This is all verbose juvenile sludge, but its my juvenile sludge, so it goes on the website regardless. granted, a lot of this work is borrowed voice

Short Story

He sits imprisoned in a foreign land, unknown vegetation under his feet, prickly, with a patronizing hostility, punishing those unaware of what is and what isn't. Men converse in strange tongues, lashing at each other with fricatives and guttural sounds from the deep recesses of their throats, ironically, likely uttering mundane actions, pleasantries, or anything uncharacteristic of the harsh wall of noise emanating from their mouths. The climate is cold, yet with a powerful sun, such that the world is momentarily plunged into an ashen winter depending on the clouds overhead, a nebulous reel of film modifying god's sunnier projections. The boy walks quietly along the white walls that enclose him with a languid expression on his face. He watches the other members of his entrapped clade toiling for as much as he can bear, then tries to dream as much as possible in an attempt to escape from the desolate reality that restrains him.

He has no memory of a prior experience, or from whence he could have come, possessing only the most rudimentary understanding of the local vernacular, enough to express desire for elementary substances: water, food. The other members, despite their suffering, care for him with a pitiful curiosity, and the wardens turn a blind eye to the ghost which encircles the world.

Once, in the boy's scanning of the walls which enclose them, he discovers a particular dark patch on the expanse of usually uniform concrete. Upon closer inspection, the patch comes into focus as a matrix of small painted strokes, and upon even closer inspection, the boy becomes surprised by his ability to comprehend such a random assortment of symbols. They speak of hope and splendor, of sorrow and tragedy, of love and hate, words that feel familiar yet unattributable, like the blurry recollection of a face one might have met, a reflection in water. Fragments of great tomes and scripture, some extensive record of a humanity reduced and flattened to some region of scrawled text, things past. Picking up a charred stick from the ground, he inscribes a reply, and begins the trudge to the glorious goal of slumber.

Over the course of years, they engage in their quiet conversation, leaving messages for the other to read. His correspondent writes of what had been, and he writes of what continues to be. As the boy becomes imbued with the context of history, of himself, he begins to age, flattened time expressing itself within the body, the awakening of some ancient, dormant pathogen. The boy, now the man, becomes more extensive with the length of his replies, the wall covered in miles of symbols, as if some mythological spider had danced around the perimeter with brushes attached to its legs, eventually becoming so densely overlapping that the walls seem to be entirely covered in random noise, only intelligible by those who constructed it.

The man becomes obsessed with discovering the identity of his correspondent with the zeal of an individual who finally tastes what they have missed, severed serene solitude. Denying himself his once prized sleep more and more, hoping to catch them in the act. Only when he finally succumbs to exhaustion does he discover another portion of the wall layered in barely intelligible script, and once he finally musters the ability to remain vigilant throughout the entire course of the night, the replies cease entirely.

The man’s insomnia becomes permanent, try as he might to atone for prior obsessions. As the mind becomes more and more exhausted, he begins to forget the meaning of things, the name of the grass beneath his feet, the food he eats, and finally, most destructively, how to interpret the expansive mass of black carbon before him. Reduced to an infantile state, he finally sleeps once more.

The boy wakes from his slumber confused, no memory of prior experience, or from whence he had come. He settles into a kind of routine, the other members caring for him with a pitiful curiosity despite their suffering, and he begins to explore the perimeter of the gray walls before him. Once, as he walks, the boy spots a lighter patch in the usually uniform wall. Upon closer inspection, the patch comes into focus as a matrix of small carved strokes, and upon even closer inspection, the boy becomes surprised by his ability to comprehend such a random assortment of symbols. He picks up a rock and begins to scratch in a reply…

The walls are covered and uncovered by the shadows of expression, clouds overhead passing through the light of the world, marked and erased by an eternally restless figure.

What my dreams look like

Homogeneous uniformity 

Like groundhog days or dead horses 

Papal hymns, repeated verses

Isn't it funny?

Escapes wasted

“what has” 

Not what could’ve or should've or would’ve or wouldn't have…

Why bother really, with all future locations?

Suppositions and Propositions and Dispositions 

Bark-in’ general*

Obsession with advancement

Brittle little coverings

Can I not be left-

Bereft of prescience, of foresight

To my myopic deposition?

*bark in general (brittle little coverings), Barking general, as in officer  shouting orders,( obsession with advancement(

the following was written when I was 16. A little angry innit. You can tell i was taking euro at the time, id edit it but it is what it is.

Nothing exists in a vacuum, and certainly not me. My character is my own creation- the thoughts, words, and actions said and done to me interpreted in my own patent manner, and yet the subunits of those perceptions are borrowed, their complexities divisible into common, shared elements, inherited genetically, socially, culturally. My grandfathers were awful men, by all stretches of the imagination. Arrogant drunkards, all 3 of them criminals ( 2 in the legitimate sense of the word), the third a soldier, and entirely absent in the raising of their children. The worst was my mother’s father, of the hobbesian persuasion : nasty, brutish, and short. As such, she developed a hatred for the virile latino, Ulibarrí’s (1) horse. Quick to anger and quicker to strike, patriarchal, womanizing, the universal constants of the struggling man. And yet, she married its mirror, masqueraded as a different flavor. Absent are the beatings, the confinement, the overt disrespect, but in their place: verbal lashings, a refusal to help pawned off as ‘inability’, and a hidden mistress. The origins of my existence are not love. The label of love was given to the fetishization of a foreign woman and escapism, packaged by gauze, traumatic adhesive, and delivered with an unconscientious acceleration. Of course, can anyone blame my father? Can anyone blame me? When does the child, dominated by its progenitor, make the transition to an autonomous body? Does it ever? Parental determinism extrapolated out from an original sin, the devil's serpent, Quetzalcoatl’s blood (2). Yet we know it has agency, almost from the very beginning, it utters sentences never heard before, has natural conceptions of fear, or love, unlearned intuition. Or are those yet another form of inherited trait, evolutionary instinct. 

I, naturally, attempt to distance myself from those who came before me. The pendulum’s swing, the Hegelian reaction, the third law pair. I lack the previously necessary adaptations of fiery passion, obstinate stubbornness, abrasives generated for the purpose of increasing friction, barely holding on. My disposition: agreeable, at times to the point of sheepishness. My appearance: softer. My romantic and sexual preferences on the periphery of the northern American zeitgeist, and certainly that of conservative-catholic-hispanics. Through the media I consume, I have attempted to find alternative role models for a more positive sort of masculinity, reading, watching and listening to all manner of different perspectives on what it means to be a man. In mere moments I encounter more varieties of opinion through the modern shifting kaleidoscope of information than my ancestors might have experienced in lifetimes. Hence the problem. Infinity equivalently comprehensible to 0 within the human psyche, indeterminate forms, the internet's firehose overexposing mental connections to null, to paralysis. What remains then, is the constant, generational influences. My relationships are consistently short flivers of sensationalism, antiquated biases are replaced with modern misconception. Youthful revolution exactly that, cyclical motion.

As I begin to grow into my body, to graduate from an androgynous, amorphous, state into a more clearly defined figure, the distrust remains, but directed at the self, insecurity, generationally sharpened to a point. Muscular definition derived from a late interest in athletics alien to skin and bone, the use of my anatomy upon another giving the sensation of self-violation. Introspection, like invasion.

These are the rivets of my armor, personal reasons, explanations and validations that construct my overdominant adaptations, useful only within the environment for which they were created. Your tone of silent anger, your tact, your political machinations of discontent were entirely alien forces. You are older than me, yes, but even if we were equal in age you would be still , wisdom a function of lived experience. Similar upbringings, but you have not hidden behind failure. 

The genesis of our argument was inconsequential, but I augmented its impact to an extreme degree, expecting reciprocal retaliation, as if I was playing an adversarial game. You looked upon me, a bitch unwilling to engage in the “playful” melodrama of her pups, an older brother doing schoolwork. For all my attempted auto-interrogation, I have only attempted to externalize the blame, to translate it upon another medium, avoiding personal responsibility at all costs. Even this admission is yet another way to accomplish the above,  selfish abuse to absolve a conscience. Such a ritual occurs periodically, the indulgent desire for reconciliation, a mind so egotistical that it believes acknowledgement of its own wrongdoing as ultimately effective, and the acknowledgement of the acknowledgement even more so. 

(1) referencing El Caballo Mago, a short story by sabine ullibari in which the horse represents masculinity lmao

(2) another creation story 

Photographic Amnesia

Been reading too much Susan Sontag, tried to imitate her voice but shes really academic so I just sound like a dick.

Photographers have a curious amnesia. In music, literature, painting: all these domains maintain an almost religious relationship to ancestry. The musician cannot escape Bach; the poet carries Frost (or if you're my age and insufferable, Kaur or Plath) like a phantom limb. This mythologizing of predecessors does not merely represent nostalgic reverence but establishes the crucial dialectic through which new work interrogates old forms. The inheritance is inescapable.

Photography's practitioners, however, operate in what might be called a perpetual present. Beyond the obligatory genuflection toward Adams' "sublime" landscapes or Weegee's brutal urbanity (references that have calcified into cliché rather than living influence, the hiker who schleps a tripod as if they needed to steady a daguerreotype, the class tourist), most photographers demonstrate a startling indifference toward their aesthetic forebears, often unoriginal but never engaging in an intentional theft or study. 

The conventional explanation, that photography consumes its practitioners with technical demands, collapses under scrutiny. The camera, that "democratic machine", requires minimal expertise. One gains a working knowledge of exposure, sharpness, color, in a concentrated half hour. The true complexity lies buried in engineering laboratories, physicists toiling away to make the process as sleek as possible; the technology has been black-boxed, rendered accessible through deliberate mystification of its underlying processes. (eh now that im thinking about it there really is a subgroup of people who obsess over settings and the like)

Even the analog chemistry, supposedly more craft-oriented, follows manufacturer prescriptions with minor deviations. The darkroom ritual amounts to preforming procedure with modest improvisation - hardly the profound technical immersion claimed in nostalgic defenses of the medium.  (darkroom editing is actually one of the coolest processes ive ever seen but this is about the vast majority of photographers, the people obsessing over the film look  are just sending it off to the lab)

There exists, of course, that peculiar affliction endemic to photography—what might be termed "gear acquisition syndrome" a subspecies of consumerist desire that has colonized vast territories of photographic discourse. The photographer's obsession with pseudo-technical minutiae- sensor dimensions, dynamic range, lens resolving power marketing buzzwords replacing substantive aesthetic inquiry. Forums and websites proliferate where heated debates rage over incremental improvements in machinery, and yet, these fixations often fade as soon as one has either made the purchase, lost interest, or entered a reactionary obsession over technical limitation, (the usual suspects being B&W and the aforementioned chemistry). The only individuals who manage to stay engaged in this cycle of acquisition are the older suburbanites whose coffers are filled by way of dentistry or some other bougie pursuit, the equipment itself pristine, unused.

What emerges from this ahistoricism is a population who's work is forever contemporary, perpetually amnesiac, while entirely convinced of its originality. The same ethereal landscapes and poverty pornography, either documenting the classically beautiful, or naively extending the definition.

---- 

Honestly, I don't mind. While I don't necessarily subscribe to the "whitmanequse" equality of every moment—there does exist some hierarchy of subject and composition, so many of the activities I preform are constantly obsessed with some sort of iterative mastery, its nice to have a gambling addiction.

Sundial 

Top down light. Theres a lot of kinds. Top down, Lights! - boudoir photo shoot. Top down, light - top chop shop slogan. Top down, lite - discount top chop shop slogan. But im most interested in the top down light that occurs at high noon in places like ecuador, or ecuatorial guniea, or any other place on the earths belt that isnt named for it specifically. ( i have since realized that due to earths tilt this does not occur at the equator but instead at about 23.4 degrees north or south, hence the term lahaina noon, named for lahaina hawaii). Everything looks like a poorly rendered video game, or like when you were a kid and put a toy in the bathtub underwater and it seemed to be cartoonishly flat. I like the idea of complex events removing information. Usually flatness is unintentional, or a symtom of a lack of budget or whatever, at least artistically. Maybe not for concrete pourers or roof installers or computer chip builders. I stand corrected, flatness is rather rare, its noise that isnt. It all comes back to noise, its all noisy. Anyway, overhead light, the world looks rendered poorly or whatever and then you see the people. Noses casting shadows down the face, cheeks hollow. everyone looks gaunt at high noon, especially with the sweat of the heat. Of course, bodybuilders prefer overhead light, makes their striations pop and their viens defined, but everyone else hates it. The recently bedded especially, " why the hell would you turn on the big light". Im not actually much of a lamp person. I mean, I have a few lamps in my room and sometimes Ill turn them on to read if I have allusions about being quaint, rain pitter pattering overhead, symbols illuminated by the warm dull glow of incandescent filament filtered by a plaid lamp shade... etc etc. normally though the lights stay off completely, my room instead filled with the light coming from my window whose blinds I cant quite close. too high up, and too far away from my loft's edge to reach. makes me wake up at sunrise every day, id say with the birds but I have to drive aways to see them. surrounded by concrete without the people, not even crumbs for pigeons. Just office building after office building. maybe thats why I think about light, being awake when most people are sleeping, watching the sun creep across glass facades that reflect nothing back but more glass, more concrete, more of the same geometric repetition that makes you forget what organic shapes look like. The shadows move but theyre predictable, mathematical, like someone plotted them on graph paper and said "here, this is where darkness goes at 7:23 PM" Its not mysterious shadows, the kind that dance and shift and hide things. Its administrative shadow, bureaucratic darkness that knows its place and stays there until the sun moves exactly twelve degrees and then shifts accordingly. slow rotation of the sun across identical surfaces, marking time like a very expensive, very boring clock.

performative aesthetics and gender radicalism (some woke shit)

uh ill define aesthetic in this context to be the elements of a group identity 

The online commodification of aesthetic is so obvious that it is now a commodified aesthetic to critically analyze the commodification of aesthetic, but I guess im going to do it anyway. Everything is folded over itself, flattened, synechdochized and reexamined. It feels cheesy to say, but Marx's idea of "commodity fetish" has been turned inward at the self, we exalt the product- performance, where once we mystified the social relations embedded in objects, we now mystify our own subjectivity as a marketable asset for the purposes of social capital, constantly exploiting ourselves to maintain the production.  This self-exploitation operates through what appears to be authentic self-presentation, masking the underlying labor of constant curation and emotional performance.

 Exploitation of ones own attention, the self, is the most efficient way to extract labor from a population, as each subunit believes in believes in their own control. Why shouldn't they, they're making their own conscious choices. However, in order to project allegiance to a particular community, ones essence has to legibly project an understanding of the communities expectations. This illusion of agency is precisely what makes the system so effective: the harder people work to express their individuality, the more standardized and commodified their output becomes (and then because it has a target market you can run ads on it yay!). A less established outgroup can then reasonably critique their homogeneity, and the whole cycle begins anew. (east asian internet culture is even more efficent bc they don't even have to delude themselves into pockets of conformity that's just like the goal).

Assisting the dominance of the internet, third spaces are dead or otherwise very profit focused. the internet is the only free alternative In the case of places like the gym, they've become vehicles to hone the performance instead of community spaces. In general, we've gone from experience to documentation, because this documentation is now profitable (either socially or economically) those providing the experience would like a larger piece of the pie.

A majority of these aesthetics are heavily gendered, which is no surprise. Usually the female aesthetics are more consumption based, the male aesthetics are more focused on some idea of self sacrifice, it goes both ways sure, there are male fashionistas and female body builders, but these social norms are ancient and expected. However, this gendered commodification of aesthetic reaches its most complex expression within transgender communities, where the fundamental stakes of aesthetic performance are amplified beyond social capital into questions of safety, recognition, and survival. The transgender experience is inherently aesthetically performative and incredibly laborious. Furthermore, due to the lack of significant real-world density in the transgender population, their communities exist largely online, precisely the spaces where aesthetic commodification is most intense.

The demands of passing (or successfully projecting the learned aesthetic of a particular gender) operate asymmetrically across gender lines, partly due to inherent biological factors: the effects of testosterone are far harder to reverse than to apply, but mostly due to the differing economic pressures that effect these communities. For transfeminine individuals, passing often requires learning to perform an exaggerated version of femininity- not because femininity itself is excessive, but because the online spaces where gender performance is learned prioritize visual legibility over the subtle social cues of embodied interaction. This hyperstylized femininity (not referring to drag here, drag is lowk historical atp), learned from highly curated digital spaces, creates a feedback loop where trans women must navigate both the general commodification of aesthetic and a specific fetishization that views feminization as the ultimate taboo transgression. The widespread (often negative) implication of the transgender community into our political consciousness has, like all taboos, created an industry specifically focused on the fetishization of transfeminine individuals. Due to a variety of factors (namely there not actually being that many trans people, the costs associated with transitioning, and the social stigma and economic discrimination many transfem individuals face), a significant portion of the traffic the online transgender community receives has been overtaken by the consumption of fetish content which leaks into the broader culture of the transfem community as a whole and contributes to the potentially distorted aesthetic standard within it, a sort of learned auto-fetishizaiton that leans into prexisting harmful narrative. 

The transmasculine experience operates along different parameters. Rather than hypervisibility, transmasculine aesthetic performance centers on achieving invisibility,  The aesthetic labor here is a subtractive medium: binders, packers, top sugery . Where transfeminine aesthetics involve amplification and addition, transmasculine aesthetics focus on strategic concealment, often leading to more generalized isolation.

Theres also nonbinary identity, which I guess inherently resists fixed categorization, but online spaces still often demand some sort of visual shorthand. In attempting to escape gendered performance, many nonbinary individuals find themselves funneled into a new kind of aesthetic, a curated androgyny that I dont really have to explain to you for you to get what I mean. This aesthetic is not universal or essential but it circulates widely because it's legible. 

if this comes across as reductive thats lowk the point