冰猫侦探社

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New year, older me

- 1/01/2023

This year I want your love and not my love back. Bounties taste sweeter when given without view of return; grants are loudlier lauded when received upon no merit. It is time to be touched, affected, and not discomfited by it. I know at any rate, be it that I hate myself beyond desert or that everything I touch tumbles beyond credit, this trial must be tried, this weight must be borne, this tax must be wiped, and this life must pass itself by, glorious or bland.

a cut of the day - iv

- 11/30/2022

Only the number of distractions caps that of my whims. I’ve sadly come to realise that I lose heart easily and will never stick at nothing. Aborted projects, partial writings, emerging sketches lie somewhere, plaintively, in some forlorn hopes of coming into use some day, until they pulp and smear, atomise and disappear into thin air. I command standards mightily higher than I command mastery, not least being that I enter upon matters I refuse to enter into—the gore and whiteness, the miniatures and traps of a body when anatomised, is what repels me from a direct observation. I live vicariously, in fancy and feelings, batering youth for flings, splurging over bread just for the warm smell. There's meaning in largess, and so much more of it in not seeking it.

Review: Man's Search for Meaning

- 11/28/2022

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl My rating: 1 of 5 stars I have time now to grudge this hell of a book some of my vehement reflections. First, why all these reiterations of the same ideas, why frame them with the exact words over and over again? I would’ve made allowances if it is one giant tome —it is not, however, with its 180-odd pages lengthwise (but in terms of the stop-and-start reading experience, it is surely a big time-consumer and bootless distraction for me). I’d have frowned less if these ideas are of value, worthy of empatic repetitions—they are not, however, original or ground-breaking (and I, a non-Christian, have come to detect most of the doctrines to be from Jesus himself); in point of fact, it is the parading and touting them as new and salutary that tick me off. Frankle was clear and adamant in his conviction that life should be a quest for meaning, and he brushed off pleasure and power as a worthy object to be pu...

a cut of the day - iii

- 11/24/2022

NO arrival of good news. I never swipe my phone open without forebodings. All my friends and I talk about seems not frustration enough to suit the occasion—a bed of mares, a mirror of tears, a house of pregnant pauses, and a life being every bit as it always ought to be.

a cut of the day - ii

- 11/21/2022

I am the freest man in the world—no jobs, no aspirations; no items to tick off, no pencil to twiddle; no hair to curl, no heel to cool; no need for feigned shame or overblown rage, no exposure to the human species or their putative moral obligations set upon me. I must be content, for I have all the slates to wipe, and streets to cross; I have every iota with me that makes who I am, every lucid thought within me to mirror the world I intrude myself upon. However, I, a wanderer who wonders at the vagrant, a conjurer who conquers the mystery of truth, always find my fate a straightway maze, the vast of which assures as well as contradicts every one of my senses. Thinking , I take them all out—my puny, wearish thoughts, and iron them down, fold them up into collages of geometries, and stow them away in the draw; and then unthinking I upset the draw, and go over the ritual, thinking , and not realising .

a cut of the day - i

- 11/20/2022

I spend too much time sleeping, time that would not have elsewhere to be placed than in devising meaningless, pregnant thoughts, deep like alluvion, heavy like manacles. Eyes shut, the mind is at peace, hopefully, a peace that is hard-fought, treasured up, too precious to be stirred at, too friable for an excited dream to break. To achieve a state of somnolence when the mind is active and phosphorescent takes more pains than fighting droopy eyelids. The latter is merely a physical tussle; the former a travail on the mind. Now I am sitting behind the glum, fake wood table, boring into the short pass way to the flimsy door that jolts and moans whenever someone passes by from the other side; though every switch is flipped up, the lighting in the room is meager and I can barely see one scintilla boucing from any reflective surface. I am thinking, shallow, happy thoughts—in the present day, there seem less and less of them—those pert, ebullient scums on the surface of a still, composed...

Daybreak/Dayclose

- 11/18/2022

The dark, starless sky is going out like a travelling wave; the bed, bare as mine, on which lie raspy, white hot planets and other bodies, takes away all the fanciful astrological notions proper to a medieval academic. I slink down along the headboard on my spine and then feeling no sleep right myself back up. How wakefulness keeps me up and useless in my convolutions is a mystery ancient as time. Every cell, troubled by overthinking and irregularity, rages against me; I know for sure I won’t be living long, but what a long jump would that be if death were not ground enough. (crack of dawn) Waiting in line to do the routine swab test, I found a familiar cart selling sugar-glazed hawberries (neatly threaded on wooden skewers) and it made me happy. Handmade food gives me not only comfort but hope that is not crushed by mass brutalisation, and a sturdiness that gains by the weight it bears, and a loveliness all the more prettier against dark back cloth. (late evening)

IV

- 10/13/2022

Out a verse is yawned, Now a calmer eye might shut. Of nothing is life; Thus about something It must be!

III