It's June! Happy Pride Month to all those who celebrate. I wish that I could celebrate, but due to the circumstances in my life, I would probably end up as one of the bodies on the side of the creek if I tried to. Growing up completely insulated to the LGBTQ+ community except for the occasional Fox News or Daily Wire glimpse into the "debauchary of the far-left", I adopted the mentality that being yourself is nothing to be proud of, and that being alive is nothing to celebrate. That's a horrible belief, but it's reinforced in me by constant pressure from my family and the people that I live around. One day, I hope to be able to celebrate with everybody else, but for now I am relegated to the sidelines, or rather, beyond the sidelines. The pride parade came through my town a couple of days ago, and I was sent to do manual labor instead of being anywhere near the center of town. It was without much ceremony, it didn't even really feel deliberate. It's just that I sometimes feel like I'm the only one who cares.

Things are hard, and making music is especially hard, when you're dealing with going through depressive episodes. Whenever I try to work on the album, or other projects that I care deeply about and view as important outpourings of creativity feel very stifled, and even in the moments when I do feel inspired, I can't get good takes down, and I perfectionistically reset the file and start from scratch every couple of weeks. The song that I've been working on getting completed for the album is going to be its first single, America Online, or AOL. The main idea of the song is that adulthood and society at large is a cult controlled by capitalist oligarchs ruling with an iron fist and instilling fear in the population. It follows Fear as a Human Person, trying to traverse the world. I feel that the song is important because so much of what I write about is longing to be a part of the world with everyone else, feeling ostracized and wanting to join with everybody else in "normal life", as it were. I haven't fully solidified the tracklist for the album yet, but AOL is definitely going to be on it. I want to try to at least finish my demo this week. I haven't posted anything on my Patreon since literaly JANUARY, and the longer I go without doing it, the more guily I feel for extracting $5 every month from my single solitary subscriber (my aunt). But I really do plan to get things moving soon. I know I've said that a lot to myself, but I am genuinely proud of how this demo is going along. I rewrote large portions of the song to make it flow better and have prettier lyrics. If you want, you can see and hear a short bit of it, although keep in mind this is only an early demo.

A felled tree is mossing over,

tape spilling out with inky blood.

An empty ocean filled with stars

that washes through René Descartes.

♪♪♪♪♪

The very land itself is hostile,

opens its mouth as it swallows us.

Into its construction of latticework,

and dead-end cul-de-sacs.

A humble shambling exoskeleton

that feasts itself it traps within.

♪♪♪♪♪

I like the new chorus (the first part heard in the sample) a lot better than the original one with Ray Bradbury. I still have very complicated feelings about Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, and censorship in literature, but I felt it didn't fit the song, and used language that was a little too matter-of-fact. After four or five revisions, I finally came to this one that targets René Descartes instead, and I think it better fits with the theme of the album being a search for feeling deserving of personhood. The instrumentation itself is also changed a little, it uses a drum machine and a piano as the main instruments, as opposed to older versions that used the synth and a different drum machines. Also, my vocal stylings have evolved. That earlier draft of AOL from the home page has much harsher vocals, since it was meant to contrast more with the haunted feeling of the verses, while this one uses more variety in both the chorus and the verses, creating a building sense of narrative. I also used a round for the second verse, since I liked the idea of doing that in a song. Things are still quite rough around the edges. Probably my favourite part of this demo is the extended instrumental segment with vocalizations. It's heavily inspired by glass beaech's plastic death, particularly the song whalefall.

The ideas for some tracks on the album are coming together: most of my tracks don't fit the theming and narrative devices that I want to include, so I probably have to write some new tracks. Currently, I want it to contain america online, Ronald Reagan versus the black hole, David, the psalmist, Your hands are broken forever, The dinasours at the Ark Encounter in Kentucky spoke to me and this is what they said, THE MYTHICAL PAST IS A MYTH, 7 hundred trillion, Portrait of the drowning, angel eight, and Atlantis / Methylene Blue. On a somewhat related note, I've been having trouble with deciding what kind of stylization I should include in the song titles, and in my general writing. i really do like the all lowercase, but it makes large blocks of text much harder to read, which is why I've been writing using proper capitalization in my book, Bird Sanctuary. It's kind of a hard decision to make, but I want the album to have stylistic cohesion. Anyways, that's about it for now. Hopefully by next blog post I should have a full draft of AOL finished.

hello again! it's been a while since my last blog post. there's something to be said about the world, and that's the observation that everything is systems and rings that overlap and connect, and the things they create cannot be seperate from the very machinery they're composed of. each thing affects each other thing, and the atoms scatter, the pool ball diagrams of the alleged multiverse splinter, and it means something to look at the patterns, and, in a very human fashion pretend that it has given rise to a new thing. now, i'm no determinist or calvinist or any such thing. but the output cannot be separated from the input. if you place your finger on an 700-trillion-way scale, every other piece changes, some more than others. i was at a philosophy discussion club earlier this week, and the question the group chose was why people do bad things. i argued the socratic, that to do something, you truly have to believe, on some level, that it's right to do. we each have an internal moral compass that we bend to stretch out around our actions and nobody else's. i think that there is nothing that happens for no reason whatsoever. sorry, this is going to be a bit of a disjointed blog post.

i recently watched innuendo studios' a guide to flaming out. i think that despite the fact that i (a disaffected young christian woman) don't fit the target audience (disaffected young athiest men), i still got a lot out of it. i found myself sobbing crying, really hanging on to the words that he was saying. i felt very seen, and i felt wrong for hating myself. since then, i've been slowly trying to make a shift towards thinking more in systems rather than in parts. i find that it helps me to view everything as interconnected. i wrote my recent song, "good she's finally leaving" about that sort of realization, to know wholly for the first time that you hate yourself more than is anywhere near the amount anybody else hates you. i walk into rooms full of people that i do not know, and they like me. i've met people who think that i'm pretty, people who think that i'm creative, people who think that i'm smart, and most importantly people who think that i'm kind. i get to experience, for some reason i cannot divine, a "passing privilidge" that i do not deserve. i make rules for others and not for myself. i am a transmedicalist who believes my body is worth nothing so long as it is poisoned, i think in a binary black and white, a dichotomy. i am loving and kind and accepting, i respect the identities of others and believe what they say, about being happy without medical procedures. but i will never be able to "truly live" without getting this poison out of my system. sadly, i'm not in a financial or geographical or temporal position to do that now. and thinking in binaries has really, really screwed up my life. when i look in the mirror, i see a hulking and disgusting beast, a demon of the machine. claws, tendrils, and a stringy mess of connecting tendons and ligaments in shreds. that's why i created the character cwynna from my book: she really IS that, the disease made manifest in the most obvious, the shallowest form of allegory, like a think skin of water coating a floor, and your finger can pass through it, and taste the blood like pungent smoke beneath. i feel so alone. and so i stopped writing songs, i stopped working on my novel, i stopped doing the things that i liked. i spent most of my time watching youtube videos like a dopamine-addicted little pig. and it made me feel even more useless: i'm an inellectual! i'm pretentious, erudite, and this should be beneath me. all the self-loathings slipped past and around one another in a dance, like tectonic plates slipping and revealing in their underbelly a chasm into the deep nothing of the center of the earth. and there's something about feeling alone that makes you even more alone. i haven't gotten a hair cut since december since i've deluded myself into thinking that any smaller amount of length will undo everything i've been able to cobble together in this decaying house, every friend i've made who instinctively knows me as a girl instead of some cheap simulacrum. but that's not true. i would look nicer with hair that's less messy, i would look prettier, but i i don't want to believe that. i just want simple answers, simple pathways, but everything is systems.

although, that isn't the only piece of inspiration that went into "good she's finally leaving." dan henschel's short film PENETRATION. it's really what i've been looking for in terms of PERFECT inspiration for my novel, but there was also a piece of it that felt so cold and shallow, intentionally. the deep and bitter self-hatred and utter divorce from reality of the character is like the plot of severance on drugs. (still waiting for season 3 with bated breath in other news!) writing "good she's finally leaving" was different than some of my other recent work, it had no Need to be Good because it wasn't for any project or any finalized form, it was just a way for me to bitch about this guy i met about at church who crushed my fingers in a "handshake" and thought that he knew me. my family has lots of connections at our megachurch which i am forced to attend, and their general demeanor, and lying about who i am, leads to a lot of people i've never talked to acting as if they know me when they don't even know my name. there's this guy named vince who i can always feel staring at me from the row behind us, his eyes in the back of my head. he's scary and i didn't want to "shake his hand." i feel like, for me, songs aren't "ABOUT" a single particular thing. they're systems. i might take inspiration from albums i've heard recently (the glow pt. 2 by the microphones ROCKED my world! oh! and !!!!! THE NEW YOU ARE AN ANGEL ALBUM????? holy moly.), functions i like a lot (prolated cycloid, my beloved), things that happened in my life (thanks vince), short films, and all sorts of other things. i don't use AI, but if i did, it would not make anything as personal as the things i make myself. it would not know why the words:

"crackling fire. there is something and then there is nothing."

encompass my religious guilt, the trauma i got from being dragged into a vortex world where nobody believes in free will, unpoisoning yourself is demonic posesssion, and genocide is the will of god himself. or how it looks back on childhood years of catching fireflies in these stupid little mason jars, something that feels so far away from me now. it's sad, but things move on.

i still haven't figured out how to improve the lyrics to my song AOL yet. it's a song about being so afraid of growing up, coated in this protective layer of references to the life and works of ray bradbury. it samples dan henschel, is sung in a strange cultish drone, and is altogether pretty strange. it has problems, but i don't know how to fix them with snapping everything else and watching it fall apart like my awful k'nex machines i made as a tiny child. like water flooding through the heart of a machine. but i'm trying. can i call myself a "disaffected young woman?" (sorry this is referencing something like 3 paragraphs back. i'm sort of rambling) do teenagers count as "young woman?" the word "woman" scares me, in a way. something about the way my dad would watch matt walsh spew nonsense and watching swirling caricatures in the peatry dish of the internet. and in another way it scares me also: by calling myself a young woman, i would be, in a way, abandoning childhood. i don't know whether i'm ready for that, because i never really had a regular childhood. in some ways, i feel a little perpetually trapped by that. i skipped so many grades, which isn't something i regret, because there would've been nothing for me in them. and i'm able to make friends now that i go to college. more than i ever could as a little kid. but i still feel like something has slipped my grasp. as a teenage girl with parents that are too harsh, i somehow circle around into the 1990s purity standards and the angst. becoming a little socialist libertarian who hates authority, not being allowed to date or wear anything except the most ugly and "acceptable" clothing. the emptiness isn't there, but somewhere deeper. it feels like an important developmental milestone, the thing we call "girlhood" has been ripped from me. and that leads me into the second song i wrote, kind of. "fields of snow are melting" is about feeling something missing from you, a little piece of your soul stolen and eaten by the demonic machines remaking the world in their own image. it's the worst of the songs i've written these last few days, but its chorus still hurts me in its rawness.

"there was something that was taken from me many years ago,

and every night i look for it through endless fields of snow

but now those fields are melting

i think it's nowhere to be found"

then i wrote another song. in a way, it's kind of like car seat headrest's Dream: Encounter on Smoke Island, in that it's needlessly expiremental, hopelessly angry, and strangely worded. it's called "its gonna be a cold winter charlie kirk." it's not really about charlie kirk and i'm not sure why i called it that. there's something about the gray and wintery feeling that it encompassed, the anger it expressed at life, that really encompassed the way my life was around the time he was assassinated. things were looking beautiful and amazing: i had a chance for my life to improve drastically, but like a bird splattering into a closed window, i never really had any hope. it's something i came to terms with only after long songwriting sessions, tears, poorly-thought-out and desperate messages to people, and it still looms over me in some emotional capacity. when i think about it feels so empty. it kind of tastes like charlie kirk in the same way memories of a place you've been taste like the people you were there with, even if they aren't there in that memory. it's not a very good song, and i got distracted halfway through by a creeper exploding while i was afking for iron in my minecraft world (BET YOU WERENT EXPECTING THIS VERY WEIRD BLOG POST TO RANDOMLY MENTION MINECRAFT BUT IT DID.) and so the song kind of ended abruptly. have i slipped into a conversational tone during this blog, or was i always in one? no matter. anyways, have i mentioned each song was on a different day? maybe? anyways, after that, i haven't written any more, but i have played a few songs and worked on them. your hands are broken forever has gotten a lot of work done on it recently. really loving the way it's turning out, i might have to post a demo up here soon, it's super fun. it's kind of a worship song, but it's very desperate and not very "#blessed." it's about being desperate and hopeless, and playing it makes me feel better about being desperate and hopeless. since my last post i've also written like 50 other songs, but these are just the most recent. they include cannibal ecology, a song about the patriarchy's effects in modern america, a song called permafrost about palantir and how evil they are, a song called hillbilly elegy, a song called permafrost, a song called caverns, a song called... you sort of get the idea. but i haven't produced any of them into full demos yet, which is what i hope to be doing in some of the coming days. okay, now i'm too tired to finish writing this blog post. this was really helpful to do, since it's getting me back into the feeling of sharing things, sharing art, to the world. this is art, right? maybe?

the internet's function is to connect people, right? or, at least, that's what its initial, oncorrupted intention was. or maybe, even that intention, to connect people is inherintly corrupt: down to its very core. i don't know. i'm no philosopher. but i do know that what's going on right now far surpasses what anyone could have ever expected: not tim berners-lee who invented the worldwideweb, not mark zuckerberg with his creepy book of faces, and not elon musk with his concentric circles of corporate buyouts. the internet works too well: everyone is connected, and nobody is connected in the right ways. search engine optimization has made the internet a decaying wasteland for companies to fight over: filling sponsor spots with AI slop, fascistic propoganda, and scam ads. the major walled gardens have taken away any idea of personalization: of making the web your own. google your internet name right now: for me, it's pretty tame and untainted, but even that feels too much to me: my defunct book rating account is on the front page? why? because the company knows best? what to push when, how to weasel ads into every little empty air pocket: there is no escape from this.

or maybe there is? i've been reading a lot about the fediverse, personal websites, and other things of that nature recently, and so i decided to try my hand at having the website, mainly for the purpose of being a little art gallery of music and eventually other things i can take with me: i've loved exploring around rings on neocities for a while, and with my 2026 resolution to not doomscroll (which means stay away from every social media except bsky, since they haven't quite figured out how to make an addictive algorithm yet), i've loved exploring pretty websites as an alternative. it just feels so much more real and tangible. i've been crawling through the remains of old trans communities on geocities too, and what i've found just kind of depresses me, so i won't talk about it here. but something that shines through all of this, transphobia, homophobia, self-sexualization, sexualization of others, misogyny, racism, ableism, hatefulness, and fascism, is this underpinning of creativity, of genuine love for creation.

i'm still in school right now, but eventually, i will be working a job: i will wake up in the morning to go to work, and go home again in the afternoon: that's an undeniable fact of life. and i'm not that scared of it anymore: i feel equipped to go out into the world and be an Adult, soon enough. but the one thing that truly scares me is the sap of creativity, just these aching vines that bind to your legs and bloodlet you, suckling out any ounce of love, any ounce of hope. every night, i get emails from different news outlets telling me war is coming. war is coming. war is coming. and it gets to you, it really does. for all intents and purposes, i'm the healthiest and happiest i've been in years. why is everything still so scary?

these algorithms have all been deliberately crafted to surgically extract the most time and money from us as they possibly can. but i believe in boycotts, grassroots protests, and mindless optimism: i will not become a husk of a person! sometimes i feel thankful that God made me trans. before i learned that about myself, when i was seven years old, i was on track to become this conservative charicature: i was set up to have a future as a wunderkind: a child prodigy. and that's not really an exxageration. i can see so many clear paths from where i was then to working at a startup in silicon valley, california, a husk fo a person spouting conservative ideologies and never coming to terms with the glow of the TV until it's too late and i killed myself. so, there is hope. or at least some kind of it. maybe it won't be in religion for you: maybe it won't be on the web for you either. but there is something for you, there's something for everyone. even if it's not true, it always does you well to believe that there's something on the other side of this.

when the bombs fall and the world is over, or when the planet burns and the world is over, or when the endtimes come and the world is over, or when the machines learn too much and the world is over, there will always be a new Thing that arises, or at least that's what i believe. there will always be someone to sit and make something: whether that's with sticks and string or $8,000 recording equipment: whether it's with mulberry paint or the world's finest watercolours. and if not humanity, something else. the beauty of art and the beauty of life is uneclipsable.

so one day, when i move out of this town, i'll be ready. i'll still be making music, or at least some kind of art. i'll look different, hopefully for the better. and i will enter the world, and you will too. or maybe you already have. this whole feeling of 'rebirth,' of 'moving away,' despite feeling like esoteric woo-woo, will happen eventually. there's always something on the other side of a door. even if that door is death. and maybe that something will be a Nothing. i'd hope that it's not, and i believe that it's not. but even that we can learn to be ready for.