Don’t think I want what I used to want!!! BITCH!!! Like it’s fucking true! That’s the song of the year right there! It’s just so fucking succinct and TRUE! She summed it right the fuck up! Oh this song is so good bro. It’s how I fucking feel. She’s just mysterious enough about it that it sucks you right in and lets you project whatever the hell you want onto it.

Well… maybe I shouldn’t have smoken that bowl just now. Like the use of the word smoken back there should tell you everything you need to know. But the act of writing alone is so centering and nonjudgmental that… I have to laugh. I have to look at myself and just say “what you’re doing is the gold. I love you.” That’s what it is though! Every decision I’ve made. Gold. That’s just how I have to look at life. It’s in a competition with no one. The competition aspect is literally so fucking made up, just like the rest of it, so you might as well make up your own best case scenario every day and fucking live it. Sorry, we’re getting a little motivational speaker here, but you know what, no, I’m not fucking sorry. It’s the last day of the year. We’ve waited this fucking long, and look, the day is here. What? Are you kidding me? This is our one chance to say it all, to wrap everything up with that nice little bow, to recognize that even if you won’t be able to “wrap it up in a nice little bow” in the same way that the quote seems to imply, we might as well spend some time working on the bow as, like, a sign of respect. Like, it’ll be up to you to let me know if you liked the bow, but in my own mind, I will know that I made the bow. I went out of my way to polish this thing up and present it as expertly as I could. I took the time and did what I needed to do to make this thing work. I did all that, so I might as well put a bow on it. You’re not supposed to judge presents by their bows, but honestly, why not play into it? Like… somebody’s gonna be judging this whole thing based on its bow. You know who you are. There’s plenty of people like you. Don’t worry. I know. I do it sometimes. You get the gift and you think, “Yeah, but they could’ve made a nicer bow. Love the gift, of course, and thank you and everything, and at least it’s the thought that counts, but the thought that would really count would’ve been a bow. Especially one that you made. That would’ve just shown me that you really care about my experience, that you want every part of it——from the initial observations to the bow inspection to the actual usage of the gift, however you’re gonna use it, or if you’re gonna return it or whatever——to be nice and presentable, and that requires a bow.”

So this is the bow, then. The last thing I’ll write during the weird year. With or without my consent, it’s going to end tomorrow. Of course, I gave my consent a very long time ago and have continued to offer it at several times throughout the year on the off chance that it would accept it a little early. Let it be an early Christmas present. Sorry for Christmasifying it. It’s a disappointing bow in that respect. Bro spends a whole document writing about everything but Christianity and then the bow has little cliparts of Jesus all over it.

The point is I’ve been waiting for this day for months. I’ve hated this year. The only good thing about it was getting to turn it into whatever this is. Like, at least now it sort of makes sense. I pushed the void away for another moment. I’m on the path to rationalizing all of this. But maybe I’m doomed to be irrational, and maybe we all are. Okay, soap boxing there. I’ll let that go.

Being irrational is a good thing, I guess is another thing I would say at this point, with only a few hours of the weird year left. I’m glad I gave my consent for it to end so long ago. We’ve had a slow burn, me and this day. It’s been a long time coming. Or waiting to come.

I’m not sure what else there even is to say. It sucked. It was no good. It was some good. There were some good things that happened. Plenty of good things that I didn’t include in here that I secretly allowed to warm my heart and make me grateful for my fellow man and the world and the universe for letting me take up a spot. It’s an honor just to be nominated. And included. It’s an honor to be included. Thank you for including me. Things like that weren’t getting jotted down in here, because they didn’t seem important at the time. What was important was complaining and letting my future self be able to witness the shit that was going down this year.

fictional self As I write this, it’s becoming really difficult to find my own voice, tease it out of the above ground man’s. I feel like this is a little performative, not so diaristic anymore. It’s feeling pretty fictional in a sort of psychosis way. Like I’m splitting. There are too many versions of myself that exist, man. It’s fine, but it’s just like…. Ugh lol sometimes. You know? Like Jesus. How many of us are there? Too damn many! I think that’s why I like nftag for being able to accept all of my weirdness, because I’ve named the character at the beginning. Hey y’all. This is written by me, but it’s not by me. Like, I didn’t say that shit. Somebody else said that. That wasn’t me, I swear. But like… it was me, but it wasn’t. I think that adds something. I still think it adds something. I don’t want this to become my self. I want this to just be someone similar to me. This is just someone who existed inside me at the time but doesn’t exist anymore. Like… the character is purely fictional. That’s what they’re going to believe, because that’s what I’m going to tell them. So really… it doesn’t much matter how different I make it from my actual journal. If anything… I think it would hit harder when people (if anyone actually cares) find the source document, this one, and read them next to each other (if they REALLy cared) and be like ohhh…. It’s the….. It’s the same thing. The diary is the diary. The book is the diary. The book is just the real guy. He just… he was just uh…. He was having a psychiatric event. We should book him into the psych ward right quick and get some Haldol in his system.

Self-indulgent fantasy about getting institutionalized. I think that fits here. It’s pretty much how it is. Wishing psychosis on myself all year and wondering how close to it I really was at different points. Pretty close and then pretty far and then pretty close and then pretty far. I don’t know where I’m at with that now. I think I’m closer to realizing that we need a different set of words to talk about those kinds of things. Like… okay… you guys (DSM-5) did an okay job, but it’s over now. Like, that was cute, but now can you let the adults talk. Like, that shit is so elementary. Give me a break, actually, please. Like, I’m not trying to come at you from a “I know everything and I know the solutions to these problems I’m pointing out” place, but more from a… oh, I don’t know. Maybe that is how I’m coming at you. Fuck the self-awareness bro. Who needs it. We are dealing with a fictionalized CHARACTER right now.

Oh god. Realizashun. Am I also a fictionalized character, the version of me who’s writing all these little tidbits that will never end up in that other book? Nftag? I’m here, too, guys… the one who actually wants to talk about real shit rather than this fiction world bullshit. The one who lifts up his head when y’all are writing and looks around at his surroundings like a real person, someone with real fucking eyes and shit like that. Like hey, bitch,.... Remember that we still live in a world? Lift up your fucking head. Your eyes are gonna be fucked by the time you’re 30. You’re gonna be the Galileo of your generation, and it’ll be because you went blind from staring at a computer screen. That’s a way gayer way to lose your vision than the one Galileo did. And I’m not even discovering shit or doing any scientific contributions or anything…. YET! This will be my year for doing that kind of thing. I’m going to start making my great discoveries as soon as they let me out of med school. Like, this shit is stupid. I need to flex my brain. I’m getting stretched out too much. The butt plug is still in. And I’m also getting fucking shrunken down to a box version of myself. The thing I said about how med school forces us into certain postures that end up crippling us, yeah, I meant that shit. This year has actually crippled me. It made the whole year like something different from reality altogether, and all of my accomplishments are so made-up and invisible to anyone who actually has to exist in the real world that it’s almost embarrassing that I gave so much of my time to it. Like, look back on this year real quick. Are you gonna remember anything without that little lens of resentment that you’ll cast over everything, given all the times you almost escaped but didn’t, and now you have nothing to show for it? Of course that’s the wrong attitude, and I do feel like I have “things to show for it”——not that that really matters… well, yes, it does. I feel like you should always have something to show from your experiences, like, that’s the whole point of having experiences… I guess what I’m saying is, like, did I really need to put myself through all that, just in the name of having experiences? There would’ve been other experiences I could have too, ones that involve more direct action and ‘help’ to the people who need it. Oh my god bro fuck off with this medical bullshit. Like you can’t actually expect me to wanna do that shit… pLEASE be serious like. Let’s get fucking realllyyyyy freaking serious my buddy. There’s more shit I could do from the comfort of my own home that would have more of a positive effect on “society” than being a psychiatrist. Leave me the fuck alone. Stop trying to convince me that I can make it work, that I don’t have to quit after the weird year, that I can keep going into the next fucking tunnel and spend the rest of my life looking for fucking lights at the ends of tunnels….. Actually fuck off with that shit, please, like I’m so over it leave me the fuck alone holy shit dude. Sorry, I’m actually getting pissed, and I know that in the spirit of life or whatever I’m supposed to let go of my anger at things, but bitch, I’m not there yet, ok. Like, I’m not gonna let go of my anger and let this thing end on a beautiful peaceful and well note. That’s not the note we’re ending on, cuz suddenly it looks like I have eight minutes left before I need to kinda gtfo to the new years festivities, meaning my log of the weird year will be over after this. Like, I genuinely won’t be able to add anything else. No end-how-it-started. I refuse to have one of those gay ass moments in the mirror where I recognize the humanity in the person or something. Because guess what, I have to go back to the above ground in two days anyway. Yeah, on the second day of my first ever post-weird year, I’m going back the fuck above ground. Which, I know, means I should or could, in theory, keep contributing things to the notes from above ground document, but I know that just doesn’t feel right. Maybe I don’t have to include that part about how I’m going back up, but——

Tempo switch, bitch, we don’t have time to think about stupid shit.

Anything else before we call it quits? Seven minutes left, oh god, what are we gonna say? Bunny is a rider satellite can’t find her. The reason I put this song on this playlist was so I could remember the drawing target around arrow thing. This song, she just wrote lyrics and made sense of them later, which is what I’m trying to lean into partially with my own shit. It’s one of those parables that resonates so hard no matter how long I’m away from it, which means it’s fucking true.

So then it means it’s not up to me to monitor everything that gets put into this document and make sure it’s up to par and shit like that. Of course I wanna do that to an extent, like, the polishing is part of the whole process, but I love this rough sketching phase, too. It’s so coarse. It really does feel like fucking sculpting. Like, you need all this raw material, and you need to convert it into something, or else you just have a rock collection. That’s the difference between a rock collector and Michelangelo. Michelangelo actually spends time with the rocks, and he actually wants to reveal something FROM them rather than letting them be what they are. That’s why I’m trying to be more like Michelangelo. There’s a reason people cite that thing he said so much, where he was like, “the stone already contains that fucking thing, I’m just releasing it.” In my case the stone is the letters of the English language, and all the time I spend with any given piece of text is me sculpting it into what it was ALWAYS GONNA BE.

And just like that you gotta move on to a different thing, tempo change pretty rapidly, cuz it’s only four minutes until that arbitrarily determined deadline for when all writing about this year must stop. I wonder if I‘ll take any phone breaks later in the evening to jot down some thoughts as the year comes to a close. I can really try to supply as much raw material as possible to myself who’s going in for the polish. I think that would be a nice idea. People want the bow. People wanna see endings drawn the fuck out and having the sensory details and everything.

So here we go. I’m at my house, and I can smell the weed in the paper bag in front of me, and there’s a lamp, and there’s my water bottle, and my phone and check book and remote and lip balm and wrappers and tooth brush heads and two lighters——one big, one small——my glasses my giraffe stuffed animal my towels and the sun is going way down. The sun is going to start coming up sooner and staying up longer now, by the way. It’s still winter, but no snow on the ground. Wood walls. Tiled floors combining with wood floors. Need to leave in two minutes; were’e staring at the precipice. Will I jump or will I languish here forever, spend the rest of my life in the weird year? I think we know that answer to that. And it involves jumping the fuck out of the helicopter. I’m the guy in the helicopter. That’s my future self. Or my past self. It’s both. And then the me jumping out of the helicopter is me right fucking now. I’m jumping the fuck out, bitch. I’m jumping out, and idk if I have a parachute, and no, I didn’t learn any lessons from that original dream besides always do the awesome thing to impress guys in helicopters, even if it spells your demise. But it also means a really nice view of the sky on the way down, which I’ll very much enjoy. Let’s hope it lasts forever. The freefall. Let’s hope the freefall lasts forever, the ground never comes, the clock never strikes 12, we just stay in suspended animation forever and ever. Maybe we can do that. Maybe this is that. Maybe we’re doing that. In that moment I swear we were infinite. I think I am infinite. I’m falling infinitely. Clock never runs out for me. It never ever