Trump is getting sworn in as we speak, and what am I doing about it? I guess I’ve decided to write, just like always.

Well, might as well try to make myself useful, right? The question remains what useful looks like. I don’t really know. It may look like what I look like now, sitting in my chair at the doctor’s office (except I’m on the doctor’s team) and letting my fingers type before my mind can tell them to stop. I wonder what will come out next? It’s not really that mysterious. I don’t have many secrets anymore. Nothing inside me that’s begging to be released. It’s all just there, always at the tip of the iceberg, all of the deeper contents vacuumed out and thrown into oblivion. Oblivion being these very pages, and the ones from last year, and the ones from the year before that. Really, it’s all here.

So that’s what makes it exciting, the right now, isn’t it? Everything that comes up is just the tip. It’s all just ready to come out no matter what I think or what I think or what I think. Even when I glitch out like a little broken record, it’s all the tip of the iceberg, and sometimes the tip is such that there’s nothing left for my fingers to say that hasn’t already been said.

It begs the question of what is the point. But then that question can be begged of plenty of other things, things that are less constructive than this. At least I’m putting words on the page in the form of letters and spaces—and I’m even using punctuation to make it all make even more sense. The point is the point. The point is the tip. The tip is the point. The iceberg is melted. The tip is all that remains. I hope that doesn’t melt. I’ll keep sharpening it. I’ll make sure it never runs out until it runs out. Everything runs out eventually.

Next though. What’s the next one? There’s no way of knowing. My fingers now have complete minds of their own. Well, it’s more like the fingers are united by one mind which tells them to act in tandem to create the words. The words are the mind, and the fingers are just the tools. But now we’re back where we started, with the idea that it’s my mind that’s creating the words. And that’s no fun. Why not anthropomorphize the fingers and let them have their own minds? That’s how it feels, but it’s not how it is. Just like in life when something feels one way but is actually another. That’s why metaphor and simile are dead. It’s over for them. I think I had one good run of metaphors, and it’s over now. We need to take it back to the literal.

No we don’t.

The tip of the iceberg. The fun thing about it is that none of the things that come out really have any weight behind them. They’re not from the bottom, so they haven’t been sedimented down into a dense compact little package that I can upload here onto the page. They’re all so much lighter. It’s giving quantity over quality. But I think the quality is the same. I think quality is an illusion in some ways. Like, this is quality. It’s words. The words use grammar. They abide by all the rules that one would want good writing to abide by. Don’t they? Don’t the words abide by the rules that matter to us all?

All of this doesn’t matter. There’s no purpose in writing any of it except just writing it. It’s like I’m reading my thoughts in real time. And they’re this. Not really interesting, are they?

I have this desire to feel like what I’m saying could matter to someone in the future, even if it’s just the version of me who exists then. Will I be able to read this back and be like “wow I was actually saying things that make me think and I’m glad I was operating in this tip of iceberg world so often”? I’ll appreciate the honesty. I’ll point out the fact that there still is a deep iceberg that hasn’t been mined yet. There’s plenty down there that hasn’t been explored.

But then there’s no fundamental self under any of it. There’s no under. There’s no iceberg. The metaphor doesn’t work because it’s a metaphor. Ohhh, yeah! That’s a relief. It’s not an iceberg. There are no deeper meanings. There is only this one moment that goes on forever and ever, whose progression I’m able to track by letting my fingers run around and around and around and around with no real aim or intention.