Controlling Time
2025-10-30
I've gotten to a point now where I feel weird when I don't make a Cogito post for the day. It makes my life feel incomplete, which is strange considering the nature of this body of work. The ideas expressed here are meant to feel ephemeral, but there's still that very human feeling I have to 'keep score' or 'track my progress' or whatever else. I don't like that I feel that way about it, but here we are yet again, another day with another entry.
I've gotten some kind messages from people, but a common thread I've seen from them is that they often express compassion towards my suffering. On the one hand, it feels reassuring to see the compassion in others but simultaneously, it makes me feel very selfish to receive that compassion just because I am fancily complaining about things. To that end, I feel like it's more important now than ever to espouse a positive message. I might hate life and I might feel like there's not many redeemable qualities about it, but as someone who writes in public like this, there's a certain duty I feel towards people to not be some whiny piece of shit.
I seem to constantly have these meta-cognitive discussions with myself, wondering why I write these vignettes every day. I wonder what good they do for people and what they could possibly inspire. The history of this kind of medium is shrouded in ephemera because many of the old school 'blogs' of yesteryear were hosted on centralized platforms like LiveJournal and the like. Those centralized platforms, now dead, have taken with them the art of the diarist. It's a sad thing and through this hypertext of mine, I hope to bring some kind of new light to it. The main difference between me and some schmuck on Substack is that my writing is in my control—my site, coded by me; it dies when I say it dies, not if it fails to make a profit.
My life is so mundane, yet my inner world is constantly circling about and giving me all kinds of ideas and things to say. It makes me sad that I can't condense all of it into a single sentence and I yearn for the day when I might have enough tears to cry about it. Making art is a tough task because there's a desire to document and curate the lived experience into something for others to enjoy, yet there's a different desire for that lived experience to stay in my head and to have its moment and die as time ticks on. It's a weird sort of weight to carry, deciding what there is that has to be put on the page and what should live in its private domicile where it will inevitably die alone and go back into the ether of lost vibrations.
I don't want that kind of control, but it seems that this moment was not something that I curated.
It was something that came into the page all on its own.