sleepyhearted

"The cow jumped over the moon" - this is semantical nonsense? Possibility does not affect conveyance. Most anyone can clearly picture what's being communicated, so it's entirely semantically meaningful. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a lot closer to meaningless, for the reason its wikipedia article states, "no obvious understandable meaning can be derived from it." That still feels like a gross overgeneralization. Squeeze hard enough, and you can picture what's going on, and maybe even derive a form of meaning from it - the aforementioned wiki page has many examples. This meaning might end up being not obvious or understandable, but does that really make it devoid of conveyance? How about Hylics dialogue, which is randomly generated and often includes arcane and ancient words? Sample: "haughty platinum incomplete passion, exhume our dirt." These lines were truly intended to communicate nothing in particular - but does that mean they convey nothing? What gives our words power - their intended meaning, their obvious meaning, or their perceived meaning? Once they leave our minds, it is out of our control what effect they have, so maybe it's not worth worrying about. "All the things you say aren't the worth of your life, but leave the only lasting impression" - not as though any impression lasts.

I like to read books just to finish them and to put them on the shelf. Same for movies and JRPGs and stuff. Or I mean, my motivator for finishing a game, often more than seeing the end of the story or overcoming the challenge, is just to be able to add it to my pile, and then I can see what people have to say about it on the internet. This feels like a shallow motivator, like Miss Bernard Said, although I don't really feel ashamed about it. The action matters more than the motivation at any rate. At times I challenge myself to recount what happened in a book I've read or a game I've played months or years ago, to summarize the story as if I was speaking to someone unfamiliar with it, and sometimes it's pretty hard for me. If I'm not absorbing it properly because I'm rushing to finish, that means I might as well have burned it. It feels more relaxed going back through the pile, so maybe two rounds is all it takes.

In a short story I read about a character who had a shorter version of my name, who came from a town with a shorter version of my hometown's name that was in the same state as my own. In the story, this character was an author with writer's block who isolates in a decrepit Maine cabin with his girlfriend. He didn't particularly speak to me, although if I squeeze hard enough I could see myself in his stubbornness and his lack of faith in the narrator.

I had a small deconstructed bookshelf from target in the trunk of my car all summer, thinking that when I moved in with my roommates, I would put it in the living room and we could all get one shelf and it would reflect on us. Nobody but me had anything they wanted to put there, though, so it's all my stuff in there. I wonder if it bothers them that there's a lot of manga in there. I was just too scared to microwave food at 5 am so I just ate it cold.

1/26/2021

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Related works - Hylics, Downtiming by Camp Trash, Miss Bernard Said (manga), the logical structure of linguistic theory by Noam Chomsky, Ark of Godiva by Kleenex Girl Wonder, A faithful but melancholy account of several barbarities lately committed by Jason Brown. above art by john mclachlan.