Café Writing

Café writing (edited 9/8/2026 to include the full text)

Part 1

It’s time to put ideas to the page.

Giants roamed the mountainous ranges of my imagination, traveling from peak to peak as my mind goes from idea to idea. The concept of a magic mountain sticks in my mind: it is such a resonant symbol. It strikes me with the mysticism of a holy mountain like in the Himalayas. I think mountains are powerful symbols in our consciousnesses. They are so vast and seemingly incomprehensibly timeless. I wonder how these words sound in another person’s mind. Words when they are published take on a life of their own. I think about how you must gain some kind of insight to how I think now – the now being in the past for you. But then for everything I express, there are at least a hundred thoughts that go unexpressed. But then again, I’m not counting. I just let the thoughts wash over me, and see what crystalises into language, and what just passes seamlessly through me as either a memory or an unconscious notion. We often don’t know what we are thinking until we work it out into the logic of language.

Sometimes I have conversations with myself. I wouldn’t call them dialogues because it’s not that I am talking to another person in my head. It’s more that I can hear my thoughts, and those thoughts built some kind of story or explore a narrative possibility, or maybe I am just trying to deconstruct an idea. I feel like writing is some kind of amalgamation of all these processes, except someone else might end up seeing the results of these ponderings. When I think about it, someone else is having a peek into my head, and they might even see the cog work of the machinery of intellect. Thoughts are weird as they can be incredibly abstract, but we humans have devised clever constructions to express these such as language. When we compared different ancient languages into the development of modern languages, we can see how people’s ability to express certain ideas and, by extension have these ideas, has evolved over time. In someways, ancient languages may be better at expressing some ideas, they might be more conducive to those thoughts.

Writing is the passport to freedom of thought. When we write, we allow ourselves to go into uncharted mental domains. We encounter the places, people and poltergeists of our subconscious, letting our language guide the flow of our thoughts. In some ways we are mapping our minds, exploring parts of possible thought. In some ways, what we read feeds into our minds expanding the possible space for thoughts, but it’s not until we try to write ourselves that we really explore the possible depths of these region. The space of thought is not a 2-dimentional cartographer’s map, it is a multidimensional, non-Euclidian hyperspace, where some ideas are worlds away from each other, but only a word away with the right word.

I am the architect of my own fictional world. I construct the framework of verbs and nouns of this mind-palace that I will reside in. Reading is the action of seeing other mental design plans. They are important for creating the blueprint which I will use, but writing is the key for building my own mental palace that is distinctly my own. Here there will be a hallway, and here a ball room. This will be a lounge and this a Parisian salon. I am not limited to simply the designs that other have thought of. I can come up with my own nonsensical architecture. Maybe this stairway infinitely ascends like an Escher print, or maybe this hallway extends for hundreds of kilometres in impossible spaces. My mind is the limit. I shouldn’t feel bound by what others have done before me. Their designs will only serve as inspiration, not as a blueprint.

How many times can I say the same thing with different words. Mostly, I’m musing on my creative process with different metaphors, but ultimately, I’m saying the same thing: writing is a process of thinking and reading feeds into writing. I can say this many times to myself. I don’t feel like I can explore concepts fully until I have a keyboard under my fingertips or a pen in my hand. I feel I need to tell myself these things when I write because otherwise, I won’t learn, and I won’t continue this habit. Will anyone read these words? Right now? That doesn’t matter, what matters in liberating my mind in a creative act.

Are these stories or essays? I don’t know, maybe I don’t have clear idea of what defines different pieces of writing. Do these stories have to have a plot? Do essays have to be purely informational? Again, someone with a better knowledge of writing genres would know. I don’t think it matters what kind of writing this is for the creative process. I just want to get thoughts down – to capture the ephemeral on paper. I want to create a thing. How important it is to make art? In my mind, it’s important, and I have gone a long time from my relatively productive youth to now without creating many artefacts of worth. I don’t want the peak of my creative outlet to be my youth: that should be the beginning, not the apex. I also think I have answered my own question: this is an essay, rather than a piece of creative fiction. I don’t think I have read many essays recently so I can’t easily pinpoint the genre. Perhaps later in this text, it’ll morph into a short story. We’ll see how this develops.

I’ve repeated myself, again and again, but maybe that is what editing is for; cutting down unnecessarily overgrown ideas, pulling out the redundant words like weeds, and expanding the parts which are underdeveloped. Sprinkle some punctuation in for good measure, and hopefully this piece is at least readable for whosoever will read these words. At least I made my word count today. Does that matter?

I’m trying to tune into my thoughts. How can some people listen to and talk about nonsense all day. Can they not hear how little sense they are making. It’s like they are just making noise for the sake of it.

Tuning in, but not dropping out, because it’s worth sticking with. When you listen to music from the past, “your gold hits sound dumb” as MF Doom says. There is plenty of bad nostalgia, but there are also classics. I got into an argument online about what defines a classic. There is a lot of gatekeeping of classical books. People disparaging good books because they don’t meet their narrow definition of classic. I don’t want to get into it too much, but people aren’t good at judging subjective quality. There seems to be no quality control on people’s thoughts. They’ve lost their ability think clearly, not that people have necessarily gotten worse, nor better. It seems to be the perennial problem of nonsense. Just as a note to myself: Brushfire Fairytales is still a good album. I think it resonates with me these days because I can more clearly understand what he’s singing about. I have more life experiences. Maybe this piece of writing isn’t that good, maybe it’s just rambling; I am just trying to clear my thoughts. I’m trying not to just write the lyrics that I’m hearing. Maybe I should just read a book to clear my thoughts, have a little break to get back into the flow.

Footfalls thump onto the sand as the wave hiss and gurgle as they wash up on the shore. The wind blows the sea spray up into the air with particles of sand. Seaweed putrefies on the hightide line. In the distance gulls caw to themselves. Rips suck water from the shore out back past the whitewash, and all this plays in my mind as I try to settle my thoughts.

I experiment with Copilot on Word, seeing what words it generates. I feel while it creates some interesting things, it is no substitute for my own words. Often it expands ideas I put down concisely into paragraphs and paragraphs of the same things said over and over in different ways. I liked the word it used though: quietude. So, I don’t think it is devoid of value.

I’ve been thinking of reading more poetry. I want to see words form into ideas, to let the eddies and currents of metaphors churn the seas of my mind. I have read some Yeats and Keats, some T.S. Eliot and Dante. I met a poet the other day. He took an interest in the conversation I was having with the barista and sat down to have a yarn. I was memorised by his words as I drifted in and out of conversation

I set myself the goal of writing some short pieces of my holiday. I was struggling to find time for writing as the pace of modern life outsped my ability to keep up with my own thoughts. I was reading only because I was prioritising books over social media, but I still wasn’t finishing enough of the books I started. I would get maybe 100 pages in, then lose concentration and find something new to do. Maybe it was because I would always find something newer and more attention grabbing at the bookstore or library, or maybe it was because I only find the beginnings of books interesting. It’s as if all the stories I read don’t have endings. I’m sure they must, since don’t all good stories have endings? I’m trying to think of the last piece of media that I consumed that had an ending.

When you start every paragraph with the same word and use the same rhetoric devices over again and again. We are constantly in and endless loop with ourselves, or maybe it is a spiral where the terminus is the void. Someone said when you stare into the void the void stares back. I think this quote is referring to our tendency to towards nihilism. When we complete nihilism, we become nihilist. It’s a vicious cycle. When I think about these spirals my mind is brought back to Junji Ito’s Uzumaki which is a story of cosmic horror about these types of patterns. His work is simultaneously highly idiosyncratic and archetypical – if those are the right words. What if reality was fundamentally shaped into a spiral like pattern? When I think about consciousness, I often find cosmic horror in contemplating the metaphysical possibilities of such patterns of conscious reality. This type of fiction really works on my mind. But for every horror possibility there is also a divine possibility as explored by Dante is La Commedia, of the Divine Comedy as it’s commonly known in English. Many people only read Inferno, even though the work is meant to be read in its entirety. I guess that is a modern problem where we get the beginning of stories, but not an end, or is that the age-old problem? What about stories with no beginning nor end such as Finnegans Wake. I have a habit of bringing up Finnegans Wake even when it’s only tangential to the conversation. I think it is a fascinating book, but it is also a very alienating piece of literature.

What do dreams resemble? Are they a portal into our subconscious or rather just babbling from our brain? It’s weird that we sleep in the first place. You’d think we would have evolved to have periods of rest that don’t require us losing our waking consciousness for. I mean having time to rest our bodies and to grow and heal makes sense, but it’s weird that we must conk out for that period too. Weirder still is that all animals as far as I am aware sleep too. And it’s not like sleep is optional either, I need to sleep at least eight hours personally of else I don’t function well every night. I guess the regular amount helps keep my circadian rhythm in check. I have noticed that I function best when I do everything at regular times, but especially sleep. It would have paid for past me to do this too.

Part 2

Late night creeps up on us all, and I spend time looking at what I have written. Some of it might be salvageable. But then again, the audience right now is me. Other people will perhaps read this at some point, but they don’t matter in this moment. The point was to create something, not to hold yourself to some kind of unrealistic perfectionism from a phantasm. If people cared about what others thought all the time they would be paralysed and only create art that neatly fit in with the canon that already exists. Where would all the innovation be? Where would all the passion projects and personal diaries and sketch books be? I say, don’t write for others first and foremost. Write for yourself. Write because you want to write. Write because you have that creative impulse that would not be truly sated until you have made a thing that you can say is your own.

When morning does finally arrive, my mind is obliterated. Sleep came slow, then all at once, and it’s hard to crawl out the oblivion of sleep into the land of the waking. Motivation takes a while to return to me. Then I pick up the pen (or keyboard) and write some more. Seeing the words written down from last nights escapades is the call to adventure that I need to start writing about my thoughts again.

Conversations, memories and sensations fly around my head as I try to label my thoughts. Then the music comes back. My head begins to become beautiful again as music swimming back into the radio static. The poetry of myth returns from its thousand-year slumber. Sea monsters rise from the depths to fight seafaring heroes who outwit forces of natures and make deals with gods which they will have to repay in this life or the next.

The cosmic drama unfolds like an elaborate stage show being told by a masterful director as the legends unfold. All the narratives of myth and epics unfold. Beowulf slays Grendel again before going to fight the dragon, who in turn inspires The Hobbit’s Smaug. And this morphs into the legend of modern fantasy, inspiring and creating new dragons and new myth to a new generation about to write their own stories about such things in turn.

Sundials cycle round and round, casting shadows at different points at different times of days of different seasons. The planets orbit the sun in some kind of cosmic harmony beguiling and awing astronomers in the past and present. The stars which seem static slowly drift in their cosmic dance. All this happens which I am waking up and will continue to happen regardless of my presence.

Doubts begin to set in. The slow fog of anxiety rolls over and fills the valleys of my conscious. They linger for a while, then begin to dissipate as my mind moves on to other thoughts. The lighthouses successfully warn of the dangerous rocks of the shores of my mind as the mixed metaphors sail round. Visibility begins to restore itself and slowly I move onto the next topic of thought. There is always the chance of second-guessing myself, but that drifts away into the past too as all thoughts do as they waft through the air, like a sea mist dispersing as daylight comes again.

Part 3

People speak words, conveying ideas and defending their values even when they don’t understand a bigger picture. All people see is what is in front of them, they can’t imagine the scope of the world, nor the value of peace. People feel threatened when power is taken away from them. Not that they knew how to wield it when they had it. You know, it’s like that one quote from a superhero comic that gets quoted all the time. I think you know the one. Even if you don’t, that doesn’t mean you are immune from its influence because comics are low art or anything. Powerful quotes can come from all kinds of literature, even if the literature is problematic in many ways.

Many powerful stories have been told in myriad mediums. It takes time for the great stories to emerge, but they will come, and not always from the demographic you expect. There have been great stories told with audiences for children, and ones for teenagers. It should come as no surprise when genres you don’t explore have words that resonate with us. Just because there isn’t much being made specifically for your tastes, doesn’t mean than nothing good isn’t made. Maybe you need to take a cue and broaden your horizons. Maybe what you like is toxic, and maybe there is a reason what it isn’t been marketed for a general audience. Maybe you should go back to the classics. Reread the works of William Gibson and learn while things like that aren’t necessarily being made now, what exists is good, and maybe if you support small businesses that sell the classics then you’ll find that there will be a financial incentive for generating new works like that. I’m sorry if I’m being overly specific, but I don’t see how complaints about content being made for you is valid in this content age. You are the architect of your own hell. Support local bookstores as they will begin to cater to you if you become a regular.

Classic stories are being told all the time. Open your ears and eyes to them. Consume less mindless entertainment. Sure, there with always be comfort content, however classics will not stop being classic just because you aren’t looking at them. The things that are timeless should be enjoyed in the present. I’m not sure what philosophy this comes under, but we should be looking for self-improvement, whether that’s correcting some of our behaviours, or consuming the best ideas. Our ability to think is in a large part influenced by what we read and hear. We should aim to be a better version of ourselves, to overcome our past and present selves to be the best future version of us. Our brains largely operate by language in terms of planning and rational decision making, so we should be reading content that fosters a sublime thinking. It doesn’t mean we have to read the most complex texts that we can, but we should replace the doomscrolling behaviours with some kind of betterment, both aesthetically and logically. It’s funny sometimes the supposed logical thing is actually detrimental to us and people around us, because we lacked some kind of ability to see the emotional and environmental ramifications of our actions. Sometimes our simple rubric isn’t correct at judging actions, simply because it what a rubric and not some kind of advanced and holistic calculation.

Part 4

I treat this as a sort of diary of thoughts, I was going to say it’s a written visual diary, but I realised that is tautological; I can simply say diary, because that is what this is. Writing down thoughts as you have them is the best way to have thoughts. You need to feed your imagination, or else you will become outdated like an old server running antiquated hardware, but you also need to practice putting your thoughts out there after you have developed them. That doesn’t mean you need to broadcast your mind to the widest possible audience, many people probably don’t want to know what you think, and besides, your thoughts might not be that good in the first place. Think local, you can show a few friends your diary if it has nothing too deeply personal on it that you don’t want others to see. But more importantly, you are preserving current self’s thinking for future you. You might be thinking that you could just remember your own thoughts, but it turns out that memory can be unreliable, especially when these thoughts are as complex as this.

I think what Ulysses shows us that the everyman’s thoughts can be worth preserving in a novel. The kind of stuff that usually passes us by uncontrived and unrecorded. Sure, there are many mundane thoughts that people have, but there are also the deeply profound, that when we put a pen to paper just disappear into aether. Leopold Bloom is notorious for not being able to articulate himself clearly, even when on the inside he is a kaleidoscope of interesting thoughts and literary styles. Dedalus has the means to communicate himself, but finds that people just can’t understand him, or mock him when he is being serious. At every point there is a failure of communication between what the character’s think and others.

That is why reading literature is so important, as in give us a blueprint for thinking about and expressing complex emotions. Or even simple emotions have time to be articulated fully. Literature brings the complexities of being human to the forefront. We all must deal with being human. Shouldn’t we try to learn something about ourselves and behaviours? Show us, while our exact experiences are unique, they aren’t singular; many people have encountered similar challenges. And those experiences can be crystalised into language with the right words and be transmitted across time on a medium as flimsy as paper.

I find it surreal that ideas and fully realised stories can be transmitted on such a fragile medium of words on a page. How can these signs and signals be transmitted across time and space? How can they be reproduced; be lost, then found again? Even if the audience is just me, I find it amazing that I can encounter a version of a past me and have a conversation with him. Literature is amazing for all this.

The exterior world can morph with the power of stories. The words that have been amplified by the reproduction of text can change people’s minds and then in turn change the world outside of their minds simply by the actions that those minds take under the influence of text. If the text is logical and truthful, it can reflect the natural world, and people can learn about this world without even needing to directly encounter those parts of the world themselves. In a very Orwellian sense, text can control truth, or at least what seems true to us. That’s why whenever anyone writes or speaks, they are taking part in the metafictional game of truth-making, and this ties into why literature is important so the words and stories feeding into this cycle represent the world, even fantastical stories should embody emotional truth.

Part 5

I feel I jump between different ideas at a rate that doesn’t lend to cohesion of this work. But that’s fine, because what is important is that I’m having ideas and recording them. The act of writing is important here. I can make these ideas into cohesive works later. There will be time to fix the logical inconsistencies, expand upon the parts that trail off, and trim the parts that repeat themselves.

Poetry unbinds the mind to the rigidity of thinking where things need to follow in some kind of logical structure and allow for the emotional beauty of words to string the mind together. Sometimes the structure would be a rhyming meter or maybe it’s a refrain. Maybe it’s a list of loosely connected words centring around an idea. Anyway, poetry and music can be good at unbinding the mind when it circles the drain of an idea for too long. When it feels that you are pulled in by the suck of trying to articulate something specific and you’re not letting ideas flow naturally. I feel this way when I write. Sometimes I feel my mind is pulled too strongly by the gravitational force of a thing, and I need to be unbound from its orbit. I shouldn’t feel that I need to write about anything specific. I naturally will come back to explore topics again, either when I reread what I have written or when my mind organically drifts back to a particular topic.

If I get stuck on something, that is a good indication that I need to read something new. Or maybe revisit an old favourite. I am thinking about what I’m going to read next because I need to finish Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I’m enjoying it, I swear I am, but now I am a third of the way through I am finding it difficult to retain attention towards it. The allure of reading something new is strong in me, even if I don’t finish, or even get that far, through something new. I guess it is the book collector’s impulse to always be looking for the new shiny thing. Maybe that is why I have been gravitating towards shorter books, stuff that I can finish in one or two sittings. So, I can complete the work before my brain decides that it needs something new to focus on.

How many words am I aiming for in this document? Frankly I don’t know. I am just adding to it until I feel satisfied, or until my attention runs to something else. I feel its more of a loose free-form document that anything else.

Snowflakes keep falling onto the ancient university halls where I am studying tomes containing knowledge of the past. The ambience is quite contemplation of the fellow students around me. They are here to learn as well as me. There will be time later to talk to them about metaphysics or literature into the dining hall, but right now we are learning. Some people shuffle around to make it to their lecture before the clock resonates the quarter to the hour heralding to them their upcoming seminar. As they leave, I look out the window and see snow motes gently falling, some of them sticking to the glass before melting against the heat from indoors. I read for a bit longer absorbing the atmosphere until I too need to leave. I tidy my desk, putting away the used reading materials and checking out the books that I will continue to study in my room later tonight.

I get distracted easily, I wish I had the attention of the imaginary me in the snow-covered university, who could devote himself to the life of the mind. I guess I will have to be content with living in fantasy and flights of fancy pass through me.

I’m not sure what my aesthetic is, what is being sold to be by influencers and social media. Maybe I will revel in my geeky hobbies, or maybe I’ll become dark academic. Whatever it is I know that my social media feeds will feed these lifestyle choices to me, saying isn’t this cool, or quirky, or beautiful; don’t you want to be like these people? I’m not sure what I want to be, but I will be feed an aesthetic narrative regardless. Maybe when I post content people will think, wow I want to be like this person with whatever value set I present. Although, my content could just go unnoticed by all except for content trawling bots, scaping the data to use for some unknown ends. I don’t know. Maybe all that awaits my content is the void. As I think about these techno-nihilism my mind goes dark. I wish to feel my mind fire aglow like Dedalus declaring his artistic vision to himself near the end of The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, before he finds the only one, he can have intellectual conversations with is himself in his diary entries at the end of the novel. Is that the fate for me to only be read by myself? And if someone else does read these words, will how will they respond, not knowing the real me, but a simulacrum for myself?

Perhaps I am destined to tie knots only to untie them and retie them again in a endless cycle, till I can tie with my eyes closed and my wits gone. I might gain some kind of mental acuity writing to myself. I might learn how to articulate myself in a manner that I can decipher later, then to rearticulate the same thing to myself. But again, it feels pointless as I write these words: as I vacillate between hope and despair. That might be hyperbole, but there are times writing when it feels futile and other times when I seems that I have so much to look forward to. Sometimes, things look simply; of course, it’s like this. Other times things are too complicated, the logic in my head only leads to contradictions and I’m not able to express myself.

My mind is a tube of toothpastes that has been squeezed out until this a frustrating bit left that only barely comes out when the end of the tube has been rolled up. All my ideas have been used up and the only thing left is to discard the tube and get a fresh one. Only this is not true. When I feel like I have used up all my creative reserves and I can’t get any more sensible words out, I find that if I let my mind wander and I put on the write ambience another several pages come out. The only limitation seems to be my focus and whether I’ve had a good meal, some sleep, and a glass of water.

The seduction of distractions from my own thoughts are everywhere, but especially online. There companies have been harvesting my data for years, so they know exactly what kind of content I will engage with. Not just that, just people making content for these platforms have been honing their craft these audiences with the feedback they have received from these same platforms, so they have been trained in a sense to produce content that would appeal to people like me. I’m not phased by this process, in a digital sense, it is an organic process where it’s only natural that these processes will feedback into themselves, but it can be difficult to pursue my creative endeavours when there is so much quality distraction available merely a click or two away. Sometimes this positive feedback will generate content that I genuinely want to engage with, and other times it will just be noise; a bit map snow-crashed on a screen, feeding my mind with signs and signals that will make my brain think about something, just not in the creative direction that I would want it to if I were to make something enduring.

A stream-of-conscious seems to be the style that most fits my writing. Though what can you expect from someone who retaught themselves to read as an adult from James Joyce. Thoughts jump around here and there; I hope it makes a coherent trail that others can follow. Each time a new idea bubbles up it feels like I am losing several more.

I found when I was a child, I had words inside me that I couldn’t spell, but I knew them because I listened, and I read. Although did I read much when I was young? I think I did, although the habit was never persistent. I read when I was taking to a library, and I would read at home because there wasn’t much else to do. Although, when I did find other hobbies, reading was left neglected, and slowly I unlearnt that skill which I had so painstakingly acquired. I’m not sure who put the idea into my head to read when I was an adult, I think I was in another town with nothing to do, and I wandered into a bookstore, and I decided to pick up a book from a series which was popular at the time. I had very little else to do, so I read it. There were parts that I didn’t understand, and I had difficulties. That book wasn’t an easy one either, but I got through it as my life disintegrated around me. That summer in my mind was the summer of being broke and reading A Song of Ice and Fire. It wasn’t enough to get me hooked on reading, but it got me started. And when I eventually read Ulysses, I gained the confidence to read anything, although I knew very little about literature at the time. Although it wasn’t until I picked up Discworld, where I was locked in.

James Joyce made familiar language, unfamiliar. But he also made unfamiliar language become something which I grew accustomed to. And it was the challenge, so I could say to myself that I did it, I did I difficult thing that people who read aspire to. Did I understand the text? No. But that wasn’t the point. I just needed to start. I also feel that his books are meant to be half understood, because there is so much more in them that meaning. Language is a meta-virus, that changes structures in the brain and reproduces itself in our behaviours and words. Joyce was someone who understood the mechanisms of language and used that in his writing consciously. The small pieces of syntax and morphemes that I understood shifted my thinking subtly in a direction of intellectual curiosity. Sure, there were parts of my life falling apart right before my eyes, but intellectual curiosity led me to other classics where these ideas proliferated. There were different phases where things looked like they were coming together again, and other times when everything seemed like it was heading to oblivion. Sometimes it was manga and graphic novels that kept the intellectual thread going, other times it was contemporary fiction. Sometimes it was just the right novel for the right time put in front of me. The flame for reading was kept kindled either way, and when things seemed to be reassembling into a more permanent and stable shape, the pursuit of intellectual curiosity was well alive in me.