The demographic I'm least likely to see getting extremely invested in some retarded internet nonsense and debating in the replies for 12 days straight is hands-down zoomer men. I'm not sure anyone's ever been less mad online.

After reflecting deeply on things this past week I think my core problem is that I've won the freedom to do basically anything I want but lack any kind of duties or responsibilities.

One reason you get more conservative as you age is because you come to learn that people don't really change; the unreliable, dishonest, disloyal, etc. tend to stay that way. You can't fix them, or save them, and this lesson applied at scale kills any tendency to utopianism.

Is the name 'Heart Attack Grill' meant ironically? The waitstaff are dressed like sexy nurses and doctors, which is meant ironically, i.e. what they provide (fatty food) runs counter to the sartorial expectations. But the name is... not ironic, it's literally correct --- right?

Wrong. The name Heart Attack Grill is ironic, because the expectation is that you won't get a heart attack there, and the reason you know you won't get a heart attack at the Heart Attack Grill is --- and this is where you need to judge the strength of your soul --- exactly that it is called Heart Attack Grill. That's why it is safe to eat there.

This will sound confusing, because if you actually have a heart attack at the Heart Attack Grill, inevitably someone who thinks Kristen Wing is funny will say: "umm, hel-lo? Mayor McCheese? What did you expect would happen?" Well, not this... I thought the name was ironic.

God may be dead, but we're not yet ready to shine a flashlight into the abyss to see just how abyssy it is; so we put a distance between ourselves and the dark abyssiness of reality, and by "distance" I mean literally "some other omnipotent entity." And we make that entity exert its power --- prove it has power --- through language. If something is called the Heart Attack Grill, then it could not possibly actually cause heart attacks because no one would ever allow such a thing, any more than they would allow a Vegas brothel called "Syphilis House" --- unless it was actually free of syphilis. The final step is the trickiest to understand but the most natural to execute --- it is the atemporal logic of narcissism, aka magical thinking: the naming of it prevents it from being true. Saying it is ironic is protective.

Average person is so flaky you can find yourself in the top 1% of reliability and thoughtfulness by literally just doing the things you say you'll do.

The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder. This is the ultimate penalty: the mind's own state of confusion and alienation from the truth is its punishment. There is no need for any external force to punish it. This internal disorder, this turning away from the order and harmony of God's creation, is the most severe penalty a soul can suffer.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation --- that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape --- should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.

It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed constantly to tend and aspire. In music, then, rather than in poetry, is to be found the true type or measure of perfected art. Therefore, although each art has its incommunicable elements, its untranslated order of impressions, its unique mode of reaching the "imaginative reason," yet the arts may be represented as continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a condition which music alone completely realises; and one of the chief functions of aesthetic criticism, dealing with the products of art, new or old, is to estimate the degree in which each of those products approaches, in this sense, musical law.

Don't demand more of yourself. Demand more of me who demands more of you.

People be saying things so definitively, like man I think it depends.

Van Dusen (psychologist who worked with schizophrenics and read Swedenborg) eventually adopted an energy vampire model of the voices his patients were hearing. He claimed explaining this to the patients consistently resulted in the voices telling patients to physically attack him. He basically claimed he could sit (at least a significant percent of his) patients down in a room and go through a script, like "I am going to start explaining something to you --- here's what the voices are going to tell you to do".

First they would tell patients to leave, then, they would tell patients to not listen to him, then finally when none of that was possible, and he was explaining what was happening as a phenomenon, they would tell patients to attack him. Like a predictable pattern, one, two, three.

Ultimately his model was that the voices were spirits who basically did a form of energy "collection". Their goal was to whip the patient up into a frenzied negative emotional state and then they would "get something" from that energy.

Counterintuitively, the upwardly mobile are often mentally incapable of getting married. They see no rational reason to pause what they're doing to fall in love, for true love indeed is a kind of falling and they are the opposite of falling. They believe their mate choice will be greater in 12 months, so it would be too stupid to settle now, right? Love is distracting, love is dangerous, love can go terribly wrong. "I'll focus on love when I arrive at my true level."

When they arrive at their true level, or begin to approach it, they finally decide to grace the world with their availability. But the tiny number of potential mates who objectively meet their inflated sense of entitlement... Do you know where they are? You guessed it: they're upwardly mobile. Why would they pause what they're doing to fall in love, when what they're doing is the opposite of falling?

In an overly rationalized society, the highest-quality mates will postpone marriage until they peak, but then readiness to marry just becomes a signal of weakness, which disqualifies someone in the eyes of precisely those people they were climbing to meet.

Body horror is intrinsic to the female condition; upon coming of age, your body takes a life of its own, it bleeds, it grows, it changes; pregnancy is horrific, your own body becomes a vessel, your organs displaced, your bones thinned, all without your consent, your body torn apart, all this can be redeemed by the beauty of life.

Sex, unchained from life, loses its transcendental nature, its saving grace, it is reduced to animalistic copulation, pornography is deeply unerotic, utterly sterile, under the sexual revolution, all sex is sterilized, all sex is gay sex. Desiring anything else, to possess, to be possessed, to love, to want to love, to beget, such desires are situated as crass, regressive, reactionary, cringe.

As I passed through a certain district in Milan I noticed a poor beggar, drunk, as I believe, and making merry. I groaned and pointed out to the friends who were with me how many hardships our idiotic enterprises entailed. Goaded by greed, I was dragging my load of unhappiness along, and feeling it all the heavier for being dragged. Yet while all our efforts were directed solely to the attainment of unclouded joy, it appeared that this beggar had already beaten us to the goal, a goal which we would perhaps never reach ourselves.

A "mnemonic cascade" is when the first of an entangled series of memories is triggered --- the smell that reminds you of the crib that reminds you of the lullaby that reminds you of the long-lost, cellular dream. Most villages instill memory chains in their citizens from childhood, repeated monthly during formative years, later forgotten or forcibly cut. When necessary, a mnemonic cascade attack can render one unresponsive to external stimuli --- total replay paralysis --- for days or weeks.

When I was in primary school, we had a big football field. I live in the cold part of the world, and every winter we got a lot of snow. At my school, snow would mean snowball fights, and at the time I was like, 10, they had decided on some rules to limit/control the violence. The rules were: "the football field, is a free for all, anything goes. You little shits have to behave in the school yard, everywhere else, but on the condition that all the boy fights and weird stuff all takes place out in the football field."

This was a functional solution for the most part. For all I know the tradition continues to this day. I don't really know. Anyways, during winter, any break, all the boys would run out to the football field and just beat each other up. Like straight up fighting and hardcore bullying, rubbing each others faces in dirt and gravel, throwing rocks at each other (covered in snow, so it looks like a snowball).

A girl who sat next to me in class, and in 7th grade we would sort of touch feet underneath the table but we never talked about it or looked each other in the eye really. I once picked a little bouquet of flowers for her birthday, but I chickened out the last second before, getting to school, and threw them at the door, before going in. I had picked them on my paper route that morning. Spring flowers, those white ones, I don't know what they're called in English.

Her name was Charlotte, and during one winter, as the boys were playing war in the designated violence and insanity zone, Charlotte would spend her time in the breaks going out to the football field, and walking along the edge, then on the edge, then a couple of steps inside. Then eventually some boy would see her being "on the field", and throw a snowball at her. And then, she would break down crying, and run inside, where the other girls and teachers would comfort her (she was pretty and smart and popular).

And I remember, it's one of my most vivid memories from that time --- I don't have lot of clear memories from before I was 14ish, because I suffered some head trauma. But I remember vividly being very very confused about Charlotte. Why did she walk into the football field? She knew what the rules were. She knew that was the "boys being mean" zone. So why did she walk on the edge of it like that? Wasn't she smart? The smartest girl in class? How could she not see what was going to happen, if a cute girl did that?