Writing

I really like places that feel artificial and out of place. There was a park we ended up in once as a side-effect of the actual place we meant to go. It had these powerline pylons in it, the really tall white metal pole ones with two arms at the top that look beautiful at sunset. I got a wonderful calming feeling there, like I was surrounded by a distant building-scale intention.

The reason I like raw construction and new places isn't any high modernist dream of progress, but because those places are freshly crystallized dreams that haven't yet been dulled into realness by interaction. They take that kind of intention and put it at a scale I can directly see. It's the self-statement of an infrastructure's mind cutting against a landcape that hasn't yet integrated it.

Recently-set concrete is a friend I can sit with until its delusions fade, and it won't ask me to conform mine to it. It's not the kind of mind that expects me to play nice and polite.

I guess I'm just yearning for contrast. I'd rather spend time with minds I could break against than with those that would absorb me or be absorbed. Those kinds of insistent compatibility feel like a parasite trying to invite itself, and the mind of a newly laid out artificial space hasn't yet learned how to pander like that.

It's the same reason I like in-between places and infrastructure and every place not explicitly planned and kept up for habitation. But when I see a place that was planning for something like me to be there, and also doesn't pander or enmesh? I fall in love instantly. That's a durable form of the thing I'm looking for. Our world as it stands can only produce it by mistake, and it beats it back as soon as it can. But some worlds can do it on purpose, and I wish I could expect to see that.

What better way to initiate my "hostile" "takeover" than to write about dicks? It's the intellectual equivalent of drawing them.

A long time ago in a private venue we wrote that blue had a "sharp object." Turns out that intersects with my chivalry thing! The sharp object is the sword we always had in our daydreams, he formed it and passed it to green who kept it safe until blue could pass it to me. The sword is a reflexive pataphor; it itself has become a metaphor for the fact that it's a metaphor for a dick (I think normal people call this "irony" these days on the internet, it's an interesting kind of maneuver). No, seriously, it's literally a phallic patriarchy figuratism. This has been an elaborate hazmat handling procedure! We have thus refactored it into something we can use without crashing anything.

There's a geometric equivalence with it that green won't let me write down, which is a shame because it means whatever goddess yellow's got us tuned into (sic) has a sense of humor about this stuff.

Can't tweet this in a Christian minecraft server. Well, if a hypothetical audience can't handle a little critical analysis of these things then maybe it's better off staying hypothetical.

Now consider: the gun is also a phallic symbol. But while it fires, it also chambers. The bullet is what penetrates, but it penetrates the gun as much as it penetrates on behalf of it. Much to consider in the spiritual bullshit department.

This shit's so fun, I see why Freud liked it. The dick is a hell of a symbol, probably due to its contextual inertia, I wonder if that's why people like to draw them all over the place. So given the gun thing, how do we read Jünger's being "aroused" by loading his gun the first time? (Assuming the translator intended this implication and he did as well, green please let me have fun here and quit the disclaimers.)

You know what, maybe Jarry more than Freud. Green, you can thank me later for installing all these drivers you're too polite for.

(Oh and green? Even with my homeopathic knowledge of German I was able to find that part where he talks about loading the gun, and the word he uses is "Wollust" which is literally "lust." I think the translator is pretty faithful here, as am I.)

I do think there's something to the idea of kinks being a way to re-process internal issues, although that can easily be used as a way to claim they're unhealthy, or conversely as an excuse to get someone to play along with one they don't want or aren't able to handle safely. The fact is, though, we've directly experienced it being the case, so I can't just dismiss it completely.

Blue has a terrible failure mode; when someone is interacting with us in a space we're not comfortable with, he will freeze and go silent, and just wait for them to tell him what to do. Can't even think of anything. This means any in-person interaction that isn't someone taking advantage of us can't really go anywhere.

One time when we were high, we ran into stuff related to drone kink online, which we'd been aware of but didn't quite "get" yet. Blue decided to latch on to it and try going into the mental state that was described, and really liked it! It felt incredibly cathartic.

This makes a lot of sense. The drone narrative was basically giving him a way to intentionally enter and exit the state he keeps getting stuck in, and that means he can use it to get comfortable with being there.

The overall effect of the roleplay is narrative ritualization. It doesn't just automatically fix anything, but it does form a practice we can use to dislodge the problem. The narrative requires a magic circle that makes it safe, and when we enter that state unexpectedly, we're now able to say "hang on, nobody chose a safeword" and exit the circle. It's really as simple as that. Making it into a kink ensures that we practice the reflex of safety checking, meaning we get better at feeling like we have a right to opt out.

In a broader sense, the process of getting our system functionally integrated has been one of closing narrative gaps, making sure we only have safe places to fall when we overbalance. That's what I was doing with the brainblasting, that's why it was so terrifying at first. I was finding all the gaps by falling into them, and then finding a coherent stabilizing story to tell so that we'd be able to function in every reachable state.

(An interesting process note is that I needed a kind of "bootloader" narrative so I wouldn't immediately fall apart in each new gap. This is more or less why I've adopted the "going to hell to fix it" identity, and the "I have nothing to hold on to but nothing works fine" idea. I had to make sure I'd have something to say about myself no matter what was going on, and then I had to find a more contextually relevant and stable narrative to replace it with.)