learning about histones and the nucleosome and how there's drugs we can use to inhibit de-acetyl-ization of the lysine on the histones which makes the dna coil around the histones less tightly, making dna transcription easier, but at a cost... the histones which are unable to be de-acetyl-ated accumulate in the cell and signal it for apoptosis. so like..... we can’t just use these drugs to make all the histones looser and just start transcribing everything.. or else the cell will kill itself.. so crazy how there are limits everywhere we look in nature... this is what’s happening in our bodies. these are the processes that allow life to happen. my god.

deacetylate

certain insults in the body create a sense of discontent in a very local region. it’s as if the hemorrhoid itself is a revolutionary, trying to alert the rest of the body to the fact that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” or something. it demands that the body stand up more, give it some fiber, some kind of relief from all the pressure that threatens to bulid up inside it and thrombose. and if it does thrombose, it will create more than just local damage; it will turn the whole body against itself. it will recruit all kinds of cytokines and actors to come in and cause upheaval, and maybe word will spread to different parts of the body. maybe it spreads to the command centers, the heart and brain, and the upheaval is too great, the will of the hemorrhoid too strong, for anything other than absolute destruction to occur. a returning of the cells to the earth for a brand new start. it really makes me aware of the precarity of life itself when i think about it through this angle of revolution, and it also makes me more aware of how revolution works in societies. i wonder what the soceital equivalent of "standing up" to a hemorrhoid would be. trump telling us he'll lower grocery prices or something. just enough for us not to go into full damage and upheaval mode. keep the local systems in place or else they’ll thrombose and threaten the command centers. revolution, like death of the actual body, needs to happen bottom-up, usually. unless there's some kind of real deus ex machina and the whole thing gets shot in the head or something.

even something as simple as diphtheria has so much lore, ripe for analysis. it's an AB toxin which means it has a binding part (gets it acquainted with the victim cell), and an active part (gets injected in once the binding part has done its job). once inside, the active part adds a molecule of ADP-ribose to elongation factor 2 (EF-2), and EF-2 is then unable to catalyze GTP hydrolysis, so there's not enough energy for the ribosome to translocate, and that causes protein synthesis to stop, which leads to necrosis. damn. it’s crazy isn’t it? how there's this one thing that is actually one of thousands and millions and maybe billions of little actors in the body, which leads to the very thing i was just thinking about: necrosis. like, there are some “bad actors” that are trying to stir up revolution whether we like it or not! but the state gives us a diphtheria vaccine and coaches its future medical practitioners to judge parents who don’t vaccinate their kids. the child’s body is a political battleground but not in thhe way we usually say it is when it comes to the vaccine convesration. the political actors here are microbiological. cells. codons. ribosomes. and they are all easily corruptible. they can be turned against the body by someone with a convincing argument, like diphtheria in this case. what’s difficult is knowing how to ascribe our own moral code to these kinds of processes. what does it mean that diphtheria was able to get a stronghold on this kid but not this one? man, it’s all very complicated. i’m sure there's like a buddhist argument that could be made somehow, but there’s not enough buddhists who are trained in molecular biology. there’s not enough molecular biologists who are trained in buddhism, either, or storytelling for that matter. there needs to be way more cross-talk because otherwise all this biology and chemistry and microscopics make no freaking practical sense! but now i get it! AB toxins! ribosomes! i get who diphtheria is now!

that’s the fun part about studying. something about doors, hallways…

the plot thickened when i learned about virulence factors, like M protein in group A strep. that's crazy! it expresses this protein on its membrane which looks like something the body made (molecular mimcry) and avoids getting phagocytosed into the blood. that's insane. like you literally wear a nicki wig and then be nicki. and then the body, when it finally wises up to the fact that this isn't made by its “self,” starts making antibodies against it, clever little thing, but it's not going to work, becuase M protein looks too similar to stuff that it actually DID make, and then you get cross-reactivity with self-antigens in myocardium and nerves, and then you get rheumatic fever. it's like........ the M protein virulence factor really is virulent, not just because it can protect itself by using the M protein disguise, but because it thrives by creating chaos in the body, making it turn against itself. it’s all so societal that i don’t even feel the need to spell it out. it's just insane that all of these things are playing out on the micro level. its such a drama, but we don’t ever think about it, because we’re too attached to the personal stakes of life and death. we're too selfish, aren't we? we're thinking about “what are the implications of this for us and for our kids,” and we're tying to macgyver ways of getting around it, when in reality i think we should spend more time grappling with the sociopolitical implications of virulence factors and think about how there are "bad actors" in our own society who disguise themselves and then cause agitation from the inside once they've been identified as being a bad seed....

and then i think about staph and its freaking exfoliative toxin and how it disrupts keratinocytes’ connection to each other, allowing bullae to form and leading to bullous empitigo... like what the hell is that? it seems just like so unnecessary and disruptive, to what end? and it’s like, ok, what are bacteria even "trying" to do here? it feels radical and revolutionary and stuff, but maybe it’s just as simple as maintaining a sort of ecological homeostasis. killing ppl cuz they gotta die of something, otherwise the world will be in disarray and we get climate change...... well oop, maybe the bacteria are on to something!! like they need to be consuming us or else we threaten to consume EVERYTHING.. and like humans ARE causing climate change. it almost feels like it’s baked into us. maybe the solution really is to wipe out a lot of our population. cuz there’s way too many of us for this to be sustainable. and i know we’re supposed to say overpopulation is a myth cuz we have more than enough to sustain all of us and then some, and it’s just a problem of distribution... but the fact that there are such complicated mechanisms for bacteria to take us down tells me that there's something "good" about us getting taken down.. like if we’re decentering our human perspective, we have to see that there’s something to be said for bacterial survival.. like they’re doing plenty of cool shit and they’re so different from us and oh we need them to survive and all this probiotic stuff getting advertised, like we clearly know.. idk where i’m going with this.

i guess when u zoom out it’s kinda funny.. like wait.... we're supposed to just let go and let it all be.... in a sense.. even tho we're subject to the same principles of consuming and surviving.. we also have the ability to think and plan and understand and like try to surpass our own biology and trasncend.. so shouldn’t we be trying to do that instead of aimlessly just trying to reproduce and survive and stuff? like ok let’s really think about this… what can i do now that my biology has told me not to have kids?

my studies are not only preparing me for a career in medicine (which i’m going to politely decline as soon as they give me my degree) but for death itself… look how death-centric all of this is.. exotoxins and M proteins and transcription and all that shit.. learning basic science alongside everything i’ve learned in all other realms... it’s becoming quite magical… the fact that the answer to "what are we here to do?" is up to me is crazy. cuz like i know it always has been, and as soon as i gained awareness of the question, there’s always been that feeling that it doesn’t have an answer, and then there’s that youtube video entitled "meaning is a jumper that you have to knit" and stuff. like everybody seems to know that that’s the case, but still i make these kinds of preparations for death whether i know that’s what i’m doing or not.

i’m getting so deeply moved in ways i can’t fully understand about the idea of "ori," the point of origin of replication, and how the eukaryotic genome has multiple while prokaryotic has one...... like holy shit dude we know origin stories carry so much weight in our culture so i feel like this ori thing must carry weight too.. and the fact that human cells have multiple oris and bacteria only one.. like i KNOW this is saying something. i’m not sure what exactly.. but it’s fascinating to me.

rna is a storyteller.. but it couldn’t exist in the form it exists today without dna, right? like i always thought of rna as like a child of dna.. and that’s the central dogma of genetics or whatever right? dna > rna > proteins. but my studies of rna make me want to challenge the dogma, which is ironic cuz they were very tongue in cheek when declaring it in the first place, saying that science isn’t about dogma but we have to make an exception in this case. but do we??? does rna as we have it today really come from dna or does it "come from" somewhere else, like from the rna ancestors or something? i’m getting confused when it comes to the origins of these things themselves.

some things get coded down and become part of history. the writing that we do becomes the dna of the human race. and our acts are the rna? but the records of those acts is dna..... should i be more rna or more dna? it’s a question that i’m going to have to sit with. also this idea of rna inventing dna.. is that just an anthropomorphism or is it true? do you think rna got a little big for their britches and were like “hey you know what, these stories are actually dope we should get them written down so we don't forget!” it seems a little bit like the first fall... like a little act of hubris that may have sent us down a dark path toward self-mythologizing… if that even is a dark path, but fanon seemed to think it is, or at least suggested that the ability to self-mythologize is priviliged. makes me wonder wat happens to all that rna out there that didn’t get to put itself down into dna.. like is it any less important or less part of the journey just cuz it gets left out? the burning of a library of alexandria except its not really a burning cuz none of it was written down in the first place..... hmmm . i like that dna can’t do anything on its own, it’s dependent on rna.. same goes for book. a book is just a piece of matter until someone with an alive and active brain reads it and processes it in real time and uses it to act. that’s very fanonian too. he warns against just taking in dna and turning it into more dna. like, it’s already dna bro you don’t need to store it in an additional place! you’re suppoesd to make rna out of it and DO SOMETHING!!! rote memorization is a bore and a waste of time! make it rna, do it do it do it do it do it!!! wait what do you mean rna accidentally invented dna? is this the more realistic version of the anthropomorphism? it wasn’t a choice but a mistake to build a library? mmmmm dna as a younger successor is so interesting. and also look at all the mistakes that can happen to dna. the whole field of epigenetics just throws a crazy weird wrench into this whole conversation.

maybe it’s like someone just drew something and it became cherished by the family. art gets really canonized when it’s made by someone we love, and then people tell stories (rna) about the etchings (dna) and somewhere along the way realize that the story told in the etching was a little more permanent and hey what if we tried to tap into this and tell other stories too? like what if we used this to our advantage.. and that’s evolution? like selection of the beneficial behaviors and stuff.. and this idea of celebrating the rna that changed something while it was here.. yes, i like that idea. but it makes me think about what happens in a post-dna world where none of this is even a thing. it’s not baked into the genome and stuff. what about other living things that figured out how to evolve without this interplay between rigid (dna) and fluid (rna)? it’s just interesting you know? like this could all become moot. the dna that is the history of dna and rna... it’s interesting cuz it’s.... dna. like huh.

epigenetics refers to the ability to change dna. it makes me wanna reread the old masters just like fanon did and use them for my own ends just like he did. it’s what made his arguments so convincing: using things people already understand to tell them new truths. truths that are evident from those old texts but which needed a little boost of rna to get the message across.... decide which dna deserves to be passed on.. this is important too cuz there’s a lot of stuff out there. i’m trying to figure out how to pass on the dna of dostoevksy while also making a new piece of dna from which it’s easy for others to transcribe their own rna of action. like i want the blueprint to be clear in its ability to instruct others what to do—or at least clear in its message that they can do SOMETHING. and maybe by bringing dostoevsky to the modern era is also to epigenetize him, changing his dna into something else. .. .like how when we retrieve a memory from long term, we're inadvertently changing it, coloring it with the circumstances that surround us here and now.... that’s epigenetics too!

beyonce won album of the year for cowboy carter cuz she EPIGENETIZED!!!! she took the history of country music and turned herself into rna modeled off it.. and thereby showed us the history of it.. that it actually started as a black art form and turned white over time, ultimately rejecting black people altogether.. and now look, she’s made a masterpiece by being in conversation with the past, bringing it into the futrue... deciding the parts of the dna to carry on!!!!!! we are entering post-dna culture!!!!!

"nothing really ends. for things to stay the same they have to change again. hello, my old friend. you change your name but not the ways you play pretend. american requiem. them big ideas are buried here. amen." and that’s the opening line of cowboy carter. like a thesis statement if i ever saw one. come the fuck on bro.

maybe i need to .. uhh.. whatever the opposite of reverse transcribe is... take this dna that i've written and turn it back into rna so that it can then incorporate itself into the tradition.

i just looked at my screentime and it says 10h28m and i’m like holy fucking shit dude there’s no way i’ve been looking at my computer for that long. but like i guess it’s true. studying puts me in a weird relationship with the screen, the very thing that i should hate given all my big talk about being rna and stuff like that. but damn there’s a lot of dna work that i have to be doing right now. have to....... mm, that doesn’t feel right. it just doesn’t feel right. as much as i am LOVING learning all of this stuff about science and like becoming a more educated person, the whole fire under my ass of passing this weird test is making the whole thing just doesn't really mesh with my whole MOA. or i guess MO is the saying. i was thinking mechanism of action. see how they’ve poisoned my brain? i’m being dramatic. not poison. but still exhausting. and still causing me to have a lot of screen time. there’s not really a way to study without looking at the screen. they say practice questions is the absolute number one thing we need to be doing and most other things like listening to audio is a waste of time. like damn okayyyy ;_; . but nonetheless i persist and stuff. man idk.