TELL A DREAM, LOSE A READER
Diary entries from March 2025
Sorry, went a little nuts doing promotional things.
To recount dreams in fiction is a no-no. The writer Barry Hannah apparently said in creative writing classes that writers should limit themselves to putting three dream sequences max in their writing for their whole careers. Okay. Another creative writing maxim is: Tell a dream, lose a reader. But this is not fiction, this is Substack where it’s all essays, all the time.
There was a man once, who woke up each day and started looking around for misplaced objekts to try to catch the Daily Assembly Team in a mistake—the set dressers who flawlessly rearrange and put together the universe together each morning after it is destroyed by sleep, orgasms, or other such reality disasters. That man didn’t understand the truer science, that dictates that the only time these assemblers make a mistake, the only way their set designs can be faulted by finding some objekt hastily misplaced, is if the man looks within, at the mental objekts, not physical ones outside him. And eventually these badly arranged inner objekts will pile up and kill him. Disease is an incorrect positioning of mental objekts inside that eventually affects the main physical objekt, the Body. “Natural causes” have a mental origin.
You are living on the edge somehow. You had an impulse while listening to Abul Mogard’s “Along the River” that you’d like to somehow go amongst the Erises of this world, the Elizabeth V. Aldriches, to see about the afflictions of the people and write about them. You’re too weak to do that though, I think. You’re not outfitted. There are stores like REI or mountain climber stores, that sell you the appropriate gear to go out into the world of the guttersnipes in the cities, the outlaw writers as they burn out and dissolve.
You had an idea that future healthcare would involve robots caring for the sick unto death, no other living person around, absent family members leaving holographic “voicemails,” and the robots quietly pack you away into biodegradable packaging and cart you off to be buried or cremated. There is never any contact with the living people. All AI doctors, nurses, mortuary workers (sometimes an error happens and they mistakenly take away a healthy person, who lives alone, to be interred while they sleep) following a glitch in the healthcare proxies.
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New subscribers to this Substack need to know that these newsletters are mainly comprised of selections from your extensive diaries. A lot is edited out but the whole diaries may be published later when you get to a point in life, death, afterlife, or dreams when you’re discussed in art magazines or catalogues printed by museums showing your work. You’re a novelist, poet, essayist, artist, shitty painter, really poor book reviewer, and this newsletter has been going since 2021 or so, a bit longer than the Russia-Ukraine conflict has been happening. The first link in the previous sentence is to your most recent online publication, “The Scylla and Charybdis of Gay Dating When You’re Not Even Gay: A Fragment” at Farewell Transmission issue 4.
3/4/25
You feel very down and somewhat depressed. And you don’t say that word lightly. You feel like you’re thinking (blunt info) about suicide more than the typical amount, whatever that is. That’s something you can write in your diary without bells going off too loud. Unless this book is monitoring you. Books do that, you know: film and record you. Totally possible since you’re the one writing and reading it. You’re monitoring yourself, you trust yourself with that chore. Chores: milk the cows, feed the chickens, bring water from the well, chop wood, ask yourself if you’re honestly suicidal. You want to eat sugar from the general store before work. Sugar addicted and suicidally tinged, dark-sided in your thinking. But it will probably be okay. (look at the date, subscribers.)
The political content of schizoid dreams undergoes an erasure as insidious and thorough as the subject’s waking life. The man strides through a landscape of deteriorating rights and freedoms with an ignorance that was trained into him by the “dream producers” who write the nightly dramas for him to float through. Dreams neutralize the subject, allow him to see only one or two chess moves ahead—the bare necessities of relationships, symbols, fears—conditioning him to be the same in his waking hours. The dream life trains him to be apolitical, never climbing to the top rung of the ladder that starts with Aesthetics, then up to Ethics, and then Politics. He doesn’t even know there’s a top rung. He is narcotized, just trying to survive with his illness. Confusing, distracting dreams ill dispose him to be a leader of men, a revolutionary in conscious hours.
This might be different if he were a writer. He would try to write a full-bodied novel that touches on politics and economics through the character disabled and shattered by mental illness. Because he is a disabled, disempowered person.
Sonny Rollins on your hi-fi, your ADHD out of total control. You get sucked into social media brain abduction, lost time. You think the aliens everyone is talking about are actually in the algorithms they also talk about, taking away our brains via attention deficit mind-suckage. They want to eat our minds. It gets worse for you personally, after orgasm. Your mental faculties, the quality of your mind, the mental landscape turns to utter shit. Also not eating well. Your physical diet, mental diet, digital diet—all three are garbage. Garbage in, garbage out, as it says in the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament. Maybe there are spiritual objekts you’ve been neglecting, too.
The stand-up comic Maria Bamford said, “That thing where people say ‘God never gives people more than they can handle’: yeah He does. He does. And some people die from it.”
Trying to read books. Trying to read The Valeries again. Or at least skim it a second time. These books you say you’ll review, it hangs over your head like the social media Sword of Damocles.
Now you’re listening to the album “It’s 1999” by The New Me. Concentration is a bridge too far, too much to expect. Do you have attention deficit disorder and bipolar? That seems a little much. You’re only allowed one mental illness. You have to pick one. Having more than one is being dramatic, trying to be the center of attention. It’s also class privilege. Stay in your lane. Stay in your hole. Your cubicle. You can’t even see straight. Hiss on the tape. Minimalism. The New Me is fond of a certain sound effect: the sound an arrow makes when it strikes a tree, or wood panel. No way to think constructively. This music doesn’t help you. Conducive to clear thinking, it isn’t. Somehow it feels like the lingering aftereffects of the masturbation demons from Sunday night. Or whenever that was. Wednesday night actually. Sunday night plus Wednesday night set up a force amplifying boomerang effect in time, something like the trampoline tricks kids play, to make you fly even higher by jumping in timed math combos with you so when you land you get forced even higher. This is what jerking off twice three days apart will do you two days later. The hangover will be worse, the amplitude of the depression deeper via harmonic vibrations, the demonic possession of the masturbation demons. That’s redundant. Yeah, you know that’s the point, they’re inescapable.
3/13/25
You published the Valeries review on your Substack, and aside from scanning the analytics, you have no idea how it was received. Is this a good thing? No fuel for the self-conscious writer to burn. So freeze to death in your cabin in the woods.
You’ve read a few books in the past few days. Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin, along with Introducing Romanticism, a graphic novel style non-fiction book with comics to illustrate the philosophical and historical points.
You read Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star, or actually you read the first half, then Audrey Szasz’s Teleplasm, then finished the Lispector. An experience. More on Teleplasm later. Then you started reading Isaiah Berlin’s Vico and Herder, got surprisingly far in it by this date. You’re feeling like you’d like to read more philosophy and fewer nihilistic Marquis de Sade knock-offs/updates, which is kind of what Teleplasm was, in addition to being a cool book of 2025.
3/15/25
Listening to Viennese waltzes. You could get up to get the CD case but you won’t, you’re too lazy. The waltzes all sound like bombastic mechanical clocks, at times threatening to fall apart, speeding up comically, with great intensity and emotion. This was to get people to dance and mingle, to ferment love with gusto as the Danube drifts. Maybe we need that in the USA, under Trump the “Fertilization President,” to get the birthrate up. Like a video game of ancient Greece where you build statues of Aphrodite every where to get people to have sex and populate quickly before a war.
You review books and wonder if people read them. No guarantees in this post-Twitter age when you’re not on there anymore tagging everybody like an obnoxious social climber and seeing what people say. Elon, do you see how a mass exodus from X tears a void in the envelope of our cultural epistemes? Did you put that sophomorically? Not enough university education in you to write that way. Diary says: “who cares?”
3/??/25
Fuck reaching for the phone. Fuck that. You see, reaching for the phone to find out the date is just a trickery, it’s the phone seducing you into picking it up for other reasons. The innocuous function, like learning the time or date, is a trojan horse whereby the devil gets inside. So you go writing your diary entry never knowing the exact date. It’s either the 26th, the 27th, or the 28th. What does it matter in a larger sense.
You had a great idea just before sleep last night and never wrote it down because you would have had to turn the lights on. So you didn’t, you fell asleep and it’s gone. That story is as boring as Barry Hannah’s fourth, fifth, sixth, etc dreams that no reader wants to sit still for. But what if that idea last night would have magically caused the fragments of your novel to leap together like a shattered vase in reverse, tumble-climbing up onto the plinth? That’s the dream. Another more fatalistic, pragmatic view might be that if it wouldn’t be that last note you never got down, it’ll be something else. It’s like another bus, or another episode of sadomasochistic abusive sex in Audrey Szasz’s Teleplasm—it will come along again soon.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have the mental freedom to write in the spare hours before work, before seeing family or obligations, during a commute, in whatever moments you could bitterly scrounge up for yourself? You can’t though. If you have to go to work at 6 pm tonight, you can’t feel the freedom to write at 9 am this morning. Work looms so large that it casts a forbidding shadow of time that is a day long, backwards until the morning when you awaken. Days are not how it’s all measured, but units of contiguous consciousness. Is this the neurodivergence of which they speak? Or just the human condition? In this technological age—the Plastic Age, the age of homo algorithmicus—as we are reminded hourly, attention spans are the ropes in an omnidirectional tug of war with every person and every overinvested, overinterested corporation in our media; we sacrifice everything in our spirits to the phone.
Your roman a clef will get you killed. “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental and imaginary.” And delusional on the part of the reader waiting with their voodoo doll and their sewing needle. This town ain’t big enough for both our hallucinations. Not big enough for both our complexes. Our Daseinen. Did I get the German plural correct? Reach for the phone to find out. (The devil gets in.)
Learning who to ignore on social media is a high attainment. And each social media platform has its own “ignorance profile.” You’re just now growing into developing your Substack Notes ignore list. But the thing is, in order to actively ignore someone, it must be a person that the algorithm, which you unconsciously nudged into motion, is pushing on you: it’s a Jungian thing.
3/28?/25
The question mark in the date at the top of the diary entry tells so much, communicates so much about the daily struggle to keep one’s mind, to rescue one’s wits from the grind of the world. You must preserve the cognitive structure of your mind against all conspirators of entropy and chaos, even if—especially if—they wear your loved one’s face.
I like it when precious stones emerge from the body, scabs and crumbs of earwax which, if broken away, resemble garnets or rubies, translucent gems of bodily fluids turned to darkened hemoglobin crystals. Plasma diadems. Amid the hangnails, incarnadine jewels to mark the pain. Enough body horror, instead body awe, other emotions beyond disgust.
Just as the Winchester family was haunted by the ghosts of the Native peoples killed with their invention, the Winchester rifle, users of the Internet are haunted by the spectral offspring of the same war machine that produced the World Wide Web, the megadeath victims of the US military. Also, the deaths in the second case didn’t even need to causally occur, it was a historical genocide of inferences spiraling out of the Cold War.
4/2/25
Yesterday you had a piece come out in Farewell Transmission called “The Scylla and Charybdis of Gay Dating When You’re Not Even Gay: A Fragment.” It feels rather antisocial, homophobic perhaps, even though from a fictional standpoint you are writing as if you are bisexual which readers of the novel will understand to be the case when it is completed and published if not before. It’s a tricky territory. You are not sure anyone will understand you. That’s the problem with publishing. As John Berryman said once (I seem to remember), if you need confirmation of something from readers, you’re in the wrong business.