IV: More like Me & Less like You



I woke up this morning & my brain, the dank memer that it is, decided that it wanted Linkin Park’s “Crawling” to play on repeat as I showered, shaved, brushed my teeth, dressed, packed my lunch of leftover beef stroganoff, & surfed Twitter, finding myself unable to speak with some of my comrades, stolen as they were, silenced in the dead of night by that triumvirate satan whose cerebus head is composed of @jack, @Evan_McMullin, & @heerjeet…

I drank some coffee from my thermos. On my amble to the subway I smoked the bottom half of an American Spirit I’d snubbed the night before. Despite my attempts of drowning it out with a recent Jordan Peterson interview (Jung, Solzhenitsyn, Dante, & my oh my the Tower of Babel), nothing could mute the mantra:

Crawling in my skin

these wounds they will not heal

Fear is how I fall

Confusing what is real.

Yes Chester, it is confusing, what is reeee-yull…

My mind is mostly free during my hours of wageslavery, as my tasks only take up about 50% of my cognitive CPU on average, sometimes spiking, sometimes dipping to nothing. Here’s a thought I had today. Can you imagine being a normie? I think I can approximate it sometimes. It’s like drinking so much cough-syrup that you achieve bicameral consciousness, but instead of hearing your own thoughts from a dissociated perspective in the null space of nonbeing, you dutifully monitor the radiowaves of mediocristan, mimeographing its mass-media memes & recording counterfeit mental magnetizdats of Jon Oliver quips to play for your colleagues later, by the workplace coffee machine, which is dissipating to dust before your eyes (you ignore this). “Yes, it is funny, that the Clown President isn’t funny to me” (your laughter is forced).

Confusing what is real

You have to pity them somewhat. Perhaps we’ve grown somewhat used to our predicament, having long been aware that we reside is a parody simulation run by a trickster with a merciless wit & a penchant for contrapasso. Normies are confused by the real. They were confused long before it got so goddamn complex. It takes an absurd amount of effort to fight off the fourth-dimensional egregores feasting on the delicious emotional expulsions of your loosh, never mind maintaining skepticism on matters of political intrigue when mass-belief has never been so effectively managed.

Caught in the undertow,

just caught in the undertow

Small talk on the day’s first cigarette break. One of the other smokers in the office. Portly pakistani who likes to go on late night benders. He’s far more flagrant with his funds than one should be at his age. One imagines he’s trying desperately to get laid. I like him anyway. He’s a part of our gift economy of loosies. Bumming cigs is a karmic system which bonds us in a smoke samsara. He tells me about his interest in Dan Carlin & Genghis Khan. I missed something he said, thinking about the connection between Linkin Park & Skrillex, how nu-metal slowly morphed into dubstep, the soundtrack to the Transformers films, Shia Labeouf falling asleep during them like I had, somehow lullabied by the sounds of warring machine titans, destroying themselves in animated spectacle, whatever happened to Megan Fox? I said: “Sorry, still waking up” gesturing to my second coffee and cigarette, “Stimulants. Built the West. All of this,” gesturing to the mammonic monoliths that surround us & the Stock Exchange. “Tobacco” he says, nodding. He hasn’t considered this before, but he’s interested. “Coffee, sugar, chocolate, gasoline, cocaine, amphetamines-” I can see the connections forming behind his eyes. “High fructose corn syrup” he says. “Exactly,” I say, “That’s one thing I love about America. It’s symbolically corny. Bottom to top. Nascar, Pro-Wrestling, McDonalds, Linkin Park. Even better. Everything here is made out of corn. You can’t escape the corniness.” He chuckles, “I never thought of that before.”



There’s one thing I don’t know still.

Does he think I’m being ironic?

Do I trust some and get fooled by phoniness,

Or do I trust nobody and live in loneliness?

Where did this notion that irony and sincerity exist in a dialectical relation come from?

Irony is a tool. Irony is a weapon. Irony is a medium, a mood, a stratagem, a lens.



But Irony is not a weltgeist. Irony cannot be an identity. Irony as an identity, especially when it is one’s identity ironically, is nothing but a reification of recursive meaninglessness. & even this is just a spurious smoke & mirror sham, the escape rout of an embarrassed cephalopod, hiding behind a veil of ink when threatened by a scuba diver, who may see the man, the corporeal & sweating pig-fleshed sinner & worse, he might detect his pain, the burden of Pagliacci.



There’s a place so dark you can’t see the end

Skies cock back and shock that which can’t defend

The rain then sends dripping acidic questions

A boy is born in Phoenix Arizona, the American desert, the year 1976. His mother is a nurse. His father works double shifts as a police detective, obsessively tracking child sex abuse cases. Situational Irony. The boy, decades later, says: “I STARTED getting molested when I was about seven or eight… It was by a friend who was a few years older than me. It escalated from a touchy, curious, ‘what does this thing do’ into full-on, crazy violations. I was getting beaten up and being forced to do things I didn’t want to do. It destroyed my self-confidence. Like most people, I was too afraid to say anything. I didn’t want people to think I was gay or that I was lying. It was a horrible experience. The sexual assaults continued until I was 13.”

His parents divorce when he’s eleven years old. His father gets custody. He doesn’t see his mother much. He doesn’t see his father much, too busy looking everywhere but under his own nose. He says: “It was an awful time. I hated everybody in my family: I felt abandoned by my mom, my dad was not very emotionally stable then, and there was no-one I could turn to – at least that’s how my young mind felt. The only thing I wanted to do was kill everybody and run away.”

He’s beat up at school. He’s skinny. He’s weird. He becomes obsessed with grunge music , the Stone Temple Pilots in particular. He writes poetry. Fills notebooks with sketches. He also likes Depeche Mode. He starts a band called Grey Daze. Watch him play in ‘94.

Concurrently, he’s doing lots of drugs. “Getting high, drinking a lot and having sex with a lot of great girls is a pretty good escape.” A wry smile. “I took everything. I got really, really bad. Until I was 16, I was doing a ton of LSD and a lot of drinking. Then, when we couldn’t find acid, we turned to speed because it was cheap and it worked really, really well. I got really bad, really quickly. On a normal day, my friends and I would go through an eight-ball. We were smoking it in bongs – I was doing bong-hits of meth. It was ridiculous. Then we’d smoke opium to come down, or we’d take pills, or I’d drink so much that I’d shit my pants. It was not pretty.”

He works at Burger King. It kills him. He spends his profits on meth. At 17 he moves back in with his mother. She’s shocked at the sight of her emaciated meth addict son. She keeps him locked in the house. He smokes pot and drinks still, to fight the cravings. Soon, he’s raised himself to the level of being a functional alcoholic. His band gets local acclaim, selling out venues in Phoenix on their own, but the national attention never comes. The band slowly disintegrates over career concerns. He’s married now. He’s 22. He works at a “digital services firm.” Then he turns 23.



March 20, 1993. He receives a fateful phone call.

Hybrid Theory is formed.



I recommend the rest of the story. It’s a good read.

It’s easy to make fun of a song like “Crawling.” It’s even pretty funny. But consider the man who wrote this song. He had this to say about it: “It’s easy to fall into that thing – ‘poor, poor me’, that’s where songs like ‘Crawling’ come from: I can’t take myself. But that song is about taking responsibility for your actions. I don’t say ‘you’ at any point. It’s about how I’m the reason that I feel this way. There’s something inside me that pulls me down.” How edgy…

I listened through Linkin Park’s discography over the day. Their first two albums are pretty good listens, Hybrid Theory standing out as most cohesive, but there are decent singles after that (the albums, in general, become more & more unmemorable). I can appreciate them on any way I choose, Ironically, Sincerely. I can appreciate the attention to detail & devotion of an artist like Tabbycosplay2, who puts an incredible amount of effort into making videos using the Sims as an amateur animating platform. I can also appreciate the absurdity of the fact of their existence.

I remember playing The Movies as a child. I was entirely uninterested in the “running the business” side of the game. I played the sandbox mode. For hours I would make movies, stunning myself with constant revelations. My greatest of all was realizing that I could decorate the set with shrubs to give the illusion of a forest, and thus, scale. Then I could dress my actors in monster costumes, and thus, make Kaiju films, perhaps even cutting away to a group of people in a separate set made up to look like the control system of a gigantic robot. (I wish I had the ones I made, but they’re gone forever, on the hard-drive of an expired familial HP).

The nu-sincerity is the recognition that each of us is a parody of ourselves, as we stand in estranged relation to our digital bodies, as we are the crafters of the simulated selves we maneuver in our second lives. We animate masks of our own design, using whatever materials & ingenuity are available to us. We must not be squids, hiding from this fact with occlusion. No. We must be cyborg hermit crabs, tearing what we can from the alienated artifacts that have washed ashore from digital seas. We live inside this habitus.

None of us is any more or less absurd than any other. We all love the artifacts that we have fashioned ourselves a home out of. We love them IRRATIONALLY, absurdly. Sure, we can talk about particular elements that attracted us, but at base, these elements are not what we love. We love them as they are our property. Perhaps we shuffle off this shell for another, as we shuffle off and change our “likes,” our subscriptions, our favorites, for something new that we’ve stumbled upon. & perhaps down the line, should we see our former abodes, we feel a disquieting and uncanny sense, that we now stand in ironical relation to it, but knowing that once we were quite sincere in loving it. I say we can love it still.



If you know me at all, you know that the Nabokovian corpus is my favorite above all, with its spiralic psychedelic structures, its Mandelbrotian butterflies fluttering softly by my inner ear, tickling the candlewick of my spine. Pale Fire is one of the greatest works of Literature in the 20th century, & this essay is itself informed by my many readings & rereadings of it.



So I thought I would leave you with a synchronistic juxtaposition I’ve found, quite serendipitously, in my excursion into Hybrid Theory.

I watch how the moon

sits in the sky in the dark night

Shining with the light from the sun

And the sun doesn’t give light to the moon assuming

The moon’s going to owe it one

-Linkin Park “A Place for My Head”





The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction

Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief,

And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;

The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves

The moon into salt tears; the earth’s a thief,

That feeds and breeds by a composture stol’n

From general excrement: each thing’s a thief:

The laws, your curb and whip, in their rough power

Have uncheck’d theft.

-Shakespeare (Timon of Athens, Act IV Scene iii)