Gulls swoop in an aerial dogfight above the rooftops of an ambivalent Dunedin, as I sit on the Library courtyard and listen to music on Spotify. This hot spring day invokes a stupor in all folks walking through the streets as tourists dress in crop tops and Birkenstocks exposing their midriff and toes for the world to see. Maybe they think people will care how they look or maybe they just want to feel the wind on their flesh? I try to put these thoughts outside of my brain and read a book in the Sun, the lovely Sun, who kissing my skin will burn me without hesitation if I neglect skincare and fail to put on sunscreen. The Sun who will leave us for months at a time, only appearing timidly while the Earth tilts away from her. What am I doing here?, I ask myself as I struggle to reconcile my feelings both sweet and bitter and all the other flavours of the soul. Love: it’s a word that’s been on my mind because I feel the chemical reactions go through my body and brain and I feel good from time to time, just I don’t know what am I supposed to do with these feelings and this aimlessness fills me with a hungry sorrow. Colours are brighter and food is less appealing and I find myself with abject yearning from time to time. Sometimes I feel I just want to conjoin with another human at the hips fuse into a Resident Evil flesh amalgamation because I don’t know what to do with these feelings and talking about it makes them stronger... I was interrupted by an phone call, which is for the better because I would have offered no unique insights other than waxing lyrical about nothing. I feel heartache over nothing, because who’d love me? I live in a cold isolated city on the boarder of the infinity of the South Pacific. I think how I live nowhere, in the damp, cold housing of Dunedin, where the buildings are preserved from bygone eras purely from neglect. What is there more in life, will it just be the same thing over until the end when my feeble body gives up the ghost. I feel embarrassment at being me sometimes, when I feel like I don’t have it put together. When my madness comes to the surface and I see the poisons leaking out into my atmosphere and I feel, I feel like I am the only person experiencing these emotions but that cannot be true. Maybe not this exact combination at this very second, just when you think about the number of people, you are statistically insignificant. The only thing that makes me special is I’m the one writing these words down right now, and you else who feel these emotions aren’t. I destroy myself into the lacuna of being. Life is all about the nothingness and being, where everything is contained in a seeming void. We cannot reach out and tough reality. All of life passes before our very eyes and any turns of phrases are just because I listened to the words of others. In the writing and idle mutterings and also the music which I seem to be helplessly addicted to. I find I need music to consume any idle moment of my waking life because everything is so lifelessly boring to me. Sometimes I listen to the inane chatting of my contemporaries and I just find it all so hollow. I want to touch the essence of my being and these people’s words just aren’t it. When I connect with another being they leave and I’m back to being alone. I’m glad these words are tiny because I’d feel embarrassed if people could read over my shoulder and see my personal thoughts. Sometimes I feel we are in a solved game of chess, but in order for the board not to be solved for my layout I need to speak, because I think my thoughts don’t followed the linear pathways of others. Writing is how we change the worldline like film Everything Everywhere All At Once, because it releases a packet of unforeseen data into the universe which would have been trapped in the meat-prison of my brain. I leave this information on the internet because I believe people read this, though I have scant evidence because people who might like to read my writing disable Web-tracking which is fair enough in this dangerous internet age, but makes me have no idea whom I am reaching. I’m fine with this blindness, just I have no idea what my Web-presence is. People don’t say hello to me when they see me and I close myself off from them, likewise. I feel lonely, but I also feel like I have friends and I wouldn’t want to have conversations with many strangers anyway. I think about my writing from time to time, and I feel comfortable reading myself these days. I have found my writing style changes often. Happiness is achievable, just the world can drain of colours metaphorically, because sometimes when you are hurt it feels painful to look at colours because feel like a violation of reality. I remember when I experienced orange horror after reading some Lovecraft from a bright orange book and the colour invoked an violation of reality as we moving into an unregulated hyperspace where our beliefs and worlds would be replaced by the Old Gods as reality shifted to a hypertechno paradigm shifting our reality towards the Outer Gods at the limits of this Universe. The colour would invoke those feelings within me. Other colours invoked other feelings. Words too, like Africa and Antarctica would invoke powerful mental imagery. Nowadays my mind is less powerfully consumed by these ideas. Sometimes I just want to feel good in a transcendent moment of eternal bliss. I need to remind myself that just feeling good doesn’t divorce myself from the realities of Reality because how do I even know that the me is the locus of conscious reality. It is not called Finnegan Wakes, it is called Finnegans Wake. I can’t be the only person to open myself to the joy of polyvocal reality. This is where the French have us beat, because despite their huge social issues they are the ones who really opened themselves up to the utopian visions from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake more than anyone else, because while English wasn’t spoken much by then populous, they incorporated these academic ideas without the cloudiness of English. English is the language I speak I I recognise the extreme beauty that can be articulated in this language, it often feels like I am communicating via smoke signals with my fellow English speaker. Even though French is a second language to me and I speak it brokenly, I still find my own language improve after grappling with French language. I want to learn Japanese, too, but it is so different from English I find I can learn a lot and still feel I have made little progress. Words both open my mind to the possibilities unforeseen, but also close me off into a specific line of inquiry. Sometimes that is how my heartaches and other times I am just musing on language. I wonder. I yearn. I write. And I don’t know where I am going. I often let things to the universe to decide for me many things. Who am I going to love? I know logically it is just a chemical reaction in me, but this complex chemical cascade dictates so much of me and I get not wanting to be hurt and merely observing. I think that is logical. I just don’t have a choice. When my body tells me to run, I run; when it tells me to lock eyes, I lock eyes. It is actually painful how little choice I have when my heart is pounding. That’s not true either, I have a logical mind and I can control myself; sometimes it feels like we are free-falling when the highs of our bodies take over, but then other times I feel static where any action I do is a calculation of probability. Why am I writing all of this. Is it to embarrass myself on the internet. I don’t think that is it. I just want to get at the heart of myself and this confession is really my only way of admitting to myself that I’ve changed as a human. I want to be humanitarian these days and I think we will often try to rely of coercive techniques to get someone to agree with us, and that isn’t ethical. Someone saying yes to something is not the same as them wanted to go along with something. That is what the final chapter of Ulysses is about. When Molly Bloom says her final yes, it is not her just saying that as a stream of consciousness blip, but it is her whole being saying yes, and that is what is so powerful about that episode. All vectors of emotional reasoning lead her to this final affirmation. We have seen a whole day of Leopold thoughts and actions including some pretty gross behaviour as well as heroic and a lot of the mundane. What I’m trying to say is I don’t want to address this solely to you – I am just trying to creatively express myself. Writing for me is the experience of that youth who would draw in a sketchpad his mind and all the beasts and weird shit inside his mind would come out. I still have many of those sketches, just I rarely share them. My writing I feel a bit more comfortable sharing, though I try (and fail) to keep my most explicit thoughts to myself. It is a weird feels saying “this is me!” on the internet. Who knows who will read these words? Who knows? I don’t know. I just... words tumble out and I feel this self-portrait is nearly complete. I think about how satisfying it is to sign your name on a completed work. At least until the manufacturing of the publishing industry destroys the significance of such a monumental moment and shifts it to commoditisation.