”

Spent the first part of the day at a funeral. It was really really bizarre to sit there and see the face of a non living body. It really had no human in it anymore. Watching everyone feel sad and confused and seeing how little advice the religion was serving was eye opening. I hadn't been in a church in awhile and I was taken by how strangely cold and removed the place was. It really isn't built to make you feel comfortable. Being in a building with ceilings that high is nice but then its so strange that you are made to stare ahead at someone on a normal stage height. Why isn't the pastor suspended from a pulley hanging from the peak of the room? That would make the dynamics of the architecture make more sense to me. Thinking about the reasons religion sticks. It really seems like it should have puttered out by now. Maybe that is short sighted of me. How little people know of what they believe just goes to show how lasting a mythos can be over reasons and logic. And even so when you go to add up most of our logic the things we believe are just vague assumptions.

03.16.2021 “canning jars only”

I have always loved jars. I remember thinking when I was young that people who drink tea and coffee out of jars are superior because they can close them whenever and not have flies and bugs land in their drinks. I grew up canning lots of stuff when I was young. I always liked the process. I would help my mother as far back as I can remember when we would start canning our yearly harvest. When I started thinking about standardization and how important standard measurements are in the reuse of material, canning jars always stuck out. The fact that they are designed in a totally modular way makes them much more reusable. Why are all jars not made with reuse in mind. There is way way too much diversity in the screw dimensions of jars. One think I was thinking that could be somewhat of a temporary solution is some type of universal screw top adapters. A ring that you screw onto jars that convert them into the canning jar standard. But really what would be more useful is to get all the large manufacturers of jars to just sit down and agree on like 3 sizes of screw lids. The other issue is that there are many different sizes of just the screw parts that sometimes don't align. With canning/mason jars there is a standard and they all fit together. I still find it so comforting to have all my food stuff in canning jars only. Knowing that I don't have to search for lids cause there are only regular and wide mouth lids. What could we do to increase the amount of standardization in our society?

03.15.2021 “staying in the punk family”

After coffee I took Lucia on their first scooter ride. We went to the free store to look for some fabric for this curtain Lucia is making. We pulled up to a person sitting in front doing their nails next to this huge box of nail polish. I joined them and painted my nails each a different color in mostly blue hues. Worked on cleaning up and organizing in the free store a bit and then some friends showed up. The only things I took are a collection of square metal tins with rounded corners that were originally meant to store Fossil watches. I already painted one black, it looks real nice now. On our way back we found a large white cutting board, which was something I needed to find for our roommate after I gave away their cutting board by accident. We got home and I noticed the folks that are squatting the house next door were outside and I had been meaning to meet them. I went over and introduced myself and found out that it was a house I had actually been to before. It's sharing a fence with this house me and Lucia moved into but I didn't recognize it from the outside. It was Neight Train's house, this sweet kid who was murdered almost 5 years ago. I attended their funeral procession to The End of the World. It was a beautiful very moving event. Anyway the house ended up staying in the punk family and a bunch of people stayed there for many years. Last time I was at the house I got a tattoo of a frame of this from my friend Franki. Back to present day; everyone was apparently evicted and left a ton of stuff in the house and the person is squatting there encouraged us to go look through it and take whatever we wanted. The score that I found was a collection of porcelain powdered glazes in little vials. Over twenty colors! I found a very nice small can of black enamel paint and a glass chess set that fits the board I made for Lucia's birthday.

03.14.2021 “a vague way”

Seven devious machines humming at a feverish pace. Sound echoes through and through. A tinny sound like that of a pebble in a hubcap. 'Reach for the stars!' is reads on an old poster plastered to the wall above one machine. What morons they must take us for. The managers of managers of machines. We really aren't needed. They developed machines to take the job of the machine watchers ages ago. The only thing that kept us there was this one significant day about ten years ago. They had announced in a very wordy press release on a website no one reads that they had innovated our jobs away. They had written this in such a vague way as if they didn't know what the people doing these jobs that had been innovated away would think of this announcement. Really everyone should have been happy that this had happened. This job was always quite pointless. Some oil here, some button pressed there, nothing that challenged the mind. We should never have fought for this life. But there is was. It was a Tuesday. The website loaded slowly on that day due to the fog. We all read it, even though I don't think anyone read it as thoroughly as me. The gist was that we would get our pay checks regardless. That the machines watching the machines would be content to do our jobs, or we could come keep doing our jobs, but we would get paid regardless. The idea that we were no longer needed but that anyone would keep doing it anyway was revolting to me.

03.13.2021 “random connection to hated people “

Raving alone in a crowd of strangers in a Berlin warehouse. I had gone with a person I met at this random free ex hostel place I was staying at. I had met their friend at Clock Cafe in Morocco who was from Berlin, and when I learned I was headed there I hit them up and asked if I could stay with them. I didn't stay in touch with either of these people though. The only person I had stayed in touch with for much time was this Polish photographer who also lived at the hostel. I guess the only reason we stayed in touch was because they had a Tumblr that I had followed and would see their pictures pop up now and then. Many years later I was in Berlin and I met up with them again. They told me this bizarre story about how they were close friends with Martin Shkreli. Not that that is in any way relevant but its a weird link from sitting in a random cafe in Morocco to being one step removed from one of the most hated people online. I guess my other random connection to hated people was a time I was in NYC at this gallery I worked at and these random geeky kids walked in and I was just headed to go to a noise show. I invited them to come with me and they agreed. It turned out that one of them was Weev. I didn't know who Weev was at the time. They just seemed like an awkward nerd, I started talking to them on our walk and they told me they were waiting for some trial to happen and then probably head to prison. They explained the only reason they god in trouble was for writing a script that checked random strings in an AT&T website and suddenly one of the strings gave them access to a ton of data. Anyway there's the story of how I am connected through random means to some awful people.

03.12.2021 “don't seem to be famous”

Woke up and and had coffee with Lucia before they left for the weekend. I biked to meet Aram at their house so I could get some sour dough mother. I hadn't gone on a long bike ride in a while. Half way through, my chain started falling off and continued to do so every 5 minutes or so. I managed to make it to the house and while I was there borrowed some tools to tighten my chain. I was about to leave and head back when my friends asked if I wanted to go on a scooter ride with them. I had been waiting for my room mate to get back to me about doing an errand but I said fuck it and went cause scooters are fun. We rode to the levee and drank some beers. I hadn't had beer in probably a month and it was nice. When we got back to their house, Aram asked if I wanted to keep borrowing the scooter. Oh the other thing was that Aram's neighbour was outside and I started talking to them. It turned out that they were from Jaffna, Sri Lanka. We talked about politics and Tamil for a while which was pretty invigorating, they didn't know who M.I.A. was, though I wasn't surprised by that, they don't seem to be famous there, I showed them a Yung Raja video and they laughed and said they only really listen to Bollywood music like SD Burman. I left Aram's house and made my way to a gallery opening my studio mate had some pieces in. I spent a few hours hanging out with folks there. It was the first time I had been out with that many people in New Orleans since the beginning of the pandemic.

(this post was written the next day cause I fell asleep before I got to writing my post...)

03.11.2021 “continual pressure”

I spent much of the day dealing with something that was quite difficult for me. I will definitely write about it at some point but now is not the time. I really need to get off my computer and go to sleep but I haven't written yet. I don't like this habit I am getting into of waiting till I need to sleep to write.

One of the main reasons I am trying to force myself to write everyday is that I want to be able to make new habits and stick to them. To decide to do something and just do it. I know that I can become the version of myself I am striving towards. It just takes continual pressure in some direction. Remembering why I am doing the things I am doing will help me do them too. I don't believe in regretting my past failings, I believe in learning from them and taking those lessens and embedding that into my future self.

I need to wonder more. I have been too static this month. I didn't leave Lucia's house all day, was here on this laptop pretty much the entirety of it. Tomorrow I will go to Des and work in the garden. I think that shall make me feel more full.

I don't have rules for how much I am suppose to write each day, but somehow this doesn't feel like quite enough text.