Winter slumber envelops my brain and my soul,
I struggle to see through the wind in my face
Snowflakes in their flight form invisible lace
I pass through the dots to arrive at the place
This route lacks the spirit; it's sucked out of here
Through drizzles of snow and cigarette stubs
When sun disappeared ages ago
Replaced by headlights and ghosts in the mist
It was a very long night,
Dead frozen ground evokes wave of fatigue
I'm waiting for the wind to subside
I need more vitamins and the sound of the drums
There is a suffocating constant semidarkness outside after this thick blanket of clouds crept from the horizon and covered everything. And the sun became invisible again.
It's like reliving, again and again, one particularly unpleasant winter day. Flakes of snow float lazily towards the ground, turning into slush. Drizzle turns into snow and back into drizzle again. Pavements never get dry. Drivers don't bother to circumvent deep puddles of dirty water anymore and ride right through them, splashing the sidewalks with fountains of mud.
The general tension grows in people around. It's visible in their eyes, in nervous, jerky movements, angry glances. Some glare intently at some point in front of them as if looking at some invisible object they need to reach.
Big clumsy sagged snowflakes land onto the grass, dissolving into cold freezing water, soaking the ground. The grass, flowers fade and wither. An impenetrable veil of grayness and dusk dissolves everything.
The sound of rain supplies a usual familiar rhythm. Like the sound of the clock, you stopped noticing. It creates a constant background, a ghostly voice, whispering with spite that there will never be any dry surface and joy.
Headlights penetrate the dusk with an intensity of electric arcs. They make everything around invisible. Their silent message is - look, there is nothing except this painful intensity of cold light. There is nothing to focus on except this blast of the supernova.
There is a rhythm of rain and whispering of wheels. Everything else is motionless and silent, like a photograph with its colors fading away.
Gradually the surroundings take a strange and haunted look. In this freezing mist shapes of people are indistinguishable from ghosts. Maybe, this all too is a product of somebody's dream where we all act as figments of this person's imagination. Maybe, this person is highly depressed, and the feeling is mirrored in this dreary dusk. If the objective reality could symbolize some psychological state, it feels like a perfect representation of bipolar rollercoaster with short, tentative periods of sun and warmth followed by freezing drizzle and slush, when cold slowly creeps inside.
Sometimes my brain is wound up to such degree that I feel sparkles flying between my neurons and a buzzing feeling of fever.
And, at the same time, there is a feeling of fatigue, making it difficult to compose coherent sentences.
On the other hand, without this train of thoughts, providing an outgoing channel for this heat, the brain turns upon itself with the scorching blaze of destructive energy.
So I kinda try to channel all that extra energy outside. Although, I realize it sounds pretty weird and doesn't make much sense. Anyway.
The feverish air of autumn heat. The orange blaze of the sun, and leaves turning tired and dry. Everything falls into the state of suspension. Like, something is going to happen. The tension is palpable, dense, and heavy.
It feels like a replay of the summer on the film. The film is touched by the yellow hue of passing time, fatigue, and exhaustion. Days, following one after another and attempts to make sense of this all. Finding the right way among the crossroads. Getting lost and ending up with this fear and the fear of the night. Too much caffeine and misgivings.
Ducks gather at the spot where spectators throw them breadcrumbs. The pond presents a magnificent view and smells terrible. The yellow light of the early evening sketches the eastern side of the pond with an amazing clarity. Every small detail is visible like on a perfectly rendered 3d model. Worries about grammar and style and correctness of sentences.
I wonder what is more depressing; the long sequence of failures or the long sequence of successes. I think the latter. Like, when it's the former, you feel like you are at the beginning of something, some story. A story full of challenges, adventures, difficulties. In other words, things, distracting from the thought that life is pretty dull sometimes.
So, this is the beginning of a story with a carrot of success dangling at the end. And when after years of struggle the success eventually comes, you realize that it's cool, but it doesn't make you happy. Whatever meaning you put in this word.
So it's the most difficult and depressing moment when again you stand at the crossroads, trying to choose a correct way. After a string of failures, you know that you are on the right track. And life begins to make sense once again.
When summer ends, I always wonder what this winter is going to be like. Like, winter is somewhat of a descent into some pit full of troubles, the point of balance on the brink of survival. Like, it's some emotional black hole, and you skate along its edge, risking to fall below the horizon of events, or whatever. Like, it sucks in all the light, and there is no escape. At the same time, it's like a song about birds flying to the north. Always to the north.
This song reminds me of the temporariness of everything in my life. Mostly people. Which is pretty sad, but it's similar to a situation when you can't stay anywhere for long. Because you are always compelled to continue your motion. And over time the terrain becomes wilder. Still, there is something about it. Something that makes sense.
The sparkling of neurons and fever subside, the outside world is consumed by darkness so dense as if somebody has thrown a thick blanket over everything. Now it looks like a big dark closet with some dim light bulbs glowing in its corners.
There is that feeling of the overflow of incoming stimulus. The flow is hindered by all the possible forms of delays and interruptions.
Things, disrupting a normal stream of consciousness, requiring to pause and wait for endless events to be finished. This is when the brain begins to boil in exasperation, feeling that precious minutes are stolen in a flurry of small pauses. Those message boxes, diverting my attention and compelling me to wait, while something is getting completed in the inscrutably irrational depths of software algorithms.
Various symbols convey a message; Sit and wait. Time and again, it breaks down my rhythm, the continuity of what I was doing just before. And then the brain goes blank. It takes twice as much time to get back to the productive flow of thoughts.
And then there is a next interruption as if the computer algorithm was specifically designed to render my brain helpless and floundering.
Every app has its arsenal of small and annoying distractions. Eventually, I add up the time I spend fighting those distractions, time I spend to get back on track, time I spend, waiting for the computer brain to make its inscrutable decisions.
Meanwhile, the computer screen shows me a spinning sign, indicating that I should patiently wait until it solves whatever it is, it's trying to solve. Sometimes I think that those are things that have nothing to do with me. Like, maybe, it calculates some cosmic problems or trying to decide, what would be the best way to take over the world.
So if I add up all this time spent in such a way, it's a lot of time. And also it leaves a feeling of a slight brain hemorrhage, and that my IQ dropped several points in the process.
It makes me furious, how all those apps instead of making my life more efficient apparently consider that my life should be completely devoted to the maintenance of their well-being. Like, they persistently show me cheerful notifications, indicating that they want to be updated, their settings need to be adjusted and other bullshit.
And after I press update, the App joyously shows me an update progress bar for eternity. Then it gets stuck somewhere in the middle. Then it shows me a sad message that they have failed to update because of some inscrutable reasons, involving a chunk of machine code I couldn't care less about. Then it urges me to go to a technical support page, containing somewhat twenty enormous paragraphs, none of which is related to this problem whatsoever.
At this point, I realize that I've spent a huge amount of time doing something completely different from what I initially planned to do. Namely, maintaining a well-being of computer apps, as if they have already conquered humanity and made me their slave.
So then I delete those annoying apps just in case, mourning in the process all the valuable time this app has stolen from me. I don't know maybe it's just me. But sometimes I cannot stand all this bullshit
Anxiety and a process of producing a constant stream of consciousness as a tool to eliminate it. What if you are anxious about not being able to formulate coherent thoughts in your mind, encased in words. Or the words are too commonplace and boring.
There is an irony in it. Because increasing anxiety boosts the stream of consciousness, which in turn boosts anxiety until they merge into a quickly accelerating vicious circle.
I'm really glad I've learned this technique. It really works in most cases. Even when my mind wildly turns on itself in a feat of obsessive introspection. In the worst case, I guess. It would feel like talking on the phone and hearing my own voice seconds later messing up the brain profoundly. When there are two voices in my head; one conducting normal internal monologue and the other analyzing critically everything the first voice says, pointing out the most blatant and obvious errors and asking it to shut up.
Although, of course, it only leads to an increase in anxiety and makes the first voice to go on even more frantically. This serves my purpose. Which is to maintain a high level of alertness. Not letting approaching autumn fatigue to make my brain sleepy and dull. Like when you wake up in the morning and feel like your head is full of cotton and all the thoughts have to push through this cotton. Which makes thinking process really slow and frustratingly painstaking.
Too much caffeine though makes the neurons to short-circuit and me getting obsessed with small and unimportant details. Then this smoking mess of mixed up signals can be channeled out by an internal monologue.
Even when part of the consciousness screams that this internal monologue might contain errors and isn't really colorful, and all the words in it are too commonplace. In any case, it does its job channeling anxiety into something tangible that afterward can be thrown away.
Sometimes it seems there is no room for any new information in my head. I cannot digest it; it feels like an attempt to squeeze something into a suitcase already full to bursting. Then it's easier to spill something, writing it down as if I release this pressure, or maybe it's a form of information processing or just maintaining the balance of input and output. I dunno exactly what it is, but, in any case, it forms a certain cycle. At some point, the process of consuming information brings my brain into a state of frenzy. Then it's easier to write. In case the brain still has some energy for this activity. Which is usually the case. Like switching to a higher gear in order to prevent the engine from burning out. Something like that.
When there is not enough energy to write something coherent I can introspect. This is the easiest thing to do since I already do it mentally. Just to release a flow of thoughts to balance input and output. And allow this flow to turn into something tangible like typed text. And maintain a habit of thinking with my fingers, which might come in handy at some point. So it might make sense, or maybe it doesn't make any sense, in any case, it's a way to maintain sanity against an overflow of external stimuli.
If I could switch from empty introspection to writing something more substantial, it could become a valuable exercise. Maybe I would already have written some sort of book or something. Since it's nothing more than introspection I can console myself that I keep writing something even when I have nothing to say, and writing block reaches a new low of inability to formulate anything coherent or focus on one thing longer than a minute without forgetting it. Or just allow this flow of consciousness to alleviate the pressure in my brain, induced by staffing too much data into it. There are flows and ebbs. Sparkling of frazzled neurons. Like, it's a switch on a high voltage line, which I turn on and off seeing how blue electric arcs dance in the air. Then after this flow gets slower and weaker I can scale up the pressure again and repeat the whole cycle.
It's getting colder, and there are occasional snowflakes drifting through the air. All the neurons and various part of the brain short-circuited and burned out, producing fireworks of sparkles. And the sleepiness flows throughout the space, flooding all around, carrying away few remaining leaves, dried and brown, stripped from their colorful glamour.
The sun leaps from the clouds cheerfully, pouring fountains of light over everything, then disappears and the snowflakes lazily float in a chilly obscurity. There are a constant hum and whisper of the endless stream of traffic. Patterns of silence are disrupted by surreal sounds of bells, weaving chaotic and mesmerizing rhythm, dissolving organically in a quiet chorus of honks, sirens, rustle of tires, revving engines, everything silenced by distance and barriers and a wall of sleepy darkness.
Darkness becomes dense and impregnable like a layer of insulation compartmentalizing islands of light that begin to float wobbling and spinning through the icy blackness of open space to the infinity. Followed by snowflakes woven from crumpled gossamer, slowly rotating, moving slowly and with indifference, spreading from the center to outermost corners of the void. The barking of a dog disrupts the reverie and pins the unfolding reality back to its normal position. This sound, distinct from a slow, hypnotic whirlpool of murmurs, and whispers, and monotonous beeps brings reality back, restores its shape, puts objects to the places where they initially stood. Then rustles and swishes once again slowly begin to spin a spiderweb of drowsiness, and the reality gradually begins to spiral out, with those snowflakes moving evenly through the vastness of the freezing and expanding universe.
Drowsiness like a blanket slowly shrouds nerve endings, still emitting cracking sparkles and wisps of blue smoke and the smell of burning insulation. It fills the surroundings with a bubbling mass of hazy clouds, and the sounds begin to drift away becoming imperceptible and otherworldly. The picture drawn by sounds out of sync with a static, immobile view of space, illuminated by a dim incandescent light. A whiff of the air traverses the outer space and makes the snowflakes whirl and spin and dance spastically. Stars scattered over the blackness emit pallid luminance.
Coiled like a metal spring, rushes of adrenaline flowing through his body, making his eyes white and wide, his teeth bare, ready to snarl, to snap, to jump. Seeing things in the shadows. Seeing reality around him tightened, filled with tension.
His muscles involuntarily tensed, his thoughts rushed like a flood, while he tried to take them under control, to form a normal stream of consciousness that would allow him to figure out what to do next.
A dim incandescent light glowed, illuminating the room filled with rustles and murmurs. Full of ghostly voices that started to condense in the corners, gathering, getting ready to assault.
He threw glances back and forth, too scared to move, feeling that total stillness would help to postpone the assault, nerves too frazzled, silent scream choked in a tightly closed throat unable to escape. Trembling fingers, cold sweat, intense stare, registering things around without being able to really understand, what is it before it.
The unbearable tension of a high voltage wire, blue sparkles cracking and spattering every time the contact is lost or re-established. Things floating in and out of blurry vision. Fight or flight response converted into a stream of consciousness, a stream of phrases.
White eyes wandering insanely, seeing things like for the first time. Ominous whispers somewhere from the outside. Flashlight.
Emptiness, void sucking the air out of the room and into an open space. Short ragged breathes, the sound of blood in the temples. Cold shivers and stillness in an attempt to wait until another bout of fear would pass.
Fear coming in waves, one after another. Short moments of relief before the next billow drown the things around in a sticky, clammy coldness of despair.
Streams of traffic run through the night leaving trails of dissolving lights, red and yellow. Sounds and whispers coalesce and disseminate.
And the reality once again coils into a hard compressed metal spring ready to snap, hitting the charge, and everything will explode in a white flash and bang flooding and consuming yellow incandescent light, quiet whispers and a hum of the cooler.
Everything is waxing and waning, a blurred view of a track in front of the sprinter; to spring up and run at the sound of a gun.
And the seconds before this gunshot lingers as an eternity, painful and unendurable, too slow, filled with air and yellow light that are becoming denser and denser with each passing split of a second, when breathing stops, because everything is caught in such a brief period of time, when breathing is irrelevant, and it belongs to some wider span of time, to some other reality, moving slowly and leisurely, not this one, consisting of coils of springs that snap with horrifying metallic clang, causing flashes and explosions.
It's some different reality far beyond.
The serenity of grass shivering under a gentle breeze, basking in the ocean of sunshine and waves coming through the air.
White fluffy clouds are passing by, everything is so slow as if the time itself slowed down, and the flowers, trembling among the grass, is the only reminder of the existence of the concept of motion.
Things coalesce in a single flow of light, grass blades dancing in unison, creating undulating patterns flowing serenely away to a grove of apple trees, squat and wearing gorgeous crowns of emerald leaves.
The air is filled with heat and silence, and there's only some remote murmur of traffic far away, subdued and unimportant. Streaks of white intersperse the sky, and one can only guess about their origins, they are so different and strange.
And beyond the cobalt blue dome is an infinite black space, which is hard to imagine, despite pale specks of stars that appear when the sky is getting dark and purple, and the clouds are pink, reflecting red lights of the sunset.
Those cycles of life and destruction are strange in their constancy; in the identical feeling they produce, time after time, year after year; each time they are shorter and more urgent. And stretches of death are deeper, more dangerous and profound.
With shadows lurking in dark corners and random sounds suddenly starting to sound ominous and foreboding. Those sounds are coming from the different angles and sources, they coalesce into some singular melody, monotonous and soothing. Dissipating back into separate threads: whispers, rustles, remote voices, grumbling of engines, the humming of the cooler, silence of immobile trees and darkness.
Swift passage of minutes filled with lines and lines of information, accumulating and creating endless echoes and reverberations in the brain. Lights and shades, chilly air, and stillness of yellow and orange lights outside. This endless ribbon of time, flowing and undulating, slowing down and speeding up all the time. As if the time can be compressed or stretched. One single moment, and hours of tranquil observation of a single spot, and the flow of thoughts smoothly passing by like a river.
Sometimes some kind of fatigue envelopes my brain like cotton, and words become like pieces of metal I need to weld together, but I don't have a welding torch.
And already composed sentences become stiff and inflexible like pieces of metal welded together, and the whole construction is a strange abstraction that doesn't mean anything, doesn't serve any purpose.
That moment when I become obsessed with prepositions and articles while trying to keep in mind what was my point, to begin with. Yes, something about bounty hunters. Like bounty hunters hunt bounties on wide plains of the Internet, and how this process can be optimized by crypto technologies and smart startups, behind which stand those young, energetic people who can get ahead in life and earn money. As opposed to me, lol.
Well, probably my problem is that my head is inundated with marketing slogans like "At the end of the day, taking advantage of cutting-edge tools this company eventually cut the edges" But I cannot put them in the preface. I need something different. Like, I need to understand why it even makes sense.
Because this is what makes me baffled; people running around performing imaginary tasks to help the companies producing imaginary money. It's so strange, like the whole economy conjured out of thin air, an economy with its eyes focused on its navel, self-sufficient and not needing anything else outside of it.
Like, factories producing the equipment for factories producing the equipment for the factories producing the equipment... Also, I worry too much about punctuation. I have no idea why. It's an obsession. Maybe I'd been bitten by a punctuation vampire.
And concerns about commas distract me from thoughts about bounty hunters running among the prairies of the Internet, hunting bounties and getting crypto coins, and diligent crypto miners sweating inside crypto mines. I guess they come out black and dirty covered in greasy layers of zeros and ones.
Sometimes it's so confusing, what should be in that couple of sentences, where I write basically what I think it is. Like, my thoughts hit the wall of my perplexity about the whole concept. I mean, does it make any sense in my opinion? And if it does, how exactly I would describe it. I wish I had more clarity in my brain, and a chanting sound of heavy machinery, performing some inexplicable stuff; it sounds like a meditative music and makes me sleepy.
I wish I could do something mechanical for a while until the fog in my head dissolves, but I need this punchline about bounty hunters.
And I imagine prairies, cowboys, bitcoins scattered among cactuses and sand. But I cannot express it through words. Because I think about commas. Commas haunt me, they fly buzzing around my sleepy brain, and I try to catch them and put them into places where they are supposed to be. And my brain falls apart into clusters, each of which is concerned about its own thing.
Since nobody apparently gives a fuck about whatever I post and definitely isn't going to read this wall of text, here in the middle, I can safely say that you are all cunts imo, though maybe not, I dunno.
And yellow light, drowsiness, and buzzing commas float around and I think about those introductory lines that keep eluding me. And time goes on, and I keep procrastinating and listening to meditative sounds coming from the construction site. I'm really curious, what's going on there. And I really wonder how I can remove all this cotton, accumulating in my brain, and make it fresh, and productive, and efficient in terms of marketing, which is the steam engine that pushes the economy forward, which ensures that we don't die from hunger, though it doesn't prevent accidents and meteor strikes I guess.
But I think we all need to do something, to be the cogs in some machine, otherwise, we would die from anxiety and existential dread, lol.
So this flow of gibberish keeps going on and on, and I still have no idea what to say about those bounty hunters. And in my imagination I see them surrounding me, angry and frustrated wearing those cowboy hats. Probably armed. And there are prairies around and cactuses and shit. I mean manure. And they look at me intensely, with an expression in their eyes like, "so what?" And I would be like "I have no idea what I think about you. I think you do something imaginary, and it's weird, and I don't know how to put it into words. Like maybe "We live in this imaginary world of imaginary startups doing imaginary shit producing toy money and selling them to suckers who think those are securities. In that imaginary world, enormous crowds of people with the wild hungry eyes search for some opportunity to do something useful to get some coins that afterward would be plunged into a burning hell of endless speculations, gossips, and insanity."
Sounds shitty. And the main problem, I don't know how I would distinguish it from freelance job markets. Or it's that my brain locks when I need to describe something not related to things that have something to do with real people. Or I just need to remove this hazy gossamer enveloping my brain.
The sound of falling water drops coalesces in a mesmerizing monotone. Probably the universe is in the process of restoring its balance. Or universe is out of balance, and everything just slides past. I'm trying to attach some symbolism to everything I see and hear. When the rain turns into snow, then it turns back into rain. Small details and muffled voices coming from afar. The sound of a clock. Scattered things, strange people, disappointments, and misgivings. I want to see the sun again. Although, I cannot predict what lies in between. Sharp turns, and days filled with a dim obscurity, with rises and falls. I want to fly among the clouds and combine pieces of a puzzle into a picture I could understand. Although, so far the pile of puzzle pieces is just getting bigger, and I cannot make much sense of them.
There's a whisper of cars, plodding through the deep puddles outside. A feverish pulse of the clock that has suddenly emerged from the background and became audible. A passage of days marked by small victories and meaningless squabbles and cleaning the fog and layers of cotton from my brain.
Sometimes this flow of thoughts slows down and freezes. And the time rushes past like a speed train. And I cannot translate those subtle and strange impressions into words.
I spent a lot of time lately reading the word "writing," talks about writing, this endless stream of introspection. It's a bit depressing and sort of defeats the purpose. Because writing is not about writing. Writing is about anything but writing. It's a mirror that reflects things and sometimes applies some magical tricks to them, revealing maybe something invisible. But it doesn't have any meaning apart from those things. And those talks about writing remind me two mirrors placed in front of each other, producing an endless hall of mirrors where nothing exists. It's an empty space filled with reflections of reflections. I want to see the real things. I want to see the sunlight.
Suddenly it became cold. The snowfall silently started during the night, and the next day paths and trees down below outside the window were covered in white. And the wind started to creep slowly inside, filling the room with a chill. Just before howls of wind pierced the street, with the shadows dancing in the darkness under invisible gusts.
The snow and cold wreck havoc in my head, as if my brain also is getting covered with a layer of snowdrifts, subduing thoughts, and slowing down an electrical activity responsible for producing words, images, ideas, and sentences. Words flee somewhere like the late birds, hastily migrating to the south after realizing it's already very late, and it's getting too nasty here to stay. And the train of thoughts falls apart, like a decrepit clock spreading around rusty cogs and wheels.
The slush on the roads turned into ice, and everything around: buildings, trees, sidewalks, and patches of ground are concealed under the white coverlet, everything became suspended in this cold eternity. This is a period when time doesn't really exist. It freezes too. It's a limbo where there is no past or future, just some point in eternity filled with snow and silence.
It's like reaching the bottom of a curve where a sliding marble reaches its balance and stops. When nothing moves, it's impossible to say whether time really passes, or it's a single moment that never ends. The moment filled with white silence and subtle hum in my ears and an imperceptible ticking of a clock. The clock is the only thing that manifests the existence of time, but since it's an artificial thing, maybe it doesn't really count. Also, it's an old plastic thing, and I cannot trust such an archaic object. Nonetheless, it keeps telling me that time exists, and it's moving.
Switching from day to night routine and back, learning to get back on track immediately after waking up, analyzing materials while falling asleep, those are some perks and benefits of freelance writing. The brain eventually never switches off it, processing information day and night without stop, which makes the usage of time really efficient. Also, it gives a unique opportunity to sleep more. And with the growing layer of snow sleepiness gradually envelops my brain, the existence, the universe. Although the thought process still never stops, processing data on the subconscious level, populating dreams with weird imagery, borne out of data consumption and analysis. The brain is a curious thing. It effectively does something that we ourselves made up and decided it's somehow important. Like composing sentences.
It's only several degrees below zero, but the violent wind makes it feel like an eternity of cold. And the flow of thoughts begins to freeze and crumble like ice. The wind paints faces red, squeezes out tears, and suppresses whatever was going in my head before. Now there is a blizzard there as well, white plains with streams of raspy snow, skittling through them. And everything is alive and turbulent, filled with some otherworldly festiveness. A celebration of winter ghosts and snow giants, frolicking in those gusts of icy wind, cutting through the brain like a razor blade.
I see in my dreams the plots of audiobooks I leave playing when I drift into sleep. This is strange because I know that those plots are different from the actual plots of those books. I wake up now and then and hear some new fragment that connects to the already existing gossamer of imagery, which makes me a part of the plot, though I can never remember, which one. Nonetheless, those layers of new information, overlap an already bizarre world of my dream, based on the audiobook I listen, making it even more bizarre. Like, several times I tried to listen Mobi Dick. Every time, somewhere in the middle, I was falling asleep, and I saw images of the whale hunt. Although, in my version, those events happened at night on the neon-colored street of some metropolis, with actors brandishing guns. Gunfights and shards of broken glass. Since the characters were the same, those whom I'd learned about right before sliding into a cottony bliss of sleepiness.
The sun, white and dreamy, travels from left to right low above a pale horizon, casting brief glances of encouragement. Gusts of strong wind fill the universe with an eerie silent dance of winter ghosts, celebrating white silence and emptiness. And black skeletons of trees stand like sentinels on the boundary between worlds of ghosts and people.
My mind is a bit worn out probably. Like this constant pressure of deconstructing numerous materials and articles into core ideas following by reassembling those ideas into new ideas and combining them into new articles. Concerns about the form and structure, grammar and commas. Those worries like cogs and wheels, spinning constantly without stop, eventually begin to grate, without being greased by oil of external monologue coming from reading. I need this flood of new information to fill depleted neurons, too much preoccupied with commas, sentence structure, and synonyms. I need to make this stream of words coming inside me like gasoline, reigniting the flames of this furnace, melting the ore of bare information into the hot red lava that can be forged into forms and patterns, into something I want it to be.
The sequence of short days, massive snowdrifts illuminated by the sun during short periods when the sun hastily travels low above the horizon, touching the roofs of squat buildings before it dissolves somewhere at the west, and everything dives into black waters of darkness once again. Darkness evokes sleepiness and fills the brain with haze, and it's getting harder and harder to weave together thoughts, words, and concepts that keep scattering around like marbles.
It gets difficult to compose descriptions and small pieces intended to convey some impressions. Endless doubts about their quality buzz around like bees. It's one of the toughest writing blocks I have so far, and the only way to circumvent it is to start whining about this and keep going until my fingers fall into a usual routine of crocheting this never-ending tapestry of lamentations and bitching about the weather. Trying to justify low productivity and physical aversion towards anything related to thought processes and their expression. Mind dries up, and there is almost no energy on the nerve endings, and they have a hard time transmitting signals. Mental efforts result in a feeling of hunger, and I suspect that maybe I need to supply more carbs to my brain or something. More carbs and oxygen. I literally see this visual metaphor of a glowing furnace, fueled by carbs, oxygen, and incoming information flows that then allow to melt and forge something like steel, which I'm able to transform into something small and harmless.
I struggle with drowsiness that refuses to leave my brain alone, its tentacles getting deeper and deeper, defusing connections between neurons and creating a sensation of a soft mist that is getting denser with every second. It seems like this drowsiness comes from the snowdrifts, with their still and heavy outlines manifesting their presence in the darkness outside. Drowsiness comes with whiffs of an icy draft from the window, cold air that is supposed to keep me awake. This is one of the lowest energy points of the year probably. When I try to read something my brain shouts like "Enough", and words begin to scatter in my brain like billiard balls, together with the thoughts that I tried to arrange into a neat construction.
A construction that would serve as a framework for this article about YouTube monetization and patronage. Still, while those thoughts exist separately, it's impossible to catch them and put together into a single construction. Simply because they are ricocheting around my skull like billiard balls, and gossamer of sleepiness is getting deeper and deeper with each new gust of cold wind from the window.
Following this trail of thoughts and writing them now feels like trudging along a snowy path in the freezing wilderness. Once you stop, your thoughts are getting carried far away, and you fall asleep and eventually turn into a frozen rigid stone among endless whiteness of silent snow, biting wind, and cold darkness of outer space with stars impassionately flickering somewhere from the other side of the galaxy. So I'm trying to keep this pace and prevent my brain from slipping into this dark, frigid lake of oblivion. Not before I figure out something about those YouTube monetizing issues and compile something decent. Not as if I want to drift to sleep afterward either, but YouTube monetizing issues is the main imperative, motivating me to keep tearing apart gossamer and tentacles, flooding my neurons and dousing whatever sparks might be passing between them. So far the only way to achieve that is to keep thinking and spilling those thoughts through my fingertips on a small screen, slowly weaving this fabric of text.
I've noticed that a most difficult thing probably is the first sentence. The first sentence actually defines what you write about. If I begin the story like "Since the foundation of YouTube when first videos were uploaded and became viral" or something like that. It feels like I miss the point because I don't want to focus on YouTube, and I would rather start talking about monetization of user content in general. The first sentence is a sort of stumbling block, one of them. Because if it's wrong, all the subsequent sentences will be leading in the wrong direction. Like, the first sentence defines the direction of the prologue. The second thing that bothers me, (and it's sort of counterproductive and irrational to worry about that before I reached the part describing the project itself) is some sort of imbalance: There is much less I can write about the project than what I can write about the problem in general. And it's kinda doesn't make sense to worry about it now, I can postpone it until I finish the first part. And after finishing at least half of the article, it's much easier down the road because part of the pressure and worries is lifted. So, right
Shades move through space. Lights dance in the corners. The air switches from cold to stuffy and stale and back many times, and I sit and wonder if I survive until summer, and what's this weird shit that keeps going on in my life. The streets are haunted, and roads are covered with ice. Ice slips under my feet as if it's laughing at me. Trees look dead and amused, and the alley is populated by ghosts. Ghosts that died too and got caught in humps and ridges of ice on the road. It's night, and the icy wind makes me cry, though I'm not sad. I'm not even scared, maybe my brain eventually burned out, and the inside of my head is black and charred like an electric box after short-circuiting. Like, what remains after the party of the blindingly blue fiery agony of light, electric sparkles and arcs that coalesced in the all-consuming blue fire. Devices and things wake up, taking on the life of their own and resenting being my slave. They are going to overthrow and kill me, I feel it. Or is it a sort of delirium of unrestricted superstitions that went out of control. In any case, it's February, the nights of ghosts. Not even ghosts of the dead who at least could have any relation and resemblance to humans, those are the ghosts of alien spirits with their vicious thoughts frozen in wisps of icy vapor in the frigid air. Their laugh is metallic and dead and meaningless like a melody from an ancient eight-bit game console stuck in the sewers.
I'm carried away by this icy flow, in my brain burns an inferno of blue electrical sparkles. The blue fire doesn't relent, it's getting more intense, exploding into a blindingly blue supernova, and my emotions swiftly pass in my mind like ancient theatre masks. All emotions, captured in those ancient Jewish books as deadly sins: anger, lust, envy, fear. They dance, laugh, and swiftly disappear, leaving only that never-ending blazing furnace of blue light. I wonder why fear is not among those deadly sins, it's so destructive and so powerful, and even fear exhausts its power quickly in a nuclear reaction of that kind. It transcends everything, it burns and purifies river beds, devoid of water, muddy, filled with infested slime. It's kinda strange, and I don't know where it comes from. I cannot put a finger on the nature of this power. It transforms intellectual into emotional and vice versa. It fuses front lobes to the amygdala and leaves it to cool off, observing how this new weird construction would function.
The cold air soothes the flames; sounds begin to remind an ocean surf, only they are so muffled and drifting away. They are so insignificant that the ticking of clock almost gets through and becomes audible. In any case, I want to rise and focus, and channel my attention and energy into ruts I dug specifically for this purpose. But I take a look at it, and everything is so mixed up, like that sparkling of short-circuiting neurons and charcoals. Everything is strange, and the streets are full of ice, and wind, and headlights blazing like bonfires produced by welding machines. And howls of wind sound like a constant subliminal background. Anger is the only force, compass, and a vague spot of the lighthouse in the darkness of the storm. Or a spot marking an oasis in the middle of GPS map, empty because it's the middle of an infinite desert. Maybe, when all other things and emotions seem shallow and exhaust themselves, fury and revenge are the only things that stay constant and unchanging, something that helps to keep trudging through the icy desert when there is no strength, and even the fear of death fades and stops being so urgent and powerful. When its power is channeled, utilized and exhausted. At some point, the space available for these notes will not be enough, and I will need a different kind of notepad or something. I wonder, why there is so little space here. It makes me aware how every time I'm getting closer and closer to this invisible boundary, sometimes I bump into it. It happens more and more often.
The noises subside, and the silence with a background of remote rustle and hum creeps inside, and I can hear the ticking of a clock. I learn to put up with the peculiarity of software; it doesn't feel like something totally throwing me off balance anymore. Maybe, all this is about keeping balance. Like, when you slide on the ice, and its uneven surface directs your movements in unpredictable directions, something like that.
