life goes on
if I have said nothing, it is because I have Nothing to say.
I think this is where the content warning goes.
I was once told that complicated fiction is not meant to be sifted through, analyzed for a singular, propositional “message” the author wants to impart. Why write something as complex as the great work of fiction to say something simple?
Perhaps life’s greatest truths are not “truths” in the sense of something simply stated. Much of the world’s content does admit a propositional rendering. I sometimes suspect much of what we really want to know does not.
Opinions are not those of my employer. etc.
I woke up to a 6:14am alarm on Tuesday. Early enough to get in a workout and read before work. I open my curtains, throw clothes on, grab my wallet and keys, stumble down the stairs, open the garage door, drive five minutes to the gym and (~ an hour later) five minutes back. I pace back and forth in the kitchen as I read, get ready for work, head to the office.
he has TB meningitis.
I didn’t respond. I couldn’t yet.
Thursday, almost the same morning. 6:14am alarm. Curtains open. Gym clothes on. Keys. Wallet. Do I really need the wallet unless I get pulled over? I have been a quarter of a century old for a month. Stairs. Table. Table. Haven’t tripped yet. The shoes don’t tie themselves but they always untie themselves. Five minutes. Pain. Enough. Home. “Home.” Substack. Socials. “Social.” Sunnyvale building. Don’t work here. “Developer.” Developers. I’m one of those.
I think.
He’s in a coma
Therefore, he is not.
I somehow never read “The Year of Magical Thinking” until 2022—it was Joan Didion who made me think it’s probably okay and not totally self-pitying and completely insufferable to write about experiencing a loved one’s death.
When my brother Asher died at the age of 4, I don’t think I had the mental resources or maturity available to do anything good with that grief. A social outcast in middle school, I figured the consolation my classmates and teachers drummed up was half-hearted; I got a card with a few notes of “I’m so sorry” and the name of the boy who shoved me with cleats in the hall and called me a terrorist because my family came from a country whose primary religion was Islam. My classmates even got a new weapon: I ended up on the receiving end of the phrase “you killed your brother” during one of those inane, meaningless exchanges of insults that middle school boys tend to find themselves in.
Arizona prosecutors. Mom in court. “Negligence.” Fake charges. Would you say he was fearless? “Jotted.” Yeah, like writing down. He drowned
She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death.
We.
Agenbite of inwit. Inwit’s agenbite.
Misery! Misery!
It’s almost May 2023 already. My mom’s brother is in a coma from late-stage meningitis. I can still remember the stupidity-cubed he and I and my cousin Afraz managed to form. We took trips to McDonald’s when I visited Pakistan. He encouraged me to enjoy regular Coke since I was “on vacation.”
My uncle was never “successful” in the conventional sense, and my parents didn’t let me forget it. He didn’t care as much for his career as many do. He binged Turkish soap operas. He took long walks.
Zone 2. 180 minutes.
We have similar heads of hair. I tell people I have a 12-year-old’s sense of humor. He almost certainly did.
Basheer. Bashir. Same?
Time, intensity, and specificity are going to be necessary components to give you the optionality to be able to be as physically active as possible when you're in the final decade of your life.
His first decade was his last.
四。
I’m manifesting for you.
F.W.J. Schelling argues in his middle period work Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom that will should be understood as the most fundamental constitutive element of reality.
in the final and highest instance there is no other Being than Will
Weiss.
God Will-ing.
We like to think we can will things. That we exert control over our lives. That those of us who read books and eat healthy and say smart-sounding things in conferences have some kind of surplus value that those who don’t—well—don’t.
Some personal news:
He was brought to be because I prayed in an apartment that I’d have the cutest little brother in the world and he appeared not a year later. I was pretty sure God existed. He heard me, right? Maybe I was part of the reason he was there.
Reasons. Principle of sufficient reason. The ground of being. He is because his parents are. His parents are because their parents because their parents because because
The possibly existent and the necessary existent. God’s ground? Will is primordial Being. Damn Will again.
We judge in life and we love in death. We proselytize in death. I should have spent more time with them. I should have appreciated them more. Nothing matters but that you are alive. I will do better.
My mother tells me over and over and over again that all that matters is that we are alive.
A face only a mother could love. He’s… a 4? Okay, a 4. I’m being generous here.
LEF once left me a letter. A letter that we had some things in common and that one of those things was the loss of a family member. Death is for the living. Or is there yet experience? No, funerals are for the living. Death is for the dead. How can death be for the living if the living have not been dead? Or they were dead before they were alive. Cycles.
Product @ Stripe | Writes about < thing literally everyone is writing about >
What a fun chat!!
I walk around sometimes, wondering if there’s some secret notion of “interestingness” we’re all measuring ourselves up against. Who cares about interesting when you’re dead? What is it to be valuable? Maybe I can talk more about a book if I’ve read it twice. Do k+1 Twitter followers mean you have interesting things to say?
I often think about the people I think are cool or thought were cool but who don’t seem to reciprocate. Maybe if I hide in a cocoon until I’ve read enough or produced enough that I have enough interesting things to say. That’ll do the trick. Inside. Like 2020. And 2021.
If you start to smell burning toast
You’re either having a stroke or overcooking your toast
We carry something of the dead along with us, a torn sack of sand. Lighter and lighter it gets. News of their deaths escape our lips more easily with each passing year.
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.
My brother’s things are still in his room, just as they were in 2009. The stuffed panda I used to hug as a child and passed on. The bed he was supposed to grow into. The metal tin that feels cold and stiff like his body felt with an impression of his little hands and his little feet.
Like a sick joke. Meningitis. How many violists does it take to change a lightbulb.
Many hands make the work light.
Archetype man says there is a shadow in you that shadow is a repressed part of you not necessarily dark as shadow would indicate merely a part of yourself that you do not like that you do not want to be like it is your mother your father the ick ugh ew my shadow haunts sometimes it wants justice they did not do justice in that courtroom that day those days those months those years did you see what it did to my mother did you hear her scream when they
I have been told that bad sleep accelerates death, but I have observed that death also accelerates bad sleep.
Asher didn’t have enough time to enjoy Proust and agonize over whatever the hell Schelling was trying to say. Maybe he’d never have. Cerebral palsy and co-occurring autism don’t make life easy. I see boys my age or a little younger or a little older working at grocery stores or with their families and try to think of what wonderful people they must be.
Death makes it hard to give two shits about how much you can squat or how many books you’ve read this year or how productive a developer you are or your “social capital” or whether that conversation went well. It sounds too kitsch-y to ramble on about the “fundamental value of life”—much ink has been spilled on that already.
Tell us Mr Altman what is truth with a Capital Tee?
We will obviously design them not to do so.
But I don’t know how I feel about people who post their “criteria for a best friend” or what makes a person interesting. Who am I to pretend I can imagine what someone else’s lived experience looks like well enough to know whether or not I’d call that lived experience interesting
We “know” consciousness via self-reports. We know “lived experience” via self-reports. Not everyone reports their lived experience to us. Hegel thought immediate experience wasn’t knowledge. You have to put something to words for it to be knowledge.
I have a feeling that this domain will be blocked soon but you can find me on Bluesky (person.bluesky.social)
Don’t compress your lived experience for the sake of someone’s knowledge. We think in thoughts not words not complete sentences but discrete jitters. We are in death illegible as we are in life. I can’t put the value of Asher’s life in words; I can’t do that for Mamoon’s, either.
I never had that conversation with LEF. I reached out but to no avail. Just the letter exists now. What was there to say? We mistake eloquence for depth of thought but sometimes the former trades with the latter.
We dig into our own chambers or rabbit-holes of meaning. You are great because you challenged yourself because you have a hard job because you squatted 1222 days in a row because you ~ show up ~ with undying consistency. We’ve managed to go back and forth enough that it’s almost cliched to even say “there is just this” or “you invent your own meaning” (lol) or “you need to be a part of a community / a religion / something greater than yourself” or “you are enough as you are.” We’ve more or less said… much of what there is to say about what can or should or could constitute a “meaningful” or “happy” life ?
Life is life is decades is years is months is days is hours is seconds is day after day after day after day after day
Life is everything all at once
Pick your poisons
Drain the vial
just a word please
And I want to know what would happen
If I surrender to the sound
~ phoebe bridgers song guess which one
some things read
The Age of the Crisis of Work yes another one
Why Poetry is a Variety of Mathematical Experience
I have been thinking a lot about the ineffability of the experience we have when confronted with great art of various sorts and this piece really puts together a lot of threads I have been tugging at in that pursuit myself.
We must slow down the race to God-like AI (lol God-like)
The Guy Who Just Loves Everyone
Lots about love this year—Fromm, Machine Love, Kierkegaard’s Christian love
~ books ~ i am not good at updating goodreads but who cares
this is not displaying sad
sending love - lovely post
<3