In Heaven, All Things Are Impossible

You will never be a winged creature, Margaret. Never!

9/14/25 5:30pm

Of course, it is not easy for anything to stop once it has begun. It isn't easy for the cars passing just off my home's walkway to brake without their driver first deciding so. Many would say that this is not possible. I say that it is not easy. On the same front, I say that it is not easy to halt my teeth from chewing my gums. There are many blisters forming, and given the blister on my wrist and the blisters on my heels, I'd rather they not also be in my mouth. So I wish for them to stop, though they do not intend to and though it is not easy. On the same front, I say it is not easy to warm to the chill on my upper arms nor to dry the sweat building on his napping neck. It is not easy to turn a strong chin aside from the howling cicadas of fear just about everywhere I'm inclined to look. But, cicadas molt and change into something still a cicada but no more the same; so, why not, though it isn't easy, why should I not be brave? Couldn't my metallic skin break off clean, splintered like a chewed-through toothpick swallowed by the mouth of a braver man who's already leveraged the kale from his molars? Couldn't my skin grow back smoother than lacquered oak? I would live a much more comfortable life, peppered probably by entourages of sweets and niceties, if I could believe that these changes were impossible. The shivers and sweats and the mouth-blisters the shivers cultivate through possession of my teeth are markers of the unfortunate alterity I hold to be true: anything is possible. Dreams may and will be achieved, cars will take over their operators like my gnawing teeth take over my will, you might find love, we could end world hunger, I might be an incarnation from the thirty-third planet to Earth's left. All of this puts a pit in your stomach because it is the same faith that tears the skin from the cicada's body and the same faith that haunts your dreams at night. But atheism is the Happy Man's happiness and the religion of those who reap the fruits of "impossible" while spreading numbing ointment on your blisters.

Stay still, the Happy Man coos, there's nothing for you to do.

On Fear and Fate:

To all who visit and all who don't, a letter from an exclusively self-serving establishment...

9/14/25 12:20 am

It's been ten months since I've created something I was truly proud of, though I didn't know in the moment that I was proud of it. I spent today and yesterday waiting for a call back from a job I don't want watching a program about murder and deception, drinking in a horrendous fashion all the while. This evening I went on a walk for smokes and turned my head round at every footstep. As I often do in bouts of paranoia, I asked for god's direction but found instead the behind of a raccoon about ten paces ahead of me to trail. After a momentary glimpse of some transcendental path of ease and discernment, she turned onto a private residential property to the left and I found myself in spiritual darkness once more. Before she turned, she looked at me like raccoons do— her head notching up a few degrees above and to the side of its natural disposition, eyes omniscient, hands buckled up to her chest. Though she decided not to let me follow her tonight, it was nice to be seen for a moment by a creature that I predict must feel the same size as I feel now.

Last December, in devotion to a series of deliciously suspicious coincidences, I decided to move to California. Not only did my stomach feel nice about it, but I was growing dependent on the promise of bravery and self-trust that it granted me. Prior to this decision, my life was a series of various fears and various methods of following through on them. Though I recognize that I could not be in the position I am today— a reasonably financially and intellectually stable individual in good standing with the law— without the parcels of fear I've swallowed in years past, my decision to move to California felt like a leap over a fence whose other side held a new version of Fishbot. That Fishbot does not have to take fear pills each morning to move her limbs or to make a living or to be in right standing with the heavens. Instead, that Fishbot lives harmoniously with everything that has ever felt right in her life. Being one and the same with the catalogue of beauty and elation (see those characteristics of Imagined California listed in the blog entry prior to this one), Fishbot would never again know the devil.

Contrary to the common ending to stories like these, it wasn't the far-fetchedness of this fantasy, not the realization of the universal cold hard world that wound up stinging me in the end, but the fact that to this day I don't know if it was fantasy or not. I never did move to California. I halted my apartment search, scrambled at the last minute to resign my lease, and told my parents the good news at their shared birthday dinner. They did not erupt in enthusiasm as I thought they would, but nodded like they knew all along that I would change my mind. It was a nice birthday dinner with curry and an automatic gratuity. There was a dead bird outside the front door. The sun made the car too hot to get back into. I was supposed to have moved two months ago. I fell in love eight months ago. We are still in love, and still here. I graduated college three months ago. I am four years older than I was then. I quit my job one month ago. I have been an artist for no months at all. If I'm wrong and I have been an artist for any number of months, I apologize to you and to myself for that.

Blacklight Poster

an ode to an imagined california..

It's June of 2025, the week I graduate college. There's a suspicion in the heel of my boot that I don't know where to go from here. This website reminds me that I care about things and can turn myself into whoever I want. The only direction is a sort of California that exists only in the backs of my eyelids. There, an imagined realm, blacklight posters with mushrooms and wizards and pot leaves, cartoons and video games in rooms with dusty window blinds, jobs that make employees wear silly hats, old couples with swag, young bucks with twinkles in their eye, skaters and atheletes and people without passions, never things to do, never in the "arts scene," never healing an inner child through play or knowing someone, never knowing a place , but buying a new lego set and recording bands in basements, perhaps baseball, smiley faces and websites and writing pages to hang on the wall. Twenty somethings living with their moms and dads, and an angst about them in the milk residue left in their cereal bowl, making them wants things that exist alone, solid dreams to write in the inside of a three ring binder, not everything, never dreaming for everything, but cartoonish apsirations. In my willed california, I do not do a real job and there's fuzzy haze over the town the type that's orange and crystallized. There are less cars there, except on freeways for the neccesary hum, but in normal roads only an old soda cup acting like a tumble weed across the median. There are 7/11s and parking lots, marinas and other suburban archetypes. PTA mom sweet old lady dancing men and grumbling adolescents, nothing too new or old, all of it heating up the planet, all of it dying my hair blue, all of it sounding like Linkin Park. My loved ones included only in a symbolism of themselves long gone-- since disputed versions from the 2016 san diego trip, the hotel pool at night, the cliffs by the burgers, the plastic chairs on top of gyro place's blue and white walls, my moms tanned shoulders, my dads blistered nose. All reaching back instead of forward, lunging over chain linked fences and lawn mowers, never seeing adults or human resources. Not making it big, but smoking out parking garages, making my eyelids heavier so I can see it all more clearly.

some things are real because I see them in front and behind me. I keep my eyes peeled for road signs that will tell me I can almost touch them and that those things are real because i cant. I'll try to be honest and vulnerable without treating this like a diary because I am not a liar. i was honest today a few times. like when I turned my volume up and down and higher because the zebra keeps me on my toes. I turn the knob full right for track five and whisper along because its still whispering. The very old man keeps me sprite.Keep your eyes open for something huge as soon as I get off my ass and commit to something for more than two nights. I might need to make a decision soon. also i havent figured out how to collect the comments from my comment box so feel free to chat with the expansive Out There. I won't be able to see them. Leave something true and meaningful. but don't forget to take a screenshot and email it to 777vaughant@gmail.com before you send it to the digital emptiness.

some other post.stuck in this silly little character selector. do tou think theres somethingthat sticks around in the center when you change the avatar? im scared of people knowing me getting better at saying things outloud.thinkin on people and wondering what theyre thinkin on.one night in tacoma i thought that life is a video game and that felt good. Trying to get back on that and do things that scare me. went to the skatepark alone today. scary mmy BALLS. suck it. every time i am scared i become a stronger and simpler person. do watchu want and don't think about it. sip some broth.