Squinting At Magic Eye Posters

What happens when you don't want to do that anymore?

Some Obligatory Housekeeping

I will start this essay with a little housekeeping: I haven’t written or posted anything in a while, and I apologize (most specifically to my paid subscribers) for not repeatedly churning out dazzling treatises to meet expectations.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. I have been busy with various IRL tasks, which quickly sap energy that could be used toward my already low creative output. These include:

   1. Helping my friends butcher and eviscerate the remainder of their meat birds for the rest of the year. Apparently, Cornish chickens don’t last well in the temperate winters of Tennessee.

      

      I find this activity to be particularly meditative, but what really helps me derive pleasure from it is knowing that by doing it, I’m severely offending all the vegans & effective altruists in the world.

      

      A digitally framed picture of me removing innards very proudly

   2. Running a charity drive with the emergency preparedness crew from my church to collect ~$6K worth of relief supplies; then taking a thirteen-hour road trip to deliver the load to Asheville.

      

      It was my first time driving through Cherokee country; the Nantahala National Forest and Nantahala River are breathtakingly beautiful. There is a legend that a horned serpent called Uktena lives near Lake Ocoee, but I didn’t catch a glimpse of it.

      

      I kind of want to take a ride on its back

   3. Applying to many, many jobs, in addition to following through with the launch the Tortuga Society. Both IRL part-time jobs and full-time bugman remote jobs.

2. I owe two or three articles to many various friends and Substack allies. I’m already struggling to finish those, let alone focus on my own little corner of the posting sphere. Plus, I have a podcast episode to finish editing and publish.

3. I have been, as is not out of the ordinary, psychotically depressed for several weeks.

   1. What I say, ‘psychotic’, I mean precisely that: on the way back from North Carolina, we listened to a highly provocative true crime podcast. In one of the episodes, a girl gets raped and then set on fire. The autopsy reveals that her assaulter poured gasoline down her nose and throat after knocking her out, not realizing she was only unconscious.

      

      A couple of days later after returning home, after enduring a series of nightmares, I woke up in the early morning; and as I started doing the dishes I started calculating how cost-effective it would be to deploy that process against myself.

      

      I find significant comfort in engaging in exercises like this because it makes me feel like I still have control in my life (when I fundamentally don’t) and that at the end of the day, I – not God or anyone else – still get to decide whether I live or not.

   2. Clearly, if you look at my list above, the fact remains that my levels of presence and productivity outclass that of normies by a full order of magnitude, even when a supermajority of my effort is put toward fighting the urge to gruesomely self-slaughter.

Nevertheless, let’s move on to some more interesting reflections. This post will be a short one (remember how exhausted I am?), but a good one.

The Best Television Is Furry Porn

One of the advantages of living in a late-stage empire is that animated TV shows that contain explicit characterizations of bestiality do not come under too much scrutiny; such creative premises are accepted as a fact of life. You don’t really want to be a fascist by limiting the ability of Netflix producers to outwardly explore the beauty and complexity of consenting human-animal relations, do you?

Before you exit your browser in horror (or click a different tab on the Substack app), I want to be clear – in this post, I am not aiming to imitate one of those YouTube channels run by a 22-year-old non-binary xim that spends 173 minutes analyzing the romantic relationships of pixelated perverts.

Putting aside the inherent transcendence of dog-men fucking Asian women in a show like Bojack Horseman, I instead want to talk about what happens on the flip side of that particular relationship.

I want to focus on two particular monologues, the first of them from S4E12 when Diane decides to divorce Mr. Peanutbutter.

“You know sometimes I feel like my life our marriage is like a magic-eye poster; and it’s messy; and at first glance it doesn’t seem to make any sense and it’s hard to figure out.

But, sometimes, if you squint at it just right, everything lines up and it’s the most perfect, beautiful, amazing thing.

But, I’m so tired of squinting.”

Cue the type of snot-filled breakdown that I’ve also had so many times, I’m not even sure it registers as something abnormal anymore.

This is not a real magic-eye poster, please don’t cross your eyes trying to make it work.

When I first watched this scene, and then later re-watched it right after my breakup a couple of years later, the thing that occurred to me was that Diane wasn’t particularly talking about the marriage. I mean, yes, that’s what she was literally referencing. But the context of the divorce was kind of a surface-level representation of the deeper message, at least in the way it resonated with me.

She was in a relationship with this guy for ten years, but only married for two of those. Or, in other words, she had spent the decade of her life really, really, really trying to see through all the dogshit that she put up with (literally), just for the opportunity to grasp at some magical moments that vanished as quickly as they appeared.

There is a point that you reach where you realize the last ~3650 days of your life, if not more, have been some kind of train wreck; and no number of stories you can tell yourself about how you’ve “had adventures” and “spent time finding yourself” or “done cool things” can justify the sunk-costs into a series of career, relationship, and spiritual choices that has ultimately proved substance-less and illusory.

And let me be clear to all the men’s-rights activists (who aren’t reading my blog anyway) who would want to flood my comments talking about how Diane is an ungrateful bitch – I won’t necessarily disagree. She is, after all, prone to fetishizing her sadness.

Mr. Peanut-Butter is the canonical Loving Boyfriend™ and Supportive Husband™. He is relentlessly positive and Goes To Therapy™ where he learns to Listen To Validate Her Feelings™. What woman has any right to get angry at someone who listens to her fantasies and tries to bring them to life with his stacks-on-stacks-on-stacks?

But, there’s a reason when she finally lets the dam loose, the only thing he can do is sit on the ladder and say, “Oh.” Everything in Mr. PB’s life – professional, romantic, social, and material satisfaction – has just worked out for him as a matter of course. And for anything that doesn’t feel right, he simply keeps himself busy with unimportant nonsense until he is dead.

It’s not a coincidence that Mr. Peanutbutter’s entire life philosophy boils down to a slightly more sophisticated version of:

God’s will is good and He makes everything right in the end.

This is a valid mantra, of course, and it doesn’t make sense to be resentful of Mr. PB for displaying such a comically simplistic equation for happiness. #GoldenRetrievers #BundlesOfJoy #LifeIsGood #ToxicPositivity

However, it means Mr. PB has no conception of what it would take to address Diane’s all-consuming melancholy in a satisfying way. Neither does she, of course, and she’s the only one who could do a damn thing about it anyway.

Everywhere You Go, There You Are

The second monologue is from S5E2, when Diane sees that Mr. Peanutbutter has completely moved on, and it full-body wrecks her.

ChatGPT, please tell me the life story of Diane Nguyen¹.

Once there was a second-generation Vietnamese immigrant who grew up in a family that didn’t give her the love she needed. As a result, she grew up feeling deeply lonely and alienated, especially beginning in adolescence. Through coping with these circumstances, she learned how to become self-expressive enough to communicate her inner world as a ghostwriter.

Upon entering the world as a young adult, she spent ten years trying to make a life for herself. At the end of this arc, she went through a breakup so psychologically grotesque that it ripped out the last remaining vestiges of plausible deniability that she had about how she spent any of her time becoming someone of substance, or even someone she could look at in the mirror and recognize as having fundamental worth.

In her brokenness, she decided she might try to uproot her life and reconnect to her real roots. She took a trip to Vietnam and crafted an elaborate story that she aimed to convert into a listicle about digging deep and learning to love who she is.

But it didn’t work. The most that she can say is that she survived her walk through hell. And, maybe that’s enough for her to keep trying.

Thank you, ChatGPT, now please modify this description of Diane Nguyen’s life as follows; keep the same structure, syntax, grammar, etc. but change the details to match that of the life of the availed Cactus Brahmin.

Once there was a second-generation Tamilian immigrant who grew up in a family that did give him a lot of love, and material comfort, too, but found him to be precocious in way that was difficult to deal with. As a result, he grew up feeling deeply lonely and alienated, especially beginning in adolescence, particularly around sexuality.

Through coping with these circumstances, he learned how to become extraordinarily verbally adroit and self-expressive enough to communicate his inner world with high fidelity both on paper and out loud, e.g. on a Subtack blog.

Upon entering the world as a young adult, he spent ten years trying to make a life for himself. At the end of this arc, he went through a breakup so psychologically grotesque that it ripped the last remaining vestiges of plausible deniability that he had spent any of his time becoming someone of substance, or even someone he could look at in the mirror and recognize as having fundamental worth.

In his brokenness, he decided he might try to uproot his life and reconnect to his roots. He started to build a life in the American South, while getting deeper into Vedic lore and praxis, and immersing himself in random right-wing political projects. Call it his foolish attempt to integrate his commitments as an Iyer with his internalized Anglo-Protestant cultural scripts, while seeking out the possibility of real agency, power, and intimacy.

But it didn’t work, and it doesn’t look like it will work. The most that he can say is that he survived his walk through hell, and seems to have made a comfortable mud hut in the middle of its blazing fires.

And, maybe that’s enough to keep trying.

But, truthfully, it’s probably not.

No words
My tears won't make any room for more
And it don't hurt like anything I've ever felt before
This is no broken heart
No familiar scars
This territory goes uncharted

Just me, in a room sunk down in a house in a town, and I
Don't breathe, though I never meant to let it get away from me
Now I have too much to hold
Everybody has to get their hands on gold
And I want uncharted

Stuck under the ceiling I made
I can't help the feeling

I'm going down
Follow if you want, I won't just hang around
Like you'll show me where to go
I'm already out of foolproof ideas, so don't ask me how
To get started, it's all uncharted

“Uncharted” by Sara Bareilles (2011)

1. I didn’t actually ask ChatGPT to write this, or the follow-up, obviously. Who do you think I am? I have an enormous amount of discursive talent on my own, thank you very much. Way more than a retarded LLM, at least.