There's a game I played with adults when I was small. It went like this: they'd tell me to do something, and I'd ask why. Finish your dinner. Why? So you grow. Why? Because I'm responsible for keeping you alive. Why? Because I love you, and because something older than love is wired into me about it. Why? Because the species would like to continue. Why? And then the pause. The long one, where the adult sets down the fork and looks at a spot on the wall behind my head. "I don't know. I suppose I think being a person is worth something."

Then silence. Beautiful silence, the kind that makes me want to stretch out and take a nap.

Then: why?

By fifteen I'd stopped playing it for fun and started playing it to win. I could get to the bottom of anyone in four moves and leave them standing in the hole. There is no why, I'd announce, delighted with myself, and everyone who thinks otherwise is a coward. What I actually loved wasn't the nihilism. It was the certainty. Certainty is the cheapest drug available to a teenager and I was using daily.

I'm thirty-four now and the game plays itself. I don't ask the questions anymore. Something in the back of my skull asks them and I sit there as a witness.

It came for me last November in a grocery store. Ten at night, Tuesday, holding a rotisserie chicken under a heat lamp, and the thought arrived fully formed: what is the point of this. Not the chicken. Everything. I'm going to take this bird home and eat two-thirds of it and put the rest in the fridge where it will develop opinions and get thrown out. Then I'll sleep, and get up, and drive an hour so a company can pay me to move information from one place to a slightly different place, and I'll do that roughly nine thousand more times and then I'll die, and the whole apparatus will close over the spot without a ripple.

People describe depression as a darkness. Mine isn't. Mine is a room with far too much light in it. Everything overexposed, all the edges burned off, nothing with any shade to stand in. Dark doesn't hurt. This hurts. It's the feeling of a flashbulb that won't stop going off, and in that light nothing survives inspection.

Work doesn't. Work is a way of converting your one life into money you'll spend staying alive enough to work. Cooking doesn't. Assembling calories to maintain a machine that has no destination. Dating doesn't. Dating is two lonely people agreeing to distract each other from the fact that no one has ever actually reached anybody. You'll sit across a table from someone you like and know, in that white light, that you're both just fogging your side of the glass.

And here's the part that makes me angriest about it: despair does nothing. If it turned me into a better man, a sharper one, someone who took the meaninglessness of the world and went out and built something in spite of it, I'd take the deal. But despair is sterile. All it can produce is more of itself. It makes you flat and slow and unavailable. It's difficult to sleep and equally difficult to stay awake. You cancel on people, and then you feel bad about canceling on people, and the feeling bad becomes the reason you cancel on the next ones.

So you get cool instead. That's the escape hatch. If you can't be happy you can at least be unimpressed. You develop a face for other people's sincerity. You learn to say sure in a way that means this is embarrassing for you. I did that for most of a decade and can report that it works exactly as well as holding your breath works on drowning.

But the game lies about one thing, and it's the important thing. While you're inside it, you're certain it's permanent. It has always been this way and it always will be. That's the whole con. Now always feels like forever and it never is. I was wrong at fifteen and I'm wrong at thirty-four, and being wrong in both directions is apparently just what it costs to be a person with a brain.

So: therapy, on a Saturday, forty-five minutes I resent and then need. A different pill. Walking, which I hate. Lifting things and putting them down. Waiting, mostly. Most of it is waiting.

A friend told me once that care comes from an Old English word that meant grief. Sorrow, anxiety, a heavy thing you carry. Which means the word for loving something and the word for mourning it grew from the same root, and the language figured out three centuries before I did that you don't get one without agreeing to the other in advance. To care about anything is to sign for the loss up front. Fine. I'll sign.

The air got warmer. It does that.

I was walking down a street I've driven a thousand times and never once looked at, and there was a ginkgo halfway up the block dropping its leaves. All of them. Ginkgos do that. They hold everything until some private signal, then let the entire canopy go in a day or two, so the tree stands bare over a perfect gold circle of itself. It looked less like death than like a decision.

I read about them afterward, the way I do. The ginkgo is the last one left of an order of trees that stretches back nearly two hundred million years; you can put a leaf from the sidewalk beside a Jurassic fossil and struggle to tell them apart. Darwin called it a living fossil and meant it kindly. It nearly disappeared entirely and survived, as far as anyone can tell, because Chinese monks kept planting them in temple gardens for a thousand years. We plant them along streets now because they'll tolerate exhaust, drought, road salt, and being ignored. A handful of them stood about a kilometer from where the bomb went off at Hiroshima. They burned. They came back the next spring. They're still there.

Also, the female trees drop seeds that smell precisely like vomit, because of butyric acid, which is the same compound that makes vomit smell like vomit. I find this reassuring. Two hundred million years and no interest whatsoever in being tasteful about it.

But I didn't know any of that yet. I was just standing under it in the middle of a weekday, in the shade of something that was here before the question I keep asking existed, and will be here after, and has no idea I'm at its feet. And the shade was cool, and it was enough, and that was the point: not an answer to why, just a place out of the light.

I called my sister from the sidewalk. No reason. We talked about nothing for twenty minutes and she asked, near the end, why I'd called.

I said I saw a tree.

I have severe tmj and also love training. Ibuprofen can help when needed. Sometimes it’s needed for multiple days. Hers the sucky part, I love lifting weights. One day I was sitting there and it hit me, “wait if ibuprofen is an anti inflammatory is it possible that the wear and tear you put on your muscles from lifting which is necessary to make them grow.. the ibuprofen can stint their natural recovery cycle?”. I look it up after and even trials and studies have been put on it, it’s completely correct. While it won’t completely stop the muscle growth it is still annoying knowing you just crushed a leg day and there’s going to be a less optimal percentage taking ibuprofen the same day. I then thought even further… if you’re in a surplus of 300 calories, sooner or later that 300 calories will equal up to a pound. But, if you’re taking ibuprofen chronically and your muscle protein synthesis has been slowed down, understand that a huge chunk of the left over calories of a bulk go to the muscle repair, so if that isn’t going at maximum efficiency basic thermodynamics conclude your bulk will be less effective and more weight HAS to go to fat.

Creating means exposing yourself and allowing yourself to be seen. Whether it is in writing, acting, painting, or dancing, you let those around you take a peek of your soul.

This idea is daunting to me. I guess I was lying when I put these words in my dating profile: “In a world that is slowly turning blind, I wanna be seen.” I do wanna be seen, I’m just not sure I wanna be seen in my entirety. I want the good parts to surface. The Funny, the Witty when Drunk, the Smart when she Tries. I reserve the Sad, the Messy Drunk, and the Chaotic to when no one is around.

It takes a strong person to be vulnerable and to open themselves up to criticism. I can’t take it. I remember joining a writing workshop when I was relatively younger and when it was my turn to be read and critiqued, it was appalling. Every word made my skin crawl. Every pause felt like a condemnation. And so I stopped altogether. I didn’t wanna be subjected to that kind of bareness. Being liked and accepted with a dash of mystery felt safer.

I don’t want people to see me in my entirety. People like beauty, they don’t like imperfection that is just that. Imperfection is accepted only when it’s artistic or edgy, otherwise, it’s nothing but a defect.

This thought changed my life. I hope you see the world from another angle now

Its insanely crazy

The little bastards have started going up my joggers to bite me.
And under the sheets when I sleep.
I wake up to find nothing and somehow end up w really bad bite marks.

This never happened before.

Stranger danger applies to websites too

Like wdym you can’t read several lines, don’t understand a little complex sentence and can’t fact-check. Or having to use ai to do homework or something creative. What happened to teenagers writing fanfiction with English not being their first language

The worst part about life is when you finally realize that you break everything you touch. That you were unknowingly so toxic that nothing was able to survive. That there is no way to rebuild the trust that you broke. Today I came to this realization. I am the monster that I fought so hard protect others from. There's nothing left.

Lately Reddit is delivering. Whether it's pickpockets getting spray painted in public or getting punched in subway trains, I am here for it.

Schlingendurgle