This is going to be a long one. Over the course of the last few days, months and to some extent years, I have been subject to a series of revelations that have radically altered my perception of both the world and my place in it. In respect to my old online friend who does not need to be named, this thread will be formatted as a list of aphorisms – as I know they are your favourite linguistic format.
What I reveal in the following is enough to get me arrested or severely ostracised from daily life, so it takes a great deal of belief in this community to share such here. Think of it like a diary. Except I have never been able to tolerate the idea of a diary as an admission to no audience can have no inherent meaning and the observer effect is not confined to physics.
I am writing this thread live as I prefer having to post each series of aphorisms individually. If I attempted to write this thread as a prepared document then I’d probably keep delaying the concept indefinitely and I prefer stream-of-consciousness anyway. I am only capable of producing content if it is off the cuff. I shouldn’t have to say that this will be one of my finest works yet.
Also: I might incorporate second-person narrative for some posts. I’ve been listening to a lot of Lorde recently and I really want to capture that essence going forward. I will also edit the contents of each new post into the original post that you are reading now.
Beginning below at some point tomorrow.
At some point either in my late teenage years or early twenties (my memory seems to get weaker by the year), I had what was initially a one-night stand with a girl from a prominent music college in my city. We exchanged contact information during the morning after and after texting for a short while, we eventually began meeting on a biweekly basis. At first we were ‘dating’: as in meeting in public at a bar or some cheap restaurant, but after time we rotated into something which would probably be known now as a 'situationship’.
Meetings were then confined to her house. Her bedroom mostly. She lived on the west-end of town and shared a small terraced house with two other people who never seemed to be home.
I didn’t want to admit it at the time but in hindsight I was completely enamoured with this girl. It wasn’t about her aesthetic appearance either. It was something about her personality that I don’t want to denigrate by attempting to put into words but there was just something to her: how she spoke, what she wore, the makeup that she put on, the effortless confidence in her demeanour and strangely, even her social media presence. I wasn’t in love. That’s not the word. But I had a strong appreciation for something beyond this person – like they conveyed something at a much deeper level that triggered infatuation.
Then it started to slip. Slowly, our relationship was only confined to a month-long window but at whatever age I was, and this being before the pandemic, it felt like a good deal longer than that. But it started to slip. To specify – I do not mean that the relationship began to slip but the personality of the girl herself. I remember reading a youtube comment under a Hillary Clinton interview that said ‘you can’t fuck a personality’ but I’ve never found that to be true. And the disintegration of this relationship only reinforced my beliefs because I could not process how important the superficial value of this girl was until the superficial appeal began slipping. Her life grew less interesting and she put less emphasis on upholding any sort of facade and her makeup became less and less alternative until I could hardly bear to spend any time with this person. The last time I saw her, she had replaced her winged eyeliner with a glitter accent applied to her eyelids.
I cut things off. That was perhaps a vain and misguided decision but I cut things off. But that's not really my confession. My confession is a little darker.
And then the first confession. Well, believe me or not but I can literally feel sweat running down my forehead – that sounds like I’m being facetious but I’m not, that's how repressed my personal life has been. I assume this feeling is adrenaline – yes, something particularly embarrassing happened over the course of this month with this girl in question.
During one of our copulative engagements, I was surprised to find that I ejaculated after only two minutes, which in relation to the national male average of around six minutes, was only about a third of the duration that I should have hit. I had never felt so stupid and simple-minded.
Oh, if you could only feel the flood of endorphins currently running through my head at having lifted just that one little weight from my conscience.
It might not read to you like a huge confession but to my poor media-riddled head which was raised on the cultural expectations of American Pie and literal weeks spent watching my favourite show ‘How I Met Your Mother’ (Yes, you can probably tell that Barney Stinson (arguably one of the best characters in television history) is one of my personal role-models. I always get paranoid in real life that people can tell I’m trying to talk like Barney Stinson and, to hide any correlation, I have had to consciously obfuscate my vocabulary in the past under the local dialect of my city). Online, I can really let loose and let the resemblance show.), premature ejaculation was my biggest insecurity.
But that is not my biggest confession. Far from it.
The endorphins I am feeling now are like a massive green flag saying to let it all out!
And should I really be persecuted for ejaculating below the national average one time? It might have happened again once or twice, but google says it happens to everyone once or twice. I’ll move on with the topic at hand.
But before getting to that, the relevance of the last story is that my life can be cleanly divided in two halves: life before that relationship and life after that relationship. Because, I developed an obsession with ‘character’ after that girl. I developed a fear that the character of everyone around me was as fickle as that girl was and as what would probably be called a defence mechanism, I began to grow obsessed with the people in my surroundings, correlating all of their ticks, behaviours and speech-patterns to a greater constellation representing their subconscious.
And before I begin: I am too grateful to the online world and the people I have met: that kept me creative and thinking laterally at times when I was at my most culturally deficient.
At some point either in my late teenage years or early twenties (my memory seems to get weaker by the year), I had what was initially a one-night stand with a girl from a prominent music college in my city. We exchanged contact information during the morning after and after texting for a short while, we eventually began meeting on a biweekly basis. At first we were ‘dating’: as in meeting in public at a bar or some cheap restaurant, but after time we rotated into something which would probably be known now as a 'situationship’.
Meetings were then confined to her house. Her bedroom mostly. She lived on the west-end of town and shared a small terraced house with two other people who never seemed to be home.
I didn’t want to admit it at the time but in hindsight I was completely enamoured with this girl. It wasn’t about her aesthetic appearance either. It was something about her personality that I don’t want to denigrate by attempting to put into words but there was just something to her: how she spoke, what she wore, the makeup that she put on, the effortless confidence in her demeanour and strangely, even her social media presence. I wasn’t in love. That’s not the word. But I had a strong appreciation for something beyond this person – like they conveyed something at a much deeper level that triggered infatuation.
Then it started to slip. Slowly, our relationship was only confined to a month-long window but at whatever age I was, and this being before the pandemic, it felt like a good deal longer than that. But it started to slip. To specify – I do not mean that the relationship began to slip but the personality of the girl herself. I remember reading a youtube comment under a Hillary Clinton interview that said ‘you can’t fuck a personality’ but I’ve never found that to be true. And the disintegration of this relationship only reinforced my beliefs because I could not process how important the superficial value of this girl was until the superficial appeal began slipping. Her life grew less interesting and she put less emphasis on upholding any sort of facade and her makeup became less and less alternative until I could hardly bear to spend any time with this person. The last time I saw her, she had replaced her winged eyeliner with a glitter accent applied to her eyelids.
I cut things off. That was perhaps a vain and misguided decision but I cut things off. But that's not really my confession. My confession is a little darker.
And then the first confession. Well, believe me or not but I can literally feel sweat running down my forehead – that sounds like I’m being facetious but I’m not, that's how repressed my personal life has been. I assume this feeling is adrenaline – yes, something particularly embarrassing happened over the course of this month with this girl in question.
During one of our copulative engagements, I was surprised to find that I ejaculated after only two minutes, which in relation to the national male average of around six minutes, was only about a third of the duration that I should have hit. I had never felt so stupid and simple-minded.
Oh, if you could only feel the flood of endorphins currently running through my head at having lifted just that one little weight from my conscience.
It might not read to you like a huge confession but to my poor media-riddled head which was raised on the cultural expectations of American Pie and literal weeks spent watching my favourite show ‘How I Met Your Mother’ (Yes, you can probably tell that Barney Stinson (arguably one of the best characters in television history) is one of my personal role-models. I always get paranoid in real life that people can tell I’m trying to talk like Barney Stinson and, to hide any correlation, I have had to consciously obfuscate my vocabulary in the past under the local dialect of my city). Online, I can really let loose and let the resemblance show.), premature ejaculation was my biggest insecurity.
But that is not my biggest confession. Far from it. The endorphins I am feeling now are like a massive green flag saying to let it all out!
And should I really be persecuted for ejaculating below the national average one time? It might have happened again once or twice, but google says it happens to everyone once or twice. I’ll move on with the topic at hand.
But before getting to that, the relevance of the last story is that my life can be cleanly divided in two halves: life before that relationship and life after that relationship. Because, I developed an obsession with ‘character’ after that girl. I developed a fear that the character of everyone around me was as fickle as that girl was and as what would probably be called a defence mechanism, I began to grow obsessed with the people in my surroundings, correlating all of their ticks, behaviours and speech-patterns to a greater constellation representing their subconscious.
I liked the ones about exploring people's character and about falling out of love with someone because she stopped wearing winged eyeliner but I didn't like the one about premature ejaculation as it reminds me too much of something sad from my own life.
Arguably the most important aspect of any artform in modern times is the frame. The frame represents not just the physical border between the art and reality, but more importantly the context that serves meaning to the piece. Historically, the frame would have been a literal border but with recent culture, the frame is constantly impeded upon: the manner in which it is impeded upon typically being a part of the art itself.
A painting that is great by modern standards would not be perceived as such if scrawled along the walls of a train station, frameless and without context. Perhaps it could be argued that the location and physicality of the piece was ‘modern art’ in effect (expanded upon later), but such an argument in itself would still constitute a frame for the art, just a logical frame rather than physical. While not a literal distinguisher between the art and all else, it is an explanation that is necessary to justify the existence of the creation, and inside a world that is increasingly formed through explanations and dialogue, this argument, a ‘meta-frame’, is the crucial element in what defines meaning.
What does the frame look like for different conventionary artforms? Imagine a scene from a television show. There is an actress making an announcement over a hospital intercom where she flubs the pronunciation of several words. Was this an intentional effect for the sake of realism or an actual mistake by both the actress on her line delivery as well as the director for leaving it in? The viewer makes the distinction themself by using best judgement on the modern ‘frame’ of the show: they must infer what the director’s vision was through other context offered against the greater standard for television itself at the time of recording.
Another example of frame in television would be a show like Moonlighting. People watching this show now need it to be ‘translated’ culturally, perhaps by online video essays or perhaps through word-of-mouth, to a modern frame: as a lot of the irony and subversions of television tropes at the time will be lost to someone who was not an avid television watcher at that age. Thus, a greater respect for the ideas within requires a threshold of knowledge as to what frame the show existed in when it was conceived.
This is especially true for literature, which is usually dated significantly further back than digital artforms such as television or movies. A lot of celebrated books now require a comprehensive guide detailing how each sentence related to the culture and society at the time.