I started working in a bar recently.

*

That part isn’t actually very important to what I think I’m going to talk about — though I guess I don’t know for sure. Sometimes I just say things, even if they’re only tangentially related at best. 

*

There’s something that it’s like to feel like me. There’s a quality to reality, some of the time, that is Max-ness.

To me this feeling is divine.

I’ve been in love and I’ve had sex and done (some) drugs. The love part does actually compare, but otherwise it’s hard to imagine what could be better than being me.

*

I think there’s something wrong with me.

I mean lots of things are wrong, obviously. Have you read my blog?

But I can’t help feeling like there’s something, some things, innately off about whatever is happening in my brain. I don’t think people are supposed to feel like they live in metaphysical soup. 

It’s hard for me to accept that whatever it is my cognition does daily is normal.

*

I certainly don’t think it’s all bad.

It’s hard to imagine any entity that could be better than me; except maybe another version of me.

*

I wonder what the theme of this essay will be.

*

I think I’m deeply imaginative. I’m fickle, and it’s easy for me to feel something new and intensely on the drop of a hat. There’s some kind of interaction effect they all seem to have — whatever tiny or gargantuan things aren’t quite right in my brain — they keep each other in check. 

If any one thing becomes dominant the whole system falls apart. Sometimes it really does feel like I’m being consumed, or drowned in, the imbalance that a break-up or bad night’s sleep can strike within me. 

But when it works it really works.

*

I really like Doctor Who.

*

I wonder if people will ever get tired of me talking like this. Disconnected and rambling; musing abstractly and self-aggrandizingly towards some unknown end goal, and then slapping a photo and a semi-catchy title on it all.

*

I think part of it is because of the weird way I experience identity. 

*

“I can’t keep doing this”, says the man who knows he’s going to keep doing this.

*

Sorry, I think the reason I like Doctor Who, in part, is that it resonates with how I experience identity. It’s a good allegory.

*

I think I lost my mind this year.

*

I’m going to let myself die.

I decided that a while ago now, actually. Whenever I finally feel like giving in, I’ve given myself permission to let go. Maybe that’ll be a million years from now or maybe it’ll be tomorrow. I tend to think it’s the former, but who will ever know except the final Max. 

*

Every new year I find I end up thinking about death. It’s not intentional, and it’s not my fault that I’m not very fun at parties.

This is just sort of where my mind wanders. 

*

I’m not sure I can keep holding myself together.

*

When a Timelord regenerates all that they are dies. 

They get to keep their memories, but their cells are all rebuilt from scratch, and the very nature of their personality warps. Sometimes they’ll spend days or weeks getting used to their new body, or puzzling over the way it looks.

*

I guess multiple times in the last year I’ve felt like my body is new or confusing. I’ve felt like my memories belong to someone else.

*

Maybe this is just the reset.

But I feel like I’ve woken up after drowning for weeks or months. But maybe what’s really happened is I’ve dissociated so far from my own life we’ve come back around.

I know this has happened a few times this year, and it’s intensely strange to experience.

*

I can’t help feeling like I’ve died and a new person is in my place.

But I said to myself earlier this year I was okay with dying, if that’s what I ended up wanting for myself.

I can do anything I want. And I believe and fully endorse that.

And I don’t want to die. And I’m trying very hard not to. But I’m not sure I know how to stop it.

*

So it goes.

*

This person I am right now is a good person to be. I’m happy to be me.

*

All that exists is what we are.

I wonder if I’m disrespecting all I care about by letting things go.

At several points during this year I’ve deeply felt like I was a monster, and I don’t think I quite knew how to describe why.

But I do now.

All that exists is what we are.

My dog died this year. My grandmother too.

For one I did my best to fully ignore it, for the other I did a bunch of shots.

These people I love are gone forever now. They don’t exist in this present moment anymore. And to ignore this or to try to drown out this fact is to erase them from existence. Or the existence that currently instantiates.

That feels monstrous to me. That feels weak and cowardly.

*

People have deeply hurt me across my life. And I’ve mostly moved on; live and let live. Radical forgiveness.

But somewhere across time there are these people, people who I once was, who are suffering. People are twisting the universe to hurt them — me. 

Am I disrespecting them by letting go of what happened?

*

I am divinity made manifest

*

I am dying, every second.

*

I graduated college half a year ago.

*

Is it customary to drink when someone dies, or did I make up a depressing tradition?

*

It’s started. I can’t stop it now, this is just the reset. 

*

We exist at points in spacetime.

*

Taking a bit longer. Just breaking it in.

*

Once I sat down on a wall at the edge of the courtyard behind my dormitory. The sun was setting and the clouds were dark with night. I had music on, and I took all I was feeling within my hands and shaped it like clay.

To be me is to feel like you’re exploding. Like my mind is maladapted to my body, and the universe itself.

I think I have too much energy, and too much imagination, and too deep an ability to feel something. And mostly they keep each other in check. But not always. One will dominate the other and I’ll find myself lost on the shores of an imaginary realm or the all consuming power of a single feeling. 

So I sat there, drowning in a runaway subsection of my mind. 

I took my existence in my hands, and while my shell was exploding I molded that ontological clay into a small obelisk. 

I stood up and placed it at the edge of the courtyard, that marker of all I was in that moment, and then I went back inside.

*

I can’t hold myself together very well. I don’t know how to help, or even honor the loved ones I’ve lost or the people I used to be.

*

I wish I did though.

*

Wouldn’t that be nice. 

*

If only you knew how, Max.

*

I think I should feel angry.

I think I should feel sad.

I think I should feel a lot of things.

*

It’s very strange, to wake up one day and not really know where you are.

I can trace back years of my life, so I know exactly what steps I took to get here. I have a good memory of my experiences, so I know I’ve felt this way before. I know the feeling of symbiotic explosion is a familiar one for me. It’s not the first time a brilliant, divine, version of my personality has emerged from the mist — it’s not even the first time this year. 

Maybe not even the first time this month, depending how you slice it.

But it still feels weird to sit here completely whole, and normal — insofar as anything that relates to my personality ever can be — and yet not know how I really got here; in a deep sense.

I woke up with someone’s memories, and found some of them make me cry and some make me smile for seemingly inexplicable reasons. 

*

Am I doing a good job explaining this?

*

Sometimes I worry when people look at me they don’t see what’s really there.

On a good day I really do feel like I’m exploding, in a vaguely divine way.

I really do feel like I keep dying, and someone else wakes up in my stead. Even if empirically I know I’m still me, in the senses most people care about anyways. 

*

“I think I need a drink”, says the man who never actually drinks.

*

But I don’t have it in me to sustain these things. Anger and love at all that has happened in my life, or all the people I used to know. I don’t know how to keep it all in my head at once, all of the time.

So I’m going to make a marker instead.

Out of whatever clay I get to manipulate just by being me. For all of time this one moment will be full of remembrance and respect for all the things that deserve that. All the anger I ought to feel and all the mourning I should have spent more time on.

A signpost that says these things happened, and for as long as I exist I’ll have this signpost. 

It’s okay to let these things go, Max who comes next. I’ll be here to remember them for you.

*

Desperately I want to live. 

*

Yesterday I woke up, and I found that I was embroiled in golden fire.

When I stood outside it felt strange, but calm and exciting all the same. The soft chill of a weirdly warm winter’s day, and the sun moving between clouds.

I’m not sure where or who I was the day before that, even if I have the associated memories. And that’s strange and sad.

*

And I worry tomorrow the same thing is going happen again.

*

I’ve decided I’m okay with dying, if that’s what I want for myself.

To live is to die; over and over again.

I don’t want to die, but I’d rather keep dying than not live at all.

I’ve decided I’m okay with this. 

*

And I’ll keep struggling with this, I think, for as long as I live. Just trace the throughline of my blog, at least the posts that deal with identity. The same worry, over and over, for years, getting worse and worse. More abstract and more unsettling.

And the conclusion stays the same, no matter how much I agonize over this. I don’t want to lose what I love, I don’t want to disrespect my goals or the harm that’s been done to the person that is me.

But by existing I change, and travel away from who I am now.

But I’d rather do that than end it all here; making sure my last moment is full of all the things I think are most important, before denying any future moments.

Instead I’ll keep changing. Forever and always.

So cheers; it’s-

Last Call.

Happy New Year’s. 

Let’s see who gets to live next; what life they’ll lead. 

I hope it’s a good one.