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Back to it with the ally

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weight: 1
date: 2019-08-09
tags:
- uppity
- detached
- bored
categories:
- meta
---
What if I tried to write a magical-realistic memoir?
Like.
It doesn't need to be totally true, and maybe some stuff gets pretty floaty, and maybe some stuff winds up as poetry, and maybe some of it is ergodic with scans of manic notes or bits of Manifesto Project, and maybe I just own the hypertextuality of the medium, but it's generally autobiographical.
That might be neat
> Who are you kidding?
Myself, I guess.
> Well, have at it, then.

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date: 2019-08-09
weight: 2
tags:
- uppity
- snarky
categories:
- meta
---
I'm not ready to share this yet.
> But you want to save it?
I want to save it.
> But you save it like this. You save it on the internet. You obscure the link, but it's there. It's in the commit. It's in the logs. It's in the wires.
That's not the same as sharing.
> It's exactly the same as sharing.
And who asked you?
> Who invoked me?
Well played.

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---
date: 2019-08-10
weight: 3
tags:
- inquisitive
- helpful
- snarky
- echoes
categories:
- nostalgia
- ekstasis
---
> Do you remember when you met me?
When I met you? I don't remember it so much as a meeting as you were just already there.
> I was, yes.
After high school, then. That's when you showed up. That's when life began. That's when I started thinking of myself as a person. That's when I started thinking of others as people, with their own motivations, their own desires, their own incentives and failings.
> And you made it through.
After a fashion.
> You're here, now. You made it through.
<div class="verse">She never wanted to be
What she became;
The irony of which
Is not lost on her.</div>
> Touching.
Hey now, don't be rude. Aren't you supposed to be my ally?
> I **am** your ally. I'm just not your friend.
Fair enough.
So you showed up after high school. You showed up after life slid sideways through puberty. I went digging, you know. To find this out.
> Oh?
Yeah. June 2004. There you are. I say,
```
The navy blue I've been seeing at waist level in front of me and to my left is contentment. I'm not entirely sure that it being omnipresent is a good thing, however, considering the colors it's mixed with. Am I really content with longing and hopelessness? It's not out of the question, I suppose that it could just be another aspect of my personality. But that just brings up the question of whether or not it's something I ingrained into myself through habit, something where I just kinda accepted that feeling such things is normal, okay, and what I want; or is it something I was born with, or that we're all born with? Is it a side effect of love, expecting impossible desires and the blind hopelessness that follows the end of a four year undertaking?
```
And you replied...?
> You're rambling.
So pleased you remember.
> You're rambling.
I suppose I am. But there you were. You said *You're rambling* to which I replied "Guilty, conspirator." And that was that. That was us. We never greeted each other. Why would we?
I kept digging, too. You stuck around for a year. I saw you off and on until June 2005. In October, 2004, I said that empathy is cooler in person. *Why?* you asked. *So you can verify? Don't you trust your feelings?* I said I didn't know, and then I begged you not to go.
> Everyone always leaves, don't they?
Perhaps. It's good to hear from you again. Even after fourteen years, I've missed you.
> And what was the last thing I said to you?
*I was going to call you emo, or suicidal, but no, not goth.* It was when Ash and Shannon and I found a house to move into.
> I believe I also called you a prick.
Was I?
> Yes.
Am I still?
> Yes, but a different kind.
You're as chipper now as you were then.
> Yes, but a different kind.

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---
date: 2019-08-11
weight: 4
tags:
- questions
- echoes
- humor
categories:
- meta
- alcohol
- nostalgia
---
> Why am I here?
Aren't you always?
> With you, sure. Why am I bound to words, though? It's been fourteen years.
Surely that's not all on me. You must play some role in it. I was talking with my partner about doing something autobiographical for my next project, after all.
> I'm the observer and the mirror. All I can do is reflect your choices back at you. Choice itself is not my department.
After getting [*Restless Town*](https://makyo.ink/publications/restless-town/) finished, I needed something to do. Some other project that would make me feel like I was being productive.
> Feel, or seem?
Both. If I sat still, I'd burn up. If I was seen sitting still, clearly I'd be worth less in the eyes of those around me, right?
> Not my department.
Right.
So I started digging through stuff I'd already done, seeing if any of it could be cleaned up and turned into a new project. I stumbled across [*Rum and Coke*](https://makyo.ink/publications/rum-and-coke/) and found it mostly clean as it was, so I decided to publish it as a book. Paperback and ebook, I mean, not just the stories online.
> Were you proud of them?
To an extent. A different me wrote them. A lesser me, in some ways. I was younger, I hadn't quite found my voice and tone. No [*Arcana*](https://makyo.ink/publications/arcana), no *Disappearance*, no [*Getting Lost*](https://writing.drab-makyo.com/fiction/getting-lost/) or [*Post-Self*](http://post-self.io). All I had was a few scattered tidbits and my mom's words ringing in my ears: "You wrote your own wedding vows, right? I could tell."
A me with a different identity, too. A me that was working on gender through small steps. I hadn't yet picked up the word 'trans' for myself. I was non-binary, presenting male, writing to justify myself. Or maybe to hype myself up. I was writing works about gender and poly problems being worked through to convince myself it was possible.
> They read like parables.
They were, to me. Each one came with an internal discussion after the last line, *now, what can we take from this?* Something in a circle. Socratic. A talking stick.
> I know, I was there.
Of course.
> Why didn't I show up then?
I was too...something. Too busy, too preoccupied. I was focused too much on identity, too much on The Work, as it were, to reflect. Maybe I was moving too quickly to notice my choices being shown to me.
> You'd mostly stopped [[adjective][species]](https://adjectivespecies.com) by then, too.
Life got weird. I was transitioning--
> A choice.
--I was solidifying my relationship with Judith--
> A choice.
--I was starting to burn out at work--
> Was that a choice?
The result of choices, maybe. The result of the choice to start drinking. It *is* called *Rum and Coke*, after all. The result of the choice to get into computers. The result of the choice to work from home, which itself was the result of a choice to take the previous job so far from home.
> You burned out in part because you burned so hard at the start.
Was I not supposed to? I had to prove myself.
> To whom?
You?
> Not my department.
One of your neighbors, perhaps. A cubicle over, a floor above, something like that.
> Do you anthropomorphize me that much?
No, I suppose, I don't. You're not my therapist, sitting in a chair across from me and talking me through my problems. You're not person shaped. You're the shape of my hands displaced half an inch behind my own, navy blue and trimmed with sea-foam green.
> You haven't used colors in fourteen years, either.
What I'm trying to say is that maybe you're back because of nostalgia. *Restless Town* was done and couldn't be published yet, and a prideful part of me didn't want it to be my first book, so I pulled *Rum and Coke* into shape.
It rubbed my nose in the past. I published it a few weeks ago, and I wasn't done with the past, so I started archiving more data. I dug up my old hard drives. I grabbed stuff from Dreamhost, both files and database backups. I finally unlocked my LJ account and archived that.
> And you work at an archive.
I go through phases, looking back at the past. I'll spend a few days trying to backdate some log files, or dig through my old scores and publish them --- I did that too, alongside *Rum and Coke*, publish a bunch of my old music --- or resurrect my notes on [*Nanon*](http://nanon.lang.drab-makyo.com), or the like.
> You are quite mercurial.
A failing. That may play a role in my burnout. I'm only good at something for seven years before it becomes so intolerable that I have to leave. Happened with school.
> So here I am, your ally, twice seven years later.
I hadn't thought of it that way.
> Portentous. The only way it would've been more so is if it were thrice seven years.
I ran away thrice seven years ago. In seventh grade, in 1997, no less.
> Ill omens. What will happen to me in seven years?
Will you leave me for good?
> Can an ally disinhabit a mind so easily?
I'm not comfortable with that question. I'm not comfortable with its implications. Either way, the past is important to me because maybe it can help me figure out the present. Those who don't know history are doomed to blah blah blah.
> And have you figured out your present?
For me to pull out that trite quote about my own personal history speaks pretty well to my fears of doing things accidentally. I've certainly figured out my present better than twice-seven-years-ago me had figured out his.

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---
date: 2019-08-10
weight: 5
tags:
- echoes
- kind
- snarky
- earnest
categories:
- alcohol
---
When 2007 rolled around, I turned 21. *What if,* I thought to myself. *What if I decided to see what it feels like to be addicted to something?*
By that point, alcohol was this nebulous thing. I'd roped a few people into getting me alcohol now and then, and it was fine. I'd started brewing and it was whatever. I had beer and it was alright. I went through a mead phase--
> You went through several.
--I went through a wine phase, and an absinthe phase--
> Don't sell yourself short. You wrote [an essay on absinthe](https://writing.drab-makyo.com/non-fiction/tasting/new-american-absinthe/).
--and a gin phase. That's the one that got me. I had a bottle of Beefeater's, what was to become my gin of choice, and I had an inch of it poured over ice and I was standing in the kitchen. Such a wide open space. The kitchen at that apartment was larger than my bedroom now, and it opened onto a living room the size of what we have now. I was standing tall in that vast plain of a room, staring down into my glass and watching the way the ice melting into the gin created swirls of two different kinds of transparent. I was thinking how it was probably due to the different ways the two liquids refracted light, and then I was laughing, because I was staring down into my drink like something out of a bar.
*What if I decided to see what it feels like to be addicted to something?* I thought. I drank every night that week.
> Why ruin your life on accident when you can do it on purpose?
I don't think I was thinking in those terms at that point.
> Are you now?
Perhaps.
> Maybe you're just afraid of doing anything by accident.
Perhaps.
> You're sounding like me more by the day.
Learn from the best.
> And so you set about with a will.
Like magic. I set forth my will with a stated goal and made it happen. My spell was spoken and washed down with liquor. I drank nearly every day from then on out. I spent thousands of dollars on alcohol over the next ten years. I went through more mead phases and more beer phases. I went through a distillation phase. Magic is empowerment through attention to detail.
> The MEAD principle. Cute.
I drank hard with the choir, and then I left school and drank hard with the programmers. If there's one thing that most programmers do better than computers, it's drinking, after all.
I did some work at a bar, even. Just making [their menu](/emb-menu.pdf) and website for them in exchange for free drinks.
> You mastered LaTeX that way. A very you thing to do.
I did well at it. I still have one of the menus and some of the paper laying around somewhere. I did that until the bartender left and, when I asked for my next payment from the owner, he flipped out at me and threatened to sue me for impersonating him. I don't think I realized Raffi, the bar manager who hired me, was already on his way out.
I drank my way out of one job and through a good chunk of another. I drank until I got better at it than I was at software. I drank myself into burnout. I drank until I collapsed.
> You used up your spell slots. You ran out of will. You had to quit by accident.
I worked to quit, I'll have you know. It wasn't easy. It took meds and some rough nights.
> You were less of a person then than you were when you started drinking. The you who started drinking by focusing on **starting drinking** was more real than the you who collapsed in the kitchen from a PNES and stopped drinking because she was completely empty of intention.
Should I start the daily drinking again, then?
> You're more of a person now than you were when you started drinking.
That, coming from you, is a glowing endorsement.
> You may have been more of a person when you started than when you stopped, but you weren't much of one, even then.

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---
date: 2019-08-10
weight: 6
tags:
- brief
- honest
- earnest
categories:
- dad
- mental health
---
When I was young, back before I knew what mental health entailed, what anxiety and abuse and depression really meant, I was convinced I was having semi-regular mental breakdowns. That was the phrase I used then, because I was unsure of what it meant to have a panic attack.
This was before LiveJournal, of course. This was before I was writing on the internet, or even really on the internet at all. This was before you.
> No, it wasn't.
Right.
When I [ran away](https://writing.drab-makyo.com/blog/running-away/), my dad found my paper journal. I had kept it infrequently, as something about daily journaling to a seventh-grader felt dishonest, stupid. What could I possibly write about?
In the journal, I mentioned on a few occasions that I'd had a mental breakdown. My dad called me several times over the next few days after my mom found me, and in one of those calls, he yelled at me about that. "Do you really think you're crazy?" he said. "Do you need to be taken to an asylum?"
I told him no. I whispered it. I murmured it. I wasn't crazy. I didn't need to go to an asylum. I just felt like time stopped for me and the world around me sped up. I just felt like I was holding on by the barest amount of friction on my fingertips. The whorls of my fingerprints providing my only grasp on reality.
> That was me saying hi.
Blunt-force greeting?
> I was quiet as a mouse.
I have the words now. I have the vocabulary. I can say derealization, depersonalization, dissociation. I can say panic attack and anxiety and depression and hypomania. I can say *ah, __this__ is what is happening now*.
> You have emotions now, is what you have. Those were your mental breakdowns.
Dad didn't believe in those. Not for boys. *Mood's a thing for cattle and loveplay*, right? Emotions are for women.
> He was half-right.
I suppose he was.

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---
date: 2019-08-11
weight: 7
tags:
- brief
- earnest
- snarky
categories:
- transition
- Matthew
- dead years
- Ship of Theseus
---
<div class="cw">
Some explicit stuff about suicide in this one.
</div>
I think of myself as a trans woman, not a woman. I think of past me as male, not female. To an extent, I think of past me as cisgender. I was a guy. I was that gay guy who tumbled out the other side of puberty and was left to figure out what the fuck. I am not who I was.
> You have ship-of-Theseus'd yourself into what you are.
I was not Madison. I am not Matthew. I can't deny his existence, though. He was him, and to erase that, to toe the party line and say I've always known that I was Madison, would do a disservice him.
He got in all those relationships. He loved so hard it hurt. He dreamed of being held. He struggled with the words.
He fought. He enacted his cruelty in countless subtle ways. He promised himself he'd be better than his dad and failed more often than not.
He rode the same crests of hypomania and crashed just as hard after. Once, he tried to schedule his hobbies into his day so thoroughly that he forgot to schedule meals, then, having failed two weeks later, considered shooting himself in the head. Anxiety rode him just as thoroughly. Once, dead convinced that he had meningitis, he wrote a note apologizing to loved ones and left it on the bedstand.
He was just as mercurial, too. The brewing phase--
> Phases. Plural.
--the gun phase, the photography phase and all its subphases: digital, film, cross-processing, rangefinders.
> Yeah, he was a prick.
You said I still am, but a different kind.
> In all fondness.
How kind.
All this to say, I have not always known I was trans. To pretend such would be to erase a real, actual person who tried his best more often than not.
> Have you answered Theseus' question?
I don't know.

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---
date: 2019-08-11
weight: 8
tags:
- questions
- brief
categories:
- ekstasis
- nostalgia
- images
---
July 2nd, 2004, shortly after midnight.
```
My emotions are gaining distinct colors, like a kind of twisted synaesthesia. There's definitely a sense of physical location associated with each emotion, and it's not always internal. There may also be a tactile part to this, but I have yet to experience it in any different places or with any different touches, so it may just be one continuous headache that goes latent occasionally.
An example: when pondering ****, a luminescent fuschia color that seems to be flowing in the right hemisphere of my brain; when thinking of ******* and snuggling, a warm, earthy brown with a little bit of green in a pine-needle-ish pattern about a foot and a half in front of me and slightly to the left; tiredness is off-white everywhere and blind hopelessness is bright blue wrapped around my mind. The headache moves around, but it's mostly at the lower, back, right side of my head. Ibuprofin works well.
This isn't what I meant when I was talking about beautiful pain.
Current mood: Bright blue with a tinge of purple, but mostly off white and hazy.
```
![Blue](/color/blue_flag.jpg)
July 3rd, 2004, shortly after midnight.
```
Greens covering my chest and shoulders warmly are happiness.
```
![Green](/color/green_door.jpg)
> And that's when I showed up, yes?
Yeah, later that day.
```
The navy blue I've been seeing at waist level in front of me and to my left is contentment. I'm not entirely sure that it being omnipresent is a good thing, however, considering the colors it's mixed with. Am I really content with longing and hopelessness? It's not out of the question, I suppose that it could just be another aspect of my personality. But that just brings up the question of whether or not it's something I ingrained into myself through habit, something where I just kinda accepted that feeling such things is normal, okay, and what I want; or is it something I was born with, or that we're all born with? Is it a side effect of love, expecting impossible desires and the blind hopelessness that follows the end of a four year undertaking?
Whatever, you're rambling.
Guilty, conspirator.
```
> And these pictures?
All from years later. The color thing comes and goes, like you.
April 8, 2004
```
The undersides
off gray
of clouds
drift
while I
on the path
stand
above
where the crow flies
me.
Off
with purple
gray, I
wandering
ponder, should
in a perfect
were there such a thing
world
be a
though the word is plain
color with it's own
to name
as they say
creates
word.
It soothes.
```
Sometimes I'm overcome by the numinous. Sometimes it's colors, sometimes it's you, sometimes it's a silence swelling within my chest, stealing breath.
> He would be riding on the subway or writing formulas on the blackboard or having a meal or (as now) sitting and talking to someone across a table, and it would envelop him like a soundless tsunami.
That's a post-rock song title.
> Is it wrong?
![Orange](/color/orange_eyes.jpg)
I'll take a picture, lasso a color, and desaturate everything else. Sometimes, it's fun. I do it to Falcon's eyes a lot because they're so pretty.
> And sometimes it's something more.
Yeah. Sometimes it's a compulsion. Sometimes a picture will latch onto me and never let me go. Sometimes I'll remove all color.
![Black and white](/color/bw1.jpg)
![Black and white](/color/bw2.jpg)
Sometimes I'll blow out the background because the foreground is so completely overwhelming.
[![Manifestations](/color/bw3.jpg)](/manifesto-project)
Sometimes I'll skew colors all in one direction.
![Stacks](/color/window_view.png)
It's not an artistic decision. Not *just*, at least. It's always something more.
<div class="verse">Inter ĝuo kaj timo
Estas loko de tro da signifo.
Apud kompreno, ekster saĝo,
Tamen ĝi tutampleksas.
Mi kompareble malgrandas
Kaj ĝi tro granda estas.
Nekomprenebla
Nekontestebla,
Senmova kaj ĉiam ŝanĝiĝema.
Between joy and fear
Is a place of too much meaning.
Next to understanding, outside wisdom,
It nonetheless expands.
I'm so small beside it
and it is too big.
Incomprehensible,
Incontestible,
Unmoving and always changing.</div>
A [sigil](https://makyo.github.io/tinysigil/) need not just be [lines and curves](https://makyo.ink/acts-of-intent/).
> Or maybe it's just mania.
<a href="/mania" class="pulse">It may be</a>.

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---
date: 2019-08-11
weight: 9
tags:
- demanding
- snarky
- questions
categories:
- mania
- mental health
- meta
---
> Tell me about mania.
No.
Wait, what? Why are you asking? Weren't you there?
> I was. I...am?
I don't think I'm hypomanic now. On my way, perhaps. I can't sleep.
> I may be, then. Tell me about mania.
No, tell me why you're asking.
> I'm more of a liminal creature, myself. It's hard to keep an ally around when depression slowly shuts down avenue after avenue of reaching one. You, as a reflection of me, become distorted while manic. Fun-house mirrors and blind-spots. I want to hear about it.
No.
Later.
I took a sleep aid. I'm not getting into this now. I was all prepped to write about poly stuff, but you started banging on the door.
<a class="pulse" href="/birds">Read what I've already written</a>.
> I was there when you wrote those.
So? Does that not clarify it?
> Will anything?
Likely not.
I will say, though, that I missed some stuff in my investigation earlier. You did come back for three brief days in November, 2013. It was at a liminal time, but you didn't stick around.
> I'll remind you that you ignored me for one of those posts.
Point.
Let's get into mania later. We owe each other that. For now, bed. And tomorrow, something a little less harrowing.
> Ah yes. Polyamory. Known for being easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

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---
date: 2019-08-12
weight: 10
tags:
- earnest
- demanding
categories:
- mental health
- mania
---
The first time I remember thinking about polyamory--
> And here I was hoping you'd cave and talk more about mania.
Why are you so hung up on that? I told you I wouldn't, and you seemed to accept that.
> 'Seemed to'? 'Accept'? Are those things something like me can do?
Well, if *I* can...
> Conceded. No mania, then?
It's not a comfortable topic.
> Granted. Tell me why, at least.
It's not a good feeling. Not from the inside, not from the outside. From the inside I've only caught glimpses of it, even. Glimpses caught through the haze of medication or withdrawal or the mass of ineffable ecstasy comes crashing down upon me. I get all wrapped up in hypomania. Something less. Something just beneath. That thin meniscus between this world and...something else.
But in others I've watched --- in some cases, been caught up in --- the frenzy as their world slowly slides out of alignment with consensus reality. They turn from...
> What?
You got me talking about it.
> I'm pleased you think so highly of me.
I *will* talk about it. It's not off the table. I just need something not that for a bit.
> To poly?
<a class="pulse" href="/poly">To poly</a>.

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---
date: 2019-08-14
weight: 11
tags:
- demanding
categories:
- mania
- mental health
---
> Let's talk about mania.
<a class="pulse" href="/from-within">Fine</a>.

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---
date: 2019-08-14
weight: 12
tags:
- earnest
categories:
- thank you
---
> Thank you.

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date: 2019-08-28
weight: 13
---
Can we talk about something else? Please?
> Something lighter?
<a class="pulse" href="/furry">Something softer</a>.

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---
date: 2019-08-19
weight: 14
---
<pre>
( <a class="pulse huh" href="/aside/1">...</a> )
O
o
.
_____,,,_^..^_,,,_____
__|____|____|____|____
____|____|____|____|__
</pre>
<script type="text/javascript">
/*
You know this is also very Maddy, right?
Of course it is.
Alright, just making sure you knew that was the case.
Honestly, at this point, would you expect anything less?
I guess not.
*/
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let filled = 0;
window.setInterval(() => {
let inner = document.querySelector('.huh .i' + (Math.floor(Math.random() * 10) + 1));
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---
date: 2019-08-28
weight: 15
---
<a class="pulse" href="/liminal">And so we find ourselves in a place between</a>.

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---
date: 2019-08-22
weight: 16
---
> Do you feel better, now?
Not really. Just a <a class="pulse" href="/poet-and-mystic">different kind of melancholy</a>.
> Ain't that just the way of things?

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Let's talk about writing.
> If you'd like. We still have a few others on the list, don't forget.
Would you let me?
> Of course not.
<a class="pulse" href="/writing">Upwards and inwards</a>.

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date: 2019-09-01
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> You are unsettled in your identity.
> Boy &rarr; enby &rarr; girl &rarr; trans woman.
> Biochemist &rarr; musician &rarr; <a class="pulse" href="https://github.com/makyo/ally.drab-makyo.com/pull/4" target="_blank">programmer</a> &rarr; writer.
> Gay &rarr; bi &rarr; ace &rarr; pan.
> Mono &rarr; poly.
People change.
> Healthy &rarr; sick &rarr; broken &rarr; sick &rarr; improving.
Like I said, people change.
> You change like it's your job.
Is that not a good thing?
> Will you ever stop coming out?
I don't know. Must I?
> No.
Should I?
> Should you?

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date: 2019-09-08
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The tragic core to all this, to this whole project, is that I am not an interesting person. Or maybe interesting, but unremarkable.
> You're in a mood.
*Coming to terms with being a terrible person*, I wrote, but I'm not even that. I'm just a person.
> I'll be the first to admit that you're largely just a boring person. You know that. There's nothing remarkable about your life. Middle class, middling intelligence, average looks --- at least for a trans girl --- okay sense of humor, no unusual challenges, unless the movement disorders count.
What's this, then? A memoir? What would that accomplish?
> Validation? I've already mentioned that.
What would the written account of an ordinary life validate?
> Sometimes it's worthwhile just hearing that ordinary people living ordinary lives can get by in the world. That despite being trans, despite feeling like garbage sometimes, you can still function. That even the drabbest of makyō still have stories to tell.
I suppose that's fair. Literary fiction exists separately from genre fiction, as silly a distinction that is to make, because of the validation we find in the unfantastic.
> Where is this heading? What is the future? What are we leading to?
In the context of this project, or just life in general?
> Is there an end? A goal?
I'm not sure.
> What will the last page say?
<div class="verse">[...] Endings were writ on your face,
your hands, and your steps &mdash; your very pace
spoke of completion.</div>
> Are you thinking of ending this project?
Not at all. I've got a list of side quests I need to complete in order to make you happy, and their very nature makes it easy to complete. One or two thousand words, an hour or two's conversation with you, and then they're done and I don't have to pick up where I left off.
I'm just tired.

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date: 2019-09-10
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> Let me ask this another way, perhaps. Why are we doing this? Why are we talking? Why did you start?
Let's put a pin in just why exactly you're asking these questions. I'd like to know what the origin after I give you the whys and wherefores.
> Okay.
To the question at hand, though, I think I covered that before, right? I started this project in a fit of nostalgia and one of the end results of an unstoppable wave of nostalgia plus a sort of graphomania is the need to write about the past, and to do so in such a way as to invoke the past in the process.
> I guess I'm trying to decide whether or not to believe you.
What's not to believe here? I spend page after page digging through old LJ entries, old poetry, old pictures and art and logs--
> Let's talk about TS.
Don't derail me. These are your questions.
> Point.
What's not to believe about a project filled to overflowing with nostalgia being borne from nostalgia?
> I don't doubt the roots in nostalgia, I doubt the intentionality.
You doubt that I started this on purpose?
> Did you summon me? Answer truly.
I don't know.
> I say that I've always been here, but that's only a part-way truth. That's only half-meaning drizzled over too many words. It's easy enough for someone to say that an abstract concept, a loose portion of someone's personality has always been there. Of course that's the case. Why did you summon **me**, though? Are you in need of an ally?
I'm surrounded by friends and chosen family, these days. Most of them are my allies.
> Well, maybe we should disentangle what exactly an ally is before we continue down the path of why you summoned me.
Okay. I was going to call you my shadow, but that's not exactly right, is it?
> No.
You share some similarities, I guess. You have these aspects of myself that are submerged beneath the surface, usually. You see me from a distance. You know everything about me.
> I do. But by its very definition, I'm not your shadow. Like I told you, I'm not your id.
And like I told *you*, it was a joke.
> You'll have to imagine me laughing.
Right.
> I'm not your shadow or your id because those are not necessarily things you can see. They are the things that are, by definition, unknown and unknowable by the ego.
Or at least heavily obscured. Dr Jekyll knew of Mr Hyde. Perhaps you're not my shadow, but maybe the personification of enantiodroma. Perhaps this is my process of assimilation. Perhaps this is me airing my dirty laundry.
> It's not **not** that. There are enough parts of me that are opposite of you for the similarities to be more than superficial. Enantiodroma carries too many implications of balance and equilibrium, however. That there are parts of me that are opposite of you does not make me the opposite of you. You could not press us together, merge us completely, and wind up with some more complete self.
Right. You'd have to be the same size as me, and you're not.
> I don't have a size.
You'd have to be in the same place as me, and you're not.
> I don't have a place.
Right. *You're not person shaped,* I said. *You're the shape of my hands displaced half an inch behind my own, navy blue and trimmed with sea-foam green.*
> I don't have physicality. I don't have boundaries.
You are bounded by me. I am your boundaries.
> Are you?
Can an ally move beyond a mind? Can allyship --- true, individual allyship --- move beyond the allegiance?
> You tell me.
I don't know that I can.
> I am a liminal creature. I told you that. I'm almost a shadow but miss the mark. I'm near to the concept of a back-stage persona but miss the mark. I get close to being you, but never quite come into focus enough for the outlines to match up.
Are you not just me? Just a part of me?
> There is no me without you.
Is there a me without you?
> Can you imagine so dull a life?
You're not that exciting.
> Not my department.
Right.
So an allegiance in the [orthocosmic sense](http://wiki.postfurry.net/wiki/Metacosmology) is a relationship two entities where they help each other. Or at least trust that they can rely on the help of the other at need. It's not contingent upon friendship, as you are so fond of saying, but that's not to say that they're mutually exclusive.
> I am an endocosmic ally.
Are you helping me, then?
> Do you not feel my aid?
I suppose I do. Sometimes it feels like you're just here to kick my ass.
> Ass-kicking is well within the bailiwick of an ally. To not kick your ass when you need it would be to fail at being a good ally.
I've heard that said about friends. A fair-weather friend may leave you to create your own demise, while a true friend will knock some sense into you.
> True friends are almost always also strong allies.
But not vice versa. I see that now. You are not my friend.
> I am not your friend.
But you are my ally.
> I am your ally.

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> When you started this project, several people asked if you were okay.
Yes.
> Were you?
I think so. I was swinging up toward hypomania, and plowing heedlessly through nostalgia. Some of it was good, some of it was bad, but I don't think that had much bearing on me starting the project.
> Robin asked if you were okay. "I just want to make sure," she said once. "You asked me to check in on you if you ever started talking about geese."
Perhaps this has a similar feel to it. A similar scent of ritual, a similar flavor of mysticism, a similar sense of some other reality vignetting my vision.
> lorxus asked if you were okay. "People normally write memoirs at the ends of their lives."
Life is a series of beginnings and endings dovetailed messily together.
> There is a final ending, though.
I don't think I'm near that, despite what passive ideation might tell me. I'm not writing some drawn out farewell.
> So, why are we talking, you and I? Where is this going?
We're talking because this project, self indulgent as it is, is leading me to confront and process a lot of different things, which I'd call a net positive. We're talking because how can I know what I think until I say --- or write --- it? We're talking because I've got a lot on my mind.
This is going nowhere.
> I don't know whether to be proud or insulted by that.
Can you feel either?
> Not my department. The metaphor is still useful.
Well, fair enough. I didn't mean that idiom, anyway. This is going nowhere because it's a project that needn't have a direction.
It's not a directed thing.
It is a river.
It is the movement of the tides.
It's guided only by gravity and the lay of the land.
It is its own *musica universalis*.
It's a conversation.
> Conversations have direction.
Not all of them.
It's one of those late-night conversations that go where they will, in which sometimes very little is said.
It is not a minded thing. It has no autonomy and yet has no guiding force. No sapeint guiding force, at least.
It is a way. It is a path, and yet the path is not the walker.
> This is going nowhere.
Maybe, but maybe that's the point.

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date: 2019-09-10
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My turn.
> Shoot.
Why ask this now? Why ask about the core instead of a side quest?
> I did. I asked about TS.
Don't deflect.
> Okay.
Why ask about the project? Why ask about yourself?
> You had job interviews. You had the convention. You're visiting Barac. You stopped writing for a bit.
I started again, didn't I?
> Yes. Hypomania is fading into the comfortable static of a ground state, though. You're **still** writing. That's why I'm asking. Why are you writing this if you're not hypomanic?
I wrote a bunch of *Restless Town* when I wasn't hypomanic.
> Yes.
I wrote some of *Rum and Coke* when I wasn't hypomanic.
> It shows, in the last one.
I've grown as a writer. I've grown as a person. I can continue projects whose inception lay in hypomania.
> And yet you say that you know a thing is right if you feel the same when depressed as when hypomanic. You can tell a decision is worth making if something other than strange energies birthed it.
Yes.
> Did strange energies not birth me?
I don't know. Maybe. I don't think they birthed this project, though. I think this project is...hmm.
> An honest one? A true one? A worthwhile one?
Sort of.
Maybe I think it's an earnest one. One that was borne out of a real desire, birthed by a need beyond what might be imbued by hypomania. A more grounded need, not one based in those non-Newtonian laws that govern that other space, where mechanics break down and strange energies spring, palladial, into being.

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