The Halls Careen

What really started to disturb me in retrospect about the narcissists in my life, was the realization that a lot of the things they accused me of doing (usually reading my attention issues or executive function issues as purposeful malevolence) were projections of the same vindictive behaviors in-which they engaged regularly.

Their abuse takes on a whole new layer of intentionality when you begin to understand that the reason they assumed the worst about your intentions was because they only had their own malevolence as a compass.

The vulnerable narcissist does not feel like they are safe unless you are under their control and working for their comfort. When you show your own needs or drives too clearly, they view you as the same kind of threat to their energy that they pose to yours.

If this is the only way that they can understand my character in the context of their lifelong performance, I will happily accept my role as an existential threat to narcissists.

Every adult in my life for more than twenty years:

"You're so good with computers! You'd make so much money doing something with that. It's just hard watching you waste so much potential by not turning it into a career!"

Everyone working in tech today:

"Send help. I have a 10+ year resume as a lead software engineer, but all that anyone seems to want is a new person to stand at the register in the gas station until the hypernormalized covid waves grant them the release of a premature cardiac event."

LLM tools are not helping you "express yourself as a writer," they are helping you express something they stole from a better writer.

I remember you, chaos.

Twisting metal, needles, smoke.

I plant trees of oblivion that grow fruitless, and lay crumbling bricks in the labyrinth I build in my mind.

My eternal oubliette, moist and overflowing with a burgeoning lifebed, a transmutation of decay.

As ever, I'm far too old for this.

Ageing them, and ageing me, outsource your maturity. Learning so fast my responsibility to your gravity. Growing up in that torsion; the twisting, tidal embrace of your unsafety.

I remember the nightmares.
Vivid, loud, swollen with monsters and needled through with the fangs of smiling adults, free of concern, grinning contented as porcelain masks flew from the walls to rattle my spine and pin me screaming to the floor. I remember.

All my useless grinning ones, offering critiques of my gracelessness while samesmiled ventriloquist dolls gnawed at my small limbs with their snapping painted maws. I remember. The trees bear no fruit to sate. The oubliette won't banish. The labyrinth won't contain.

I resonated louder and louder, a clarity of form and purpose fostered in the gnarled limbs of my cursed arboretum.

Such a skinny kid to feed your terror. A diet of fungus and bone and blinking eyes in the dark. Scraping, dragging, long-limbed things. Hooked hands reaching from every corner of my home to take me. It grouted my walls. I learned young to fear rest.

I learned young to fear rest. One day woke to adolescence, fighting the world without you. Quieter times with you gone. Bittersweet apathies leaving or returning. Struggling into adulthood, raised to love, and to fight you. I remember.

Pulling your screaming, shirtless body off of your scared lovers' cars as they drove away, taught by their own traumas to return. To set condition aside for love.

I remember the ways I was taught to set condition aside for love.

Tip for post truth eras; if all the news articles start blatantly telling you to forget something, you should really do your best to remember it.

I think The Great Filter is actually just narcissism

Raising a kid is not just a job you give to yourself; it is also a lifetime-job you force on that kid.

Sometimes it's a really bad job, too. Assuming your kids wriggle out from under whatever personal brand of abuses you may have brought to the table, they'll have an adulthood of trauma left to look forward to, surviving the relentlessly-deadringing aftermaths of capitalism.

I hope today's parents see the fire in their childrens' eyes, and that they are not afraid of that power, because they will need it as they walk into the raging future.

This rage is about to transcend the escalating fever-pitch that we have endured since birth, and become an altogether-new kind of cacophony. Decimations decimated. Machinery raining icarian from the sky. Humanity's borrowed reach withered and falling limp.

"I would die for you." They told me.

Such a phrase to throw around. Such a self-crucifying concept, to hand to a child.

I have seen these knotted words tested. Watched them crumble and fly like a burning tangle of old rubber bands.

I hope you meant it if you ever dared to tell a child you would die for them.

Spotting multiple threads talking about how restaurants are stupid-ass, QR coded, "it's a tip to show you're grateful but it is included in the bill and also the boss just pockets it" nightmares anymore, and I'm still just hanging out over here on year whatever of never sitting down in a restaurant again like; ✌🏻😷

More games with a dedicated "whatever you are holding, just throw it overhand as hard as you can" button.

This and a kick button. I need kicking and chucking with it, or I am not fucking with it.

"This seems AI-ish" must be my MKUltra trigger phrase cause wow it would piss me off to hear that about my writing.

If your public prison runs on a bunch of privatized services, that is still just a privatized prison. It's going to render a lot of the same horror on its inmates.

Back inside my years,
We could hear the towers' thoughts;
Whirring clicks and beeps.

Found some beads a month or two ago, lava rock bracelet, was told they would stabilize and ground me.

Could not keep the things on my wrist for more than an hour or two. They'd fly off every other time I moved. Didn't take long for the string to break. Could be that it will take more than a bracelet to settle things down for me.

I keep them scattered through the pockets of my coats now. I figured after this stabilising item rejected the landscape of my personhood so profoundly, I should let each of its components find their own time to go rolling away from me. 💚

*fixing my bedhead in the work mirror after the first customer leaves* "Wow, Lisa really got me 'full force' just then, huh?"

The jumping spider that sleeps in my hair: "Yeah, she really found her poker face after losing her shit on Brian that one time."

Play Diablo 2 for the first time in like twenty five years; get FOMO and overhaul mod it.

Play Diablo 2 again; figure out what this overhaul actually does and get reverse-FOMO and unmod it.

Re-mod it with smaller mods that don't add absurdly-powerful new drops or make the best drops way easier to get.

Take a third round of characters up through normal, finally cum, reinstall Grim Dawn. 🛀🏻

Everybody buying fake piss or detox kits wants to tell me it's for a friend. I am not judging you or your friend. I'm blessed to have never needed to use one of these products but they evidently make the world go 'round given how many we sell.

I think it sucks enough that we live in a world where entire industries are built on surveillance, and inevitably, on the evasion of said surveillance. I think it's a massive waste of resources all-around, and that it causes insane amounts of needless anxiety for the people who are subjected to its abuses.

No one who resorts to using these products should be made to feel shame on top of the anxiety they are already feeling.

I understand the world's anger, but like the anger of my countrymen, I often wish it was aimed more genuinely.

If you think working class americans are your enemy, you have one very important thing in common with them.

Step dad is the kind of guy who can put literally four thousand hours into Medieval: Total War II and not get bored. Some of you will know enough about white dudes and grand strategy games that you'll already have a diagnosis in mind for him.

🧠 mod rimworld so hard that it won't run on your steamdeck anymore 🧠

"God saw all that he had made, and indeed, it was very good."

- Me bigging myself up about the actual-effort-meal I made.

"I am no longer a stranger-
to my own sub-conscience.
I am unleashing the violence-
that comes from a broken trust."

- The Shizit - Soundtrack for The Revolution, 2001

Too tall to finish my soda at the top of a ladder; my head is not allowed to go that far back up here without big kid consequences.

Anyone willing to pay aftermarket prices on collectible music takes the condition of that music very seriously, and if you plan on selling to these people, you should take it seriously too. Nowhere in the recording industry is music's character so tied to its physical structure as with a vinyl record. You need to CARE for your music if you store it in big dumb spiral etchings.

I love ebay, but idk how this seller looked at this record and thought "mint" was anything close to a fair description of its condition.

The word is there to imply a "freshly-minted" quality. There should be no scratches, no blemishes, not a thing out of place. If a seller describes a vinyl to me as "mint", I am rightfully given very high expectations for that item. It should be in the best possible condition.

These vinyls did not arrive in "mint" condition. The amount of care it took to get these in a state where I could play them without damaging them further was extreme, and as a purveyor of wares myself, I would have been embarrassed to charge for this.

"Very Good" may have been some kind of move, if the seller had wanted to misrepresent something and get away with it. I would have raged privately as I cleaned the grime off and discovered the character of their mistreatment, but at least I would not have felt as if I had been straight-up misled. 🤷🏻

This fingerprinted, spot-needlefitti'd, hair-dusted victim-pair did not begin to approach ANYONE'S definition of "mint" when I pulled them from their sleeves, and as you can tell, ebay's 500 character limit could not begin to encompass the profundity of my disappointment.

So upset with this human. I would never misrepresent something I was selling to such a degree.

I came out ahead anyway. I am happy to care for something and help it sing. It is very close, and with time and care the tracks can even wear smoother again. The bright hum of age will overtake them. Scars will fade to a beautiful background noise of medial warmth. I will keep it safe in decay.

"You do it best, baby.
I would wear you if I could...
All of the time, your velvet skin- baby-
Up against mine, baby-
Sweat- baby.
Salt never tasted so good...
Loving you feels, so intimate, baby..."

https://alaskalaska.bandcamp.com/track/sweat