"Why do you make music?"

I asked several of my friends who were musicians. I don't remember the exact words, but I just remember how different the answers were.

"I feel alive when I'm playing live," said one friend, who led the campus party band.

"I'm fascinated by music that doesn't make sense to me, and I love exploring it," said another friend, who ruminated in drone and noise.

"I want to express the feelings I had, and I want to help the audience feel, too," said yet another, who weaved his own stories into songs.

Each one of them had experienced a lot of hardship throughout their lives. And through it all, they always made music.

Existence is a terrifying thing, and at least a tiring thing when it's not.

Expression, perhaps, is the only bearable reaction to it.

Some express themselves with sounds, images, and videos. Others through their work, relationships, and obsessions. And we all express ourselves with our words and actions.

Nieztsche, who explored the depressing depths of existence, wrote:

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

This week, we explore the expressions of existence.

(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ

– ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊ ⅋ yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑

The Successful Exit Personality Guide

A modern take on appropriate post-exit entrepreneurial behavior

1 successful exit

After a single successful exit, you’ll finally be ready to take a horny East Asia trip like you thought you would at age 22. Forget about the fact you’re 35 now and accidentally established an actual life and family in a city. For the past decade, you’ve been grinding your face off to fill the void you would have overcome if you had taken that trip in the first place. Now, it’s time to reap the reward. Go be a traveler, son, and don’t forget that you’re special and everyone else deserves to rot away behind a desk while you’re doing ayahuasca with your zany travel buddies.

2 successful exits

Okay wow look at you, you didn’t even make it past Series A this time and someone already snatched your company up. Maybe the tech wasn’t as good this time, maybe you paid someone else to build it. The point is, you schmoozed your way up through the corporate circle jerk to the top of dick mountain and it only took three martinis and a couple of Zoom calls to convince a panel of billionaire lizards that your company will make them richer than all of their already rich friends.

So where do you stand? Well, it’s probably about time to start getting into venture capital I suppose. Get a few board positions, become a chairman, roast a few bright-eyed Stanford dropouts for thinking their university clout would make their business successful. All the classic stuff. You’ve had two companies so now you’re actually going to be useful as a VC. Portfolio companies will come to you for advice and you’ll give it to them; they’ll be happy and speak about you with reverence. Good work!

3 successful exits

It’s unclear whether you’ll even be able to read this guide at this point because you’re such a hyper-evolved being that you’ve transcended the ability to read. You’re as good as Midas himself and you’ve probably gotten into the longevity movement too. If not, go get yourself an ice bath and a sauna because we gotta keep you alive for as long as possible.

You’re still a VC but years of advising founders has created a plane of separation between you and reality. You haven’t been paying attention to your wardrobe recently but a surprising amount of your garments are long capes with bright stars embroidered on them. You clutch a muted staff as you give your advice to the young entrepreneurs. They can’t understand what you’re saying and feel overwhelmed but they see that staff you’re holding and aren’t prepared to fuck around and find out. Empty screams of despair echo through the hallways of your giant home. You vaguely feel like you could take out the average burglar in hand-to-hand combat.

4+ successful exits

As someone who's never sold a company, I don't feel qualified to give advice in the 4+ realm. Take care of yourself, dawg, and don't forget to give to charity every once in a while.

The Last Pencil

An analysis of a poem yet to be written

I was walking around a lively farmers market this week, when I came across a poet taking requests on the street.

"Dogs," said a friendly family. "Flowers," said a happy couple. I decided to prompt him too:

A poem about the last pencil on earth. A post-apocalyptic society where culture is fading because nobody has access to self expression. The last pencil becomes a status symbol for those whose history will be written, and societies fade to illiterate social groups where hierarchy and is dominated by gang violence and petty internal politics.

He looked at me for a moment, bewildered, then told me:

...Write it yourself.

Now, The Last Pencil is just a poem I was supposed to write, and maybe that's all it will ever be.

The poem was supposed to be about the burning desire for self-expression, it's something we all feel. The point was to liken self-expression to a basic resource, a resource people are willing to fight for. It would have been a contemporary allegory because modern people all have the urge for self-expression but their basic needs are mostly met. In this parallel world, the expression itself is a basic need like food and water.

The Last Pencil carries undertones of loneliness, which you could define as the lack of socialization. Socialization, clearly, is a basic need. We've known this since those fucked up monkey experiments Harry Harlow conducted in 1958. By pushing the characters in the story to the end of their capabilities in pursuit of the pencil, we are emphasizing this fact.

Loneliness is a powerful concept in life and literature. When you write, even if it’s in your own journal, you are forming a parasocial relationship with your reader. That reader could be you in the future, or anyone. Writing soothes loneliness because self-expression is a relationship with other people. I want to write this poem, I want to publish it, I want you to read it. The problem is that I can't:

because I'm running out of lead.

Terry A. Davis (1969 - 2018)

Terry Davis was a schizophrenic computer programmer who documented his descent into madness online as he live-coded his proprietary operating system, Temple OS, from scratch. As one observer noted, TempleOS is basically 'an outsider technical art'.

In the eyes of the world, Terry was a severely ill person, whose psychopathic delusions, conspiracy theories, and racial slurs evoked both sympathy and mockery. In Terry's mind, he was simply a vessel through which God could program.

The story of Terry Davis is one of the wildest rabbit holes I've ever found myself in. Or have I been in his rabbit hole the whole time?

“When my bird was looking at my computer monitor, I thought, 'Whoa! That bird has no idea what he's looking at!' And yet, what does the bird do? Does he panic? No, he can't really panic. He just does the best he can. Is he able to live in a world where he's so ignorant? Well, he doesn't really have a choice. Yeah, he can kind of live. Usually the bird’s okay even though he doesn't understand the world, he can kind of learn what's safe and what's dangerous. So, uh, that's where I’ve been living. I think if I had to guess, I think I'm in a mental program. I have had a fake internet, and I've been struggling to tell them it's God, but they don't listen. You're that bird looking at the monitor, and you're thinking to yourself, 'I can figure this out.' And you know, maybe you have some bird ideas. Maybe that’s the best you can do.”

– Terry A. Davis

Terry died in 2018, after tragically getting struck by a train at the age of 48. We pray he escaped his simulation.

Add to my blockchain bro

Just one more block bro please bro just one more block

Crabs

you may or may not like them

but you have to agree that they are objectively little meat for a lot of work. they have a low meat-to-work ratio, and a high probability of making you cut yourself.

although they have many legs, i believe 8 or 10 of them in total, most of them are too small and you can’t eat it.

besides, you're usually just eating the hand of the crab, because they're the only big ones. all the other things are legs and they're too small.

Highways

I rarely have road rages. The only time I felt it was not against another person, but when I missed the highway exit, missed the loop around, and had to drive 14 miles and back. There are not many things I hate enough to care or care enough to hate. But I hate how confusing highway exits are.

But reframing is a helpful tool to regulate such road rages. For example, if there's an asshole driving 30 miles over the speed limit, I always just think, "maybe his mother is dying at the hospital right now." I'm the only one who loses out by being angry, so might as well just give that asshole the blessing of the doubt.

I was recently reading a chapter in Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity. After a book full of optimizing our physical health, the author writes the last chapter about the importance of emotional health, which is much broader and more complex than mental health, along with a very raw account of his own journey through it. In it, he wrote something similar:

I had been practicing mindfulness meditation since I left the Bridge [a psychological trauma recovery center], with obviously mixed results, but I did begin to develop occasional flashes of insight, moments when I was able to detach myself from my thoughts and emotions. It’s not complete detachment in the sense that we’re checking out, but we want to create enough of a gap between stimulus and response so that we are not simply reacting reflexively to things that happen, like a driver who cuts us off in traffic or angry or distressing thoughts that we might have. That gap, in turn, allows us to process the situation in a calmer and more rational way. Do we really need to honk and curse, and potentially make the situation worse (even if the guy deserves it)? Or is it better to simply accept what happened and move on? Mindfulness helps us reframe it: The other driver may be rushing to the hospital with a sick child, for all we know.

And now, I am able to also see the highway exits from their perspective and forgive them:

quantized_quotes

A motherfucker is just a guy that fucks his mom. That's universal.

– ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊

I've just been doom-scrolling YouTube shorts... on my DESKTOP. That was an all time low.

– yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑

audio.wav

Eric Jamal, your favorite rapper you've never heard of. This song goes hard in the mf paint no way around it. If Eric Jamal isn't on your radar yet, he's about to be. A master of lyricism, musicality, rhythm, and tone, you'll be hard-pressed to find an Eric Jamal song that doesn't absolutely slap. This one goes particularly hard.

Ween is a two-person rock band from New Hope, Pennsylvania, population 2,000. They're known for their lyricism, as expressed in this 20-second poetry.

And of course:

It's not what you look like
When you're doin' what you're doin'
It's what you're doin' when you're doin'
What you look like you're doin'!

prompts.bib

1. Ex(hib)it 1
   /imagine a tech startup founder in a spiritual journey of ayahuasca
2. Ex(hib)it 2
   /imagine A photo of a tech startup founder schmoozing his way up the corporate circle jerk and selling his company panel of billionaire lizards with Martinis
3. Ex(hib)it 3
   https://s.mj.run/50A7NMkCjJk A billionnaire lizard in magic cape with embroidered stars