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.