Nothing Means Nothing Volume One

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description

excerpt from preface:'This book is made up of things I’ve written in my journals or on my tumblr that I would otherwise forget about. It is a lot of things I didn’t imagine people would read a lot of the things in here, or if they did, it was fleetingly on my tumblr and then forgotten. I think of this collection as a supplement to my more typical writing'

Transcript of Nothing Means Nothing Volume One

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!!!!!!!!!!!!for Dwight, Taylor, Bobby, and Easton!rip

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Table of Contents!!Preface — 1!‘Towards the end of 8th grade’ — 2!A list of the major scars on my body — 3!Clip on my hand (a short story) — 4!‘Comics are good at telling spatial stories’ — 5!‘Making different types of art’ — 6!‘Whenever I’m confronted with the soul crushing reality of getting older’ — 7!‘I don’t play runescape, but I think about it a lot’ — 8!‘In one of my classes’ — 9!boring words — 10!‘You notice in dichotomized fiction’ — 11!‘When describing something’ — 12!‘I walked to the Park Blocks and bought a burrito’ — 13!‘I thought about the form that tree roots take’ — 14!‘I was sitting next to these 2 skater dudes’ — 15!‘It used to take me a long time to fall asleep’ — 16!‘As states and nations’ — 17!‘I heard and saw a guy and a girl’ — 18!‘I learned about this somewhere’ — 19!‘When I was started taking medication for manic-depressive disorder’ — 20!‘Crying is a poem because the tears are a metaphor for how one feels’ — 21!!!!!!!!!

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Preface!!This book is made up of things I’ve written in my journals or on my tumblr that I would otherwise forget about. It is a lot of things I didn’t imagine people would read a lot of the things in here, or if they did, it was fleetingly on my tumblr and then forgotten. I think of this collection as a supplement to my more typical writing!!It is 20 pages long (excluding this page), because that’s the length of single issue, mainstream comics, and so seems like a good length between concise and substantial, for a collection like this!!More volumes are coming, assuming anyone reads this. Everything in here was written between April 2012 to January 2014, but they aren’t necessarily in chronological order

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Towards the end of 8th grade, a girl I was kind of friends with was like “wow everyone has changed so much!” and I felt panicked and said, “what! I haven’t, I’m still the same kid!” and she said, “well yeah, I guess it depends how you look at it.” And now that interaction feels vaguely symbolic of my life as a whole

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A list of the major scars on my body (some gruesome descriptions, sorry)!!1!!I have a really big scar on my left wrist because I was sitting on a fireplace as a kid. The fireplace screen fell on my wrist and cut it!!2!!I have a scar on the inside of my left elbow because I gave blood. I accidentally shifted my arm with the needle in. Maybe someone bumped into my arm. Anyway, I moved my arm and the needle kinda moved, it hurt a lot, and there’s kind of a weird indent in the inside of my left elbow from the needle!!3!!I have a small scar on my chin. I was at a family reunion in Eastern Oregon. I asked one of the ppl who worked there if he could grab me a Coke. He threw it across a room, for an unknown reason, and it hit my chin. It didn’t really hurt, but my chin had some blood on it, but he didn’t say anything about the blood !!4!!I have a small scar on that little web of skin between my right thumb and right index finger. I got Pokemon cards from the internet. When the mail got there, I was so excited to look at the cards, so I grabbed a knife. As I was opening the Pokemon cards, I stabbed that section of skin on accident!!I think I have more but those are the main ones

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Clip on my hand (a short story)!!In 11th grade, I went to a debate tournament at Tahoma High School in Covington, Washington. Someone on my debate team brought Sun Chips, with a little bag clip on it, to keep the bag closed. Everyone ate all of the Sun Chips, so the clip was now functionally worthless!!I started goofing off with the clip and clipping it onto my thumbs and clipping it to pens and stuff like that. I saw one of my really close friend’s older sister across the cafeteria. She went to another high school in my town, and also did debate. She waved at me and then I waved back at her!!After I started waving, I realized I had left the bag clip clipped across the top of my fingers. Midway through my wave I rapidly hid my hand and took the clip off because it probably looked weird as hell!!A couple hours later I encountered her face-to-face and I was like ‘omg I’m so sorry about that clip thing’ and she was like ‘what’ and I explained to her about the clip and she was like ‘what I didn’t notice’ and I was like, ‘oh’

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Comics are good at telling spatial stories!!Prose are good at telling temporal stories!!Comics have less temporal orientation than prose!!Prose have less spatial orientation than comic!!Comics are spatial because it is visual storytelling. They lack concrete temporal orientation, because every panel is a single moment in time. So any sort of flow through time is an illusion!!Prose have a constant flow of time. Time - in some sense of the word time - doesn’t stop. But, in order to express the space, the narrative has to slow down for visual description!!When a writer describes space, it’s always abstract (well all writing is abstract. time is abstract)!!

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Making different types of art is like learning different languages. From my experience, when you learn a language, the first thing you notice is the differences between your first language and the new language. You learn the annoying stuff and the easy stuff about your language!!I think that’s the same with art in the sense that, if you write, and then you start to paint, the first thing you will notice is what works for writing best and what works for paintings best!!Then maybe you will make better art when you know which different media do best

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Whenever I’m confronted with the soul crushing reality of getting older I feel an intense desire to do something I did when I was younger. And for some reason, it is often wanting to go back to WoW. I don’t care much about it, but I am nostalgic for the days of meeting up with my friends in Shattrath/Dalaran/Orgrimmar, grinding honor in bgs, grinding points in arena, doing some heroic pugs. Man those were the days. But whenever I re-subscribe, I boot up the game and am just like ‘uh, what now?’

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I don’t play runescape, but I think about it a lot. One time me and the bros were chitchatting about runescape, and we came to the realization that runescape is the history of world, but compressed into a very short time!!When the game was released you could be killed by others really easily. And you would lose all of your stuff when you die!!Then, throughout time, you could only kill other people in ‘the Wildy.’ People could only attack others if they went deep enough into Wildy that the depth level was greater than the level deficit of the players!!At this point, you could only get three items back when you die. But after awhile, you could run back and get all of them!!Then the Wildy became more and more nerfed, and ‘killing’ mostly only took place in runescape’s equivalent of battlegrounds!!Then Jagex kept socializing the economy, most noticeably with the Grand Exchange, which puts caps on inflation, by limiting the amount people can sell items to other’s for!!After a lot of resistance, Jagex took away the Grand Exchange price restrictions (but not other trade restrictions) because everyone would bypass the rules (laws) of the game’s (government’s) controlled economy!!Now (and this isn’t even new), everyone bots. Before, people botted a lot (as in, having a computer play to raise your levels, get your materials) but from my understanding, everyone who plays, bots now. if they didn’t bot, they would probably rage quit, because everyone else has such a steep economic advantage of having a computer farm material for them all day!!We can look to runescape, for insight on the future and past. Why does everyone bot in runescape? Because tedious, manual labor isn’t fun. So why do they play runescape to begin with? Because, parts of the game, that aren’t grinds, ARE fun!!The world is filled with a lot of tedious, manual labor too, that is becoming more and more done by robots. Maybe, as we see in runescape, we will have a future where robots do all our work for us, and life will be one big retirement :)

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In one of my classes, the professor talked about how in Greek drama, there would be parallel things/events that were viewed as equivalent, but were portrayed differently!!What I mean by this, hubris is a tragic characteristic, and cleverness or something like that is the comic equivalent!!Also like, this one will sound weirder… But so Sophocles wrote Oedipus the King. And the tragedy in it is that Oedipus unknowingly has sex with his mom. Then Aristophanes wrote The Clouds, where the ‘comic equivalent’ of that is the main character beats up his dad.!!In a different cultural context it doesn’t make as much sense but people saw it as — having sex with your mom : tragedy :: beating up your dad : comedy!!I’m not really sure if this is just a scholarly imposition on those plays, or if anyone actually saw it that way back then. Either way, it makes sense, in the way that a lot of literary criticism makes sense (as in, not very much, but kind of)!!Anyway, I write this because I always try to think about this when I watch something. I think what would be the antithesis to this if it was in the dichotomy of comedy/tragedy. Lately, I’ve been doing the same thing to my life. And I like it actually, applying that kind of analysis to my life. Idk, that feels really beautiful to me, but also scary, but still mostly beautiful

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Plato! ! ! Forms! ! ! Beauty!! ! Truth!Kant! ! ! Ethics! ! ! Metaphysics! ! Epistemology!!!!Tragedy! ! ! Comedy!Agathon! ! ! Aristophanes!Dionysus! ! ! Apollo!!!!Socrates ———! Plato!Jesus ————! Disciples

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You notice in dichotomized fiction, one side is always Dionysian and one side is Apollonian, but the Dionysian side isn’t always ‘bad,’ and vice versa!!For instance, in Star Wars, the Sith don’t embrace ‘pure evil,’ they embrace their whole emotional spectrum (chaos). Jedis embrace order!!And interestingly, since Chronicles of Narnia is in the Protestant tradition, Aslan represents chaos and unknowing, and the villains (for example the White Witch) represent order and control!!This dichotomy switches from game to game, in Pokemon. Noticeably, there’s a shift after generation 3. Team Rocket (gen 1 and 2) is Dionysian, because they’re burglars and thieves. Team Aqua and Magma (gen 3) are Dionysian too, because they’re eco-terrorists, basically. Team Galactic (gen 4) are Apollonian because they want to reorder the whole cosmos. Team Plasma (gen 5) are Apollonian because they want to compartmentalize and segregate Pokemon and humans. Team Flare (gen 6) depends on perspective, because they want to destroy everyone on earth that aren’t them (Dionysian), in order to start a new utopia (Apollonian). Team Flare is a fascist organization

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When describing something by saying what it is opposed to, or what it is not, it has two effects!!For one, we feel/see what something isn’t, even though we know it is not that. A shadow of what something isn’t is projected on what it is!!So then, what it is becomes negative space, rather than positive space. It’s more cynical because the properties of the object are what it lacks!!

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I walked to the Park Blocks and bought a burrito. I sat on a bench and watched a preacher man yelling about sin. Other people watched him too!!A woman kept screaming ‘why aren’t you feeding the poor?’ and stuff like that. Whenever the preacher man pointed, a bro would imitate the point, and shout. People screamed at him like ‘God made weed’ and pot head sentiments like that. The preacher man kept saying ‘you are sinners’. When there was a lull, the preacher man would say ‘any questions?’ and people would start screaming again!!A kid from my class came up and shouted ‘you guys know you’re just egging him on right?’ and no one cared. People continued screaming about pot and feeding the poor. An irate bro screamed something like ‘screw you, you can’t judge me, screw you!’ He stood right by me!!After I finished my burrito, I went to another part of the park to read. A young, white guy wearing drab, burlap garb walked up to me. He had a shaved head except for a patch in the back. He held out a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. He said his name was Jed!!I told him that one of his Hindu comrades (I don’t know the right word for it) gave me a copy of the Bhagavad Gita before. He seemed pleased about that. He offered me a different hardcover book. ‘Bhagavad Gita is like a Bachelor’s in Hindu, this one is like a Master’s’ he said. I told him I’d feel guilty taking it because I didn’t have much to donate. He told me they accept old gift cards too!!‘Sorry, I only have coffee punch cards,’ I said!!‘Yes, I hear students drink coffee a lot,’ he said!!‘Do you drink coffee?’ I said!!‘No, we don’t take anything addictive,’ he said. He told me how he doesn’t know how he did drugs before, because his mind already needs to be de-cluttered, and he doesn’t need other things to obstruct it!!I told him I only have $2.90, and hoped that was enough. I was still reluctant to take the hardcover book, so he gave me another book from his bag. He told me that him and the monks read from that book every morning. He told me he was from Rhode Island but lived in the temple in San Diego. Hinduism saved his life!!I thanked him, shook his hand, and he walked away

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I thought about the form that tree roots take, and cracks in cement take, and river deltas. Why is this shape not treated as a basic euclidian form, even though it is all over the place in is nature?!!This made me think about the idea that our only connection to the external world is through spatial and temporal perception!!Maybe people privilege the ‘basic forms’ like squares and circles over organic forms because we perceive with squares and circles, and the organic shapes are inside those

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I was sitting next to these 2 skater dudes today on my campus and they had a laptop open. They were saying ‘look at this place off Le Brea’ and were going back and forth between Google Maps and craigslist. One of them was like ‘you think we can crash at your friend’s place in Hollywood until we find where to live?’ and he said yeah. Then they started looking at flights and were like ‘find the next one out of here, then let’s get our stuff’!!So it seemed like they decided to move to California within a very short period of time. Pretty interesting to me tbh. I wouldn’t do that, so abrupt seeming at least, but seeing other people do that was liberating, like, I could do that if I wanted to, but there are plenty of less drastic things all around me I can do

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It used to take me a long time to fall asleep. Sometimes it still does. What fixes it for me sometimes is I imagine my eyes are the surface of pools that join underneath my nose bone. And my mind is an underwater cave made out of rainbow crystals. For most of the day people tread water at the top of their eyeballs, but when I close my lids to sleep, I swim in the pool. Not only is the cave filled with water, but also it can be outer space. Sometimes I get wrapped up in my mind and it feels like my body moves, but it is my mind-body moving

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As states and nations have people coming and going, the body has cells doing the same. So what is a nation? What is a Self?!?! People say every 7 years, your body’s cells become fully renewed. So like, my body is not the same as my body at birth, even a little bit. In the same way, we - collectively, as a country - are not the same country as when it started, but we maintain really old standards and traditions from way before us. Why should America now be like America 150 years ago? Why should myself now be like myself 15 years ago?

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I heard and saw a guy and a girl walking down the street. They were wearing club garb and were stumbling. Also, it was about 2:20AM, and last call in Portland is usually around 2, and I live on one of the main north-south streets in between the dorms at my school, and where the clubs are. So, it’s kind of common to have drunk people walk past my apartment around this time!!Anyway, I went on my fire escape to watch and listen, because they were being quite loud!!The girl was walking ahead of the guy by a few feet, and the guy kept saying stuff like ‘babe wait, babe what’s wrong, babe’ and she ignored him. Finally, she turned around and said something quietly and he was like ‘babe, what the hell, babe, talk to me!!’!!Then, they were out of my line of sight, behind the tree to the right of my apartment building. After that I hear, ‘YOU DID WHAT?!? ARE YOU SERIOUSLY TELLING ME THIS RIGHT NOW?’ and then she was like ‘LAY OFF’ and then he was like ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU WOULD CHEAT ON ME, AND YOU’RE TELLING ME THIS NOW??????’!!Then, they must have stopped and had this discussion in the middle of the street because a car drove by, honked, and veered into the next lane

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I learned about this somewhere, but I typed it out myself (I’m not trying to plagiarize, but I think it’s a general factoid)!!But anyway, the word NIGHT in many Western languages, is like the word EIGHT, with an N added to the beginning;!!English: night = n + eight!German: nacht = n + acht!French: nuit = n + huit!Portuguese: noite = n + oito!Spanish: noche = n + ocho!Italian: notte = n + otto!Dutch: nacht = n + acht (same as German)!Norwegian: natt = n + åtte!!This isn’t too much of a coincidence, because this is similar in Greek and Latin too (Greek, phonetically in our alphabet is nýchta / októ̱ and Latin is noctis / octo) but it is still interesting

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When I was started taking medication for manic-depressive disorder, I didn’t think very much about it. I feel like a normal person (because I am a normal person, and anyone with bipolar is too). It felt like a relief, because they previously diagnosed me with unipolar depression, and the medicine wasn’t working. So it felt good to be treated for the right thing!!I didn’t understand how people felt about bipolar, until I watched a news segment on gun control. Both sides of the debate said stuff like ‘well obviously we don’t support people with mental illness buying guns’!!I wouldn’t buy a gun, but I realized at that time, that in society’s eyes, I am too mentally ill to own a gun. To society, I’m bunched up with people that have especially debilitating mental illnesses. It made me feel confused!!In fact, I googled ‘types of extreme mental illnesses’ and bipolar was the first one lol!!It also feels weird that people want me to anecdotally show them how I have bipolar disorder. They don’t believe I have it unless I prove I have it. I don’t know if that’s meant to be some sort of twisted compliment though, as if they see it like they’re saying, ‘you seem too normal to have a mental illness!’ All I know is I take medicine for bipolar disorder, and it helps me feel better, so that’s how it is

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Crying is a poem because the tears are a metaphor for how one feels!!The body reacts similarly when one cries as it does when it tries to expel something undesirable. For example, our eyes water when something is in them. Also, our stomach contracts when we laugh, just as it does when we puke. Our behavior is a metaphor

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