CNAAAWDS ONLINE BLOG-DIARY SHITHOLE

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I'm finally fully moved into my house. I have all of the necessary white appliances (even though my washing machine is still currently living in the garage) and two sofas, my dad's got me a big telly thats on the way and I'm waiting on an ikea delivery due tomorrow with some extra storage and bits n bobs. I haven't decorated as much as I'd like to, yet, but it's only a matter of time, supplies and money. Luckily the majority of what I brought over from my mam's house was mostly toys and decor.

I'm actually enjoying having a house a lot more than people told me I would. They all say shit like I'd struggle with the cleaning and the upkeep and the shopping and tasks and money and everything, but I love being able to clean when I want, eat what and when I want, and leave things where I want to leave them. I'm not a messy person I'm just a bit disorganised, but now that I have entire building of my own to organise I am revelling in the freedom.

I love all of the tasks I have to do as well. I need to replace my lightbulbs because they're all really shit, and I need to paint a few more walls and my cabinets because they have seahorses or whatever on them from the old tenants. I need to get a handle for and screw the hinges back on my garage door and I need to replace all of the knobs on my kitchen cabinets because they're all (mostly) either broken or missing. I had too much fun shopping for knobs before deciding on a few £1 for 2 from ikea - I need 16 in total.

A lot of my stuff I own now is secondhand from friends and family. A lot of my things are from my friend's dead nan. I always have things to do and I get to keep so many more lists. I can finally utilise every single aisle in Home Bargains. Whenever I feel like doing something crafty I can paint a wall or a cupboard or a door or build a shelf or a cabinet. I can reorganise my rooms anytime I want whenever I feel like it and there is nobody to say 'but it would look better like...'

I'll make another entry once all my bills go out and see if I'm struggling, but I don't think I will that bad. I am struggling with all of the communications I'm now getting - before I only had to worry about my friends getting in touch but now it's my whole family, constantly asking if I'm okay or checking up. This is very annoying when I'm busy so I don't answer, and then my mam spams me with calls thinking I've died or some shit. Of course I'm grateful, but I'm also socially exhausted!

It's a small entry but a substantial one; I'm having an unwilling house party tonight with some of the work crew so I'm kind of excited, very nervous. It's like inviting my mates into my bedroom, except now I have more rooms and more appliances. Wish me luck!

They - the anonymous and faceless 'they' of forewarning, seemingly omniscient and eponymous in their vast untraceability - fail to mention that when you hit the milestones of adulting such as getting your license, buying a vehicle or securing your first place away from family for example, that there's not (in my case, anyways) any fanfare or massive climactic shift in your day-to-day when you do secure a milestone. If anything, securing the milestones of adulthood doesn't happen in one big shift at all. It's a series of small and hard-to-achieve steps that accumulate into one large-scale achievement at the end, and there's no real celebratory feeling unless you engineer one.

Take, for example, getting my name legally changed. I was sixteen and stupid, so you can imagine the stress I was under making my first attempt at filing my own legal documents. I had to pick a name I wanted to change to, make sure it fit and I'd be happy with it for the rest of my life, source the appropriate forms and then fill them out, arrange for my witnesses to sign them, then pay to enrol my legal name change with the courts; overall it took about a month with my dawdling.

It was a lot of waiting and excitement for the process I was undergoing, that turned into general happiness that has persisted on post-achievement. Nobody popped out of the clouds to congratulate me and give me a recognition of successfully doing something very important all on my own, no matter how much I anticipated something of the sort - maybe balloons or just confetti? In actuality, it was a quiet satisfaction and the pleased remarks of the people who cared about me.

Suppose I did get a big celebration for every landmark I cross, vehicle, house, marriage, etc, it wouldn't sastisfy me, not really. The gentle happiness is a lot better for the longterm, because gradually building up to a stress point that slowly releases in pressure until you're standing there, stress-free, with the medal you earned around your neck; I wouldn't want to be left after the celebrations, after the party is over.

There is a poem by Richard Siken that illustrates this feeling well, and it's called 'Boot Theory.' It is a very sad poem if you're lost in the feeling he captures so concisely, but having gotten through the struggle I can only find positivity between the lines. Go read it for yourself, I won't type the whole thing out here, but I will say that I have the last six words of the poem tattooed on my thigh and it's one of the oldest tattoo's I have that I do not regret at all.

"He's still left with his hands." You can't take the weight off of your shoulders, you can't get the blood off of your hands, and you'll never get out that damn spot. This is what the poem tells me, but despite this, we go on. The time will pass anyways, I'll make it because I always do, and so on and so forth.

Anyways, I've just paid the first month of rent and the security deposit for my first place. It's a two-bedroom with a garage and I'm really fucking excited to have a whole new world of problems in a space that is wholly and solely my own. I hit send on the four-figure amount (boohoo...) and the perpetual tick-tick-tick of the clock on the wall kept tick-tick-ticking, and it hit me. I'm moving out soon!!! And the happiness continues :)

A foreword; a lot of this blog entry will go unsaid, because of the stigma attached to the subject topic and my personal unwillingness to publicise - anymore than I already have - the issue at hand. Does this confuse you? Does this make you curious to learn things about me? Well it sucks to be you, because I don't want to make this easy on you, you can't make me! I'm going to use twisty and obfuscatory language so that this entry will only be legible to myself and the small handful of people who are aware of what I'm yammering on about.

From the ages of about fifteen to seventeen, the primary part of my identity was Equius Zahhak. If you're not in the loop, Equius Zahhak is a character from the webcomic Homestuck; he's an indigoblooded troll with increidble social difficulty and a sweating problem, and he's most well-known for his interest in muscled anthropomorphic horse men. I was him in everyway it is possible for someone to be a fictional character, and while I could fatten up this paragraph by explaining every small way I was Equius Zahhak, but it's a lot faster to say that we were the same person. There's not an aspect of me or him that was seperate from one person to the other.

Nowadays, because of changes to my person I can't really verbalise while sustaining privacy, Equius is a little more than a dear friend to me. Still I consider him an integral part of my self, but there is a clear line of seperacy between who I am now and him. This isn't to say I was wrong about being Equius but moreso that I have found who I am now in a way where me being Equius isn't beneficial, he's served his purpose in my life and can take the backseat. It's sad, I feel a sense of grief to admit it actually, but I don't think about him as much as I used to. I still hold a massive amount of love for him in my heart and always will, not only because of the shit he got me through but also because he is still the one person I feel I know as well as I know myself now.

If you've never been through this experience I don't expect you to understand, but I do expect you to respect it. Remember, this is my blog, your criticism is not wanted. I was a very troubled teen, struggling with my place in the world and who I was and who I wanted to be, and when I thought I had nobody, I had Equius; I'd be lying if I said he didn't keep me from making some very silly decisions more times than once.

I used to talk to him a lot, but I find I don't have the same capability these days unless I'm on shrooms. I think that if I could talk to him now, I'd say... thank you. I love you. You are loved, for everything you are and everything you're going to be. Thank you for what you did for me, and I hope that when I eventually get re-absorbed into you that we get to hang in a dream for the rest of time. I think that would be nice.

Today, while barrelling down the four-lane motorway with my mother after coming from my first ever actual top surgery consultation, I rolled down the window of my sisters (of whom's car we were borrowing) Fiat 500 and threw my vape out of the window, into the vast treasure-trove that is the underbrush off the side of the motorway; it will never be found again except by a particularly excellent trufflepig of a hedgehog. It was a green camouflage-patterned XROS 3 Mini and I'd only just got it (my second ever, my first upgrade) two weeks before.

I know vaping sucks. You don't need to tell me that! I hate the things! We had perfectly good biodegradable lung cancer, but these new-age hippies needed to make a 'solution' with a thousand times more damage to the environment, and the added bonus of appealing to young children! What's the point! I got my first vape at 18, and only started because a pretty girl I liked took me to the place that she bought her fags from. Then I kept at it because it felt silly to hang out with all these smokers sat outside without doing anything, and when I left college and all of them moved away for university I still found myself with nothing to do with my hands. Idle hands do the Devil's work, they say, don't they?

My mother said 'what was that? Was that your fag?' when she saw me fling my arm out of the window. I responded 'yeah, gimme yours, lets quit together' but she refused for a number of reasons that all fell through like sand; I'd just upgraded, had exactly 9 new liquids at home (of the ones I hadn't opened, there were 4 half-used bottles) and it was the middle of the day ( as she said she couldn't quit until the morning). If there is one thing I refuse to submit to it is the sunk cost fallacy; this life is too short for regrets and the capitalist system we struggle under is too oppressive for me to coin-count and penny-pinch my way into something as lame as justifying continuing to vape.

I also had to give up weed, which I was sad about, not worried. I'm worried about quitting nicotine because I know I'm addicted to it, but I am not addicted to weed, I just enjoy it. That's why I don't agree with the sentiment 'if you're not addicted you can quit tomorrow, forever, and if you won't you can't.' I'm not craving weed, I'm not deleting my dealers number out of fear, I'm a little sad I have to give up such a good hobby that I just got a new bong for but ultimately it'l only be for a year or a few until I'm healed up from my top surgery. I want to quit nicotine for good.

Ultimately I know it's good for me and I hate vaping anyway and so does Juno so he'd be so proud of me, but that doesn't erase the fact that I've saturated my brain in a near-constant 20mg/10ml nicotine soup for the last two years -- I can't reason away the effects of neurochemical drug addiction. But I sure can fucking try. I strongly believe that some things really are just a state of mind, and this philosophy has worked out for me this far; if I can't get over some stupid chemical cravings then I'm a slave to my brain, but I can't be a slave to my brain since the damn thing is always telling me to kill myself! It has shit ideas! Who would listen to it?! Not me, that's for sure.

I'm allowing myself a cheeky puff from my mothers 10mg/10ml vape once a day when I get in from work, and only for the next week so I don't have to go total cold turkey, not because I'm sympathetic to my brains drug addiction but because I am sympathetic to myself and my body and don't want to make it unnecessarily harder on myself. Now I've written that down I have to hold it to myself, and you can all watch me succeed. You, too, can quit nicotine today! Go on a long drive and throw it into the bushes (not too many of you though, it is littering remember.)

I realised that I place a lot of trust into my own sense of probability. I was thinking about how I need to climb a tree (go see that thought memorialised in my notepad) and got to thinking about what if I fall and die? It's not like it hasn't happened to others before, but I feel that the probability of me actually succeeding in killing myself, finally, by accidentally falling from height out of a tree is so stupidly small that it's a non-worry.

Like, of course it could happen, but there's so many things that say it wouldn't. I'm a good climber, I'm strong, I'm not far from home in the woods, I'd have my phone on me if I thought I needed urgent help, I'm very experienced in first-aid, and most importantly, the universe wouldn't give me such an easy way out. I do a lot of spontaneous dangerous shit, like having fires while alone or driving recklessly or borderline invasive DIY surgery on myself (I've been so deep in my own foot it frightens me how I can still walk). And the thing that finally ends my stupid life is falling out of a tree? No chance.

I enjoy thinking about probability. One of my favourite games to play with myself is 'what's the chances...' where I think up a scenario and try and think of the chance that that scenario is currently happening point-for-point somewhere on earth right now. Usually it's something eerily similar to what I'm currently doing; say if I was making a cup of tea and spilled a teaspoon of sugar, I'd wonder the probability of another person who just spilled a teaspoon of sugar, and then how likely it is they also have a blue mug, and then if they too poured the spilt sugar into the mug, and so on and so forth.

Of course it's unfalsifiable so I shouldn't trust it, freak accidents happen all too often and I could be next. It always is just 'somebody you know,' never anybody you're close to, just the kid of that woman you know - the weird one who's transgender. I am the poster child for the probability of a freak accident, and yet here I stand, passive suicidality and all, still kicking the bucket down the road.

I don't know, maybe I'll get proven wrong and I'll die the next time I'm a meter off the ground, I'll fall in a really awkward way and break my neck or my shirt collar will snag and I'll hang myself by accident or I'll fall onto a branch just-sharp-enough and skewer myself. Or maybe I'll go out, get covered in mud and dirt, beat myself up and tire myself out before I return home for a shower and to do some more blogging.

It's true, I'm trying to learn ukulele. Shocking, right? I can't sing, I can't write good songs, I have no pitch, can't hear good for shit, and to top it all off my fingers are stubby and short. Who the fuck thought I should play ukulele?! Well, me, I do, because keyboard is just too bulky (I barely have the space for this laptop) and you cant sing while playing the harmonica. Less trying to learn and more trying to teach myself, which isn't going great as I have no idea what I'm doing.

I love music and songs and lyricism, I've always wanted to be able to play an instrument but I am very afraid of allowing other people to hear what I'm doing. I don't like people hearing me sing, play instruments, watch movies, draw, build stuff, tattoo myself, or anything. I'd much rather it if I could mute all sounds that come from my personhood into a self-contained audio bubble so I could be completely silent to everything but my own ears. It's an odd insecurity but a deeply rooted one.

I like to write songs - or I like to try and write songs - but I struggle with coming up with unique melodies; it feels like the best songs have lyrics and instrumentals and melodies that all work perfectly together, like they were all created at the exact same time for one another, but I know that isn't possible. It's done by tweaking and adjusting and adding and removing and scrapping it all when it pisses you off and then remaking it from memory when you get a new idea. It's just like any other artform.

The first song I completed, and the only one I have that actually counts as a song so far and not just a jingle, is 'Blood On My Bedroom Floor.' I began writing it after I was lying on a towel to put pressure on self harm wounds, and saw tiny black speckles of blood peppered all over the bottom of my drawers. They're from my last suicide attempt where I let the blood drip freely and splash all over the floor, and the song is about how long I've left it to be cleaned. I still haven't gotten around to it.

I've got another song I'm quite proud of called 'Portaloo Drugstore,' about a guy that does coke in bathroom stalls. The first time I saw a man do a line off the sink counter of a pub bathroom, he turned around to me and I thought word-for-word, "oh no, that was really hot." That tells you everything you need to know about the tone of the song, doesn't it?

Someday I'll get my songs out of my head. You have to, in the end; if you don't get your art out of you it funnels out of your actions and behaviours, and that's when you start to see problems. No problems come from creating art, problems come when you stop yourself from creating art. I make art about things I don't want to be seen in my actions and behaviours.

Whats wrong with the head of a screw sitting, harming nobody, on a surface? What's this new-age obsession with everything needing to be streamlined and aesthetically pleasing? Screws are one of the most important aspects of modern construction, both domestic and commercial. If you can't handle seeing a screw hold two parts together how are you going to cope when your skin develops liver spots and your hair begins to fall out? Do you count your worth by how pretty you are, or will you thank your body for carrying you this far to live to see another day?

Without turning my head from where I'm sat, here staring at a wall in the work canteen in the middle of my break, I can see too many screws to count. Over the walls, the tables, the chairs, the bulletin boards, the television, the AC, the door, they are everywhere here and I love it. I work in a factory, where prettiness is secondhand to functionality. The embracing of screw heads here is just a measure of practicality but to me it is a dedication to making sure our equipment is hardy, durable, and before all else reliable. On that, just one of our machines downstairs probably contains roughly the same amount of screws that are in this entire room, not just the one wall I'm looking at. Invisible adhesives are a hinderance and a risk here, not a convenience.

Things can't be perfect all of the time. What can be perfected though, is durability and reliability. Despite the almost infinite number of lengths and girths of screws out there, they're all designed to do one job and that is hold two or more bits together, and by god do they do it. Your first concern should be being reliable and durable, second comes practical. Sure you could fork out a tenner for ten millilitres of superglue or a few adhesive stickers so your hooks hang without giving up their secret, but why? Why put yourself through all the hassle and risk of chemicals and microplastics and extraneous unnecessary packaging when you can instead do what humans have been doing since 400 BCE.

It's such a simple concept, such an overlooked idea. Do you not fiddle with threaded lids and locks at least once a day? Every door and window, every vehicle, every white appliance in your immediate present are held together with screws and I'd bet the worst problem the screws ever caused were being a little too loose. You know what happens when superglue gets loose? It goes from being an adhesive to an unwanted residue.

Of course, I can't overlook how easy it is to strip a screw and make it unusable; too tightly wound to be removed from the situation it finds itself in. Sound familiar? Everybody has been hurt too badly to embrace change, once. Have some sympathy for the mighty screw and what it does for you, and maybe next time be a little gentler when applying or removing a screw from where you need it most.

Last night I was in the mosh pit of the Liverpool Papa Roach gig for about 3 hours straight. I was so dehydrated that I couldn't wet my lips and was sweating through my denim jacket – not despite but because of this I had a fucking blast. But afterwards, while I was waiting for those who accompanied me to the gig to re-emerge into the harsh fluorescent lighting of the arena transitory corridor, everybody was looking at how red my face was.

I could try and placate myself by saying they weren't looking but they were and I know they were. People always do. My face goes bright red so very easily and honestly I don't blame them for looking, because I look like a colour-inverted rash-stricken red panda. My eyes and the top half of my forehead stay a sickly pale white and everything else flushes bright cherry red. I've always gone red easily, it happens anytime I exert myself or anytime my face gets cold or anytime I'm embarrassed, and that last one is a real motherfucker because going bright red the way I do only makes me more embarrassed. It's been like this for as long as I remember, little girl to adult man just a constant red face.

It's a really sensitive subject for me actually. If I could change anything about my body it would be that, not my weight or my looks or whatever, but this one little biological process that serves no true benefit. I've shouted at people before for suggesting we take a break because of how red I get while walking up hills. I suppose it's because I don't want it to be a reflection of my fitness, I'm unhealthy in the way I smoke and only eat once a day but physically I'm strong and fast, just red. It's still no reason to lash out of course. My mother once told me she thought I looked like I was on the verge of passing out, and didn't believe me when I told her I was fine just red. I cannot stress enough to people how it's just my colour! I'm fine! I'm just red right now! Move on!

When I was at the gig, waiting in the corridor, trying to find my company as everyone poured out of the arena, a man laughed at me when we made eye contact and high-fived me. It made me feel so much better, it made me remember my values. Why the fuck do I give a fuck if some rando's think it's weird how red I've gone? ESPECIALLY after a Papa Roach gig, where they should be able to do the basic mental maths to come to the conclusion I had just done 3 hours of straight full-body exercise while heavily inebriated in a death-circle of adult men twice my size? If there's ever a time and place to have a red face, it was then.

That guy knew what was up, that I had just had a fucking amazing time and my face reflected that. In that wordless two-second exchange he made me feel better about something that has played on my mind for decades with no respite. I could be insecure about how red I go or I could enjoy what I'm doing, and I choose the latter. At the end of the day, my body is just a vehicle for me to experience the world and have as much fun in before I die, and I'm going to fucking do that! I won't let some stupid insecurity that I can't do anything about stop me from living my life.

I did one of these back in 2023, and I have been continuously updating my list (as you do..) since then, so naturally the next course of action was a part two to keep all you loyal listeners out there updated on the hottest new trending phrases in my life. If you didn't read the first one and don't know that I keep a list of short phrases that tickle my brain in the right way on my notes app.. well, ugh, get with the program NERD! Anyways, lets jump right into it.

"Why funny people kill themselves." This one is just epic. It was a book title when I first heard it, and its such a fantastic literacy sucker-punch I still repeat it to this day. The perfect fourstroke funny/people/kill/themselves thats split perfectly in half with the positive and negative. It also hits hard because I was 'the funny one' because humour is such a great mask.

"Esoteric Nietzschean cunny rape." Holy shit we're starting off strong with this one. I saw this as its the twitter profile name of an aryan nazi incel lolicon. I like it because it paints a fantastic picture of the two things these nerds love most, and when you put misogynists wet dream philosophers next to their 'loli waifus' you demonstrate the utter hilarity of what they've subscribed themselves to. Even at my lowest, at least I'm not an esoteric Nietzschean cunny rapist.

"Drop bombs not acid." I saw this spray painted on the back of an electrical transformer while I was walking my dads dog on christmas day. I'd of course seen the original 'drop acid not bombs' phrase elsewhere but it shocked me so much that I'd never considered this so called anti-drug pro-war stance. I think it sounds cool, but I'll refrain from taking its advice.

"Tony Blairs forgotten youth." This one I heard on Brassic, specifically in the first episodes opening scene. Vincent as a character means a lot to me, and I am literally a part of the TBFY generation, so it's also featured in my about section :)

"This is my impression of your impression of me." I don't know where I heard this one, but it stuck on my mind like a tick. The imagery of someone impersonating someone elses (what I assume to be) mockery of them, it feels so violent and sudden. And I love poetry in any shape or form and that alliteration dare I call it is fantastic!!!

"I like it when you don't like it." This one sounds really rapey, I know, but I see it like 'I like things you hate' e.g. being an outsider. Its very punk, and I like upsetting shit, hence all the fetuses and houseflies in my art. And this is a perfect phrase to end on because it is my justification for all these horrible quotes above. "Why do you like that phrase?!" Because I like it when you don't like it.

I've finally caught up with putting all my previous blog entries on this page, and having reread all my past thoughtpieces I'm filled with a sense of sadness at the person I used to be. I'm happier now, even though I am in an objectively worse place than I was.

In 2023 I was a fresh piece of meat; freshly out of college and having the world at my fingertips, I had a server full of friends I could talk to at any hour of the day. Nowadays I'm a fulltime employed nightshift worker who gets high every free second and I disappoint my parents every other. I struggle to stay clean of self harm and my problem with messaging people back has gotten so bad my coworkers are aware of it.

But like... I'm happy? Life is messy. You don't have to be perfect all the time, and right now, as messy as I am, I am happy. That's more than I could say for 2023, because I was unhappy then! Maybe I could've gone down a better path, stayed clean and not gotten so into drugs as I am now, but I found a way to be happy in this mess.

I like being me right now, because I'm making actual adult progress. I enjoy my job and the people I work with, I am satisfied with my artistic pursuits and the things I am making. I have plans to move, to get a car, to do shit I want to that I couldn't when I didn't have my bike and my independance.

I don't know. This is just a blog entry to add onto the pile as I finish up the backlog. It's currently 9:40PM on a friday night, I missed a gig I wanted to go to because of the snow on the traintracks, and I'm going to have a cup of tea and a big fat bong rip before I go and play videogames all night. I'm happy :)

I think it's important to have favourites of things. My favourite band is a middle-american folk punk/horror folk band called Harley Poe, frontrun by Joe Whiteford. They have 120k monthly listeners on Spotify, which isn't that much in the grand scheme of every band that's ever gotten recognised but sure is an achievement for a small alternative folk musician. Plus, nobody ever knows who they are when I bring them up, so I get to re-explain this everytime.

Harley Poe came to me through YouTube, when I was thirteen ... I want to say. The first song I ever heard was Gorehound from the Pagan Holiday album found by complete chance and I was immediately hooked, going as far to screen-record the lyric video I'd found to make an unsynced song-comic about it. It affected me deeply, it was a new world of music that was made to mean something, that was in style of what I enjoyed but had an un-before-considered fictitious theme of horror and taboo.

If you were familiar with the song, you'd probably think that its nothing a thirteen year old should be listening to, and you'd probably be right. The lyrics go,

"'Cause I'm a gore-bound hellhound horror movie lover, I like my voyeurism with a glass of red rum; good and evil are just colours on the spectrum – hey!
One, two, three, four, nail her to the bedroom floor. Five, six, seven, eight, rape and kill and mutilate – hey!"

A fast-paced catchy folk song about a snuff film connoisseur justifying his love for the forbidden. Mind you, before this, my music taste was almost entirely nightcore emo songs like pretty little psycho or youre so creepy. This was new territory for me, and pushed me deep into a love of horror and b-movie trash that was before reduced to just my appointed liking for Tim Burton films (as is the way for every tboy growing up)

A lot of Joe's songs are like this, like corpse grinding man (about a necrophile grave robber) or psycho (about an unaware child serial-killer), but he also has a range of styles and with them a range of themes. Songs about being a freak or an outcast, songs about his divorce and the depression that came with, songs that try to sing a meaning to this silly little thing called life.

Joe's music career inspires me. He makes and sells small-batch hand-painted sculptures on his own webstore, he illustrates books and merch and album covers regularly, he has a decently sized dedicated following and a genuine passion for what he does that shows itself in everything he does. As far as I'm concerned, he has it made out for him.

Not only does his work inspire me creatively but also in who I am and what I present myself like as a person. I feel more confident to be who I am with Harley Poe behind me, knowing that irregardless of the looks I may get or the comments that get said, I get to go home enjoying who I am and listening to the music I love. Why do I give a fuck? I don't care, fourth song on the have a great life album.

I'll end this off with a quote I enjoy from Joe, partly because it's a beautifully simple and super real quote in the scheme of things, and partly because I'm getting nervous about how long this one will be; I was being me. I have to be me.

My 20th birthday is in two weeks, as of writing this anyways, and I still sleep with the same stuffed puppy I did as a child. There is not a single modicum of myself now that mirrors who I was, or who she was I should say, as a child yet we share the most intimate connection through this tattered little comfort.

Scruffy Russ is his name, adorned on his tag as the company that made him and the specific model of plushie he is. For every intent and purpose I could think up for him, he is the most perfect plushie in the world; soft fabric dirtied by time, a tightly stuffed head that keeps its shape despite having the floppiest of bodies, and a belly full of PVC beads that sound like the ocean as he moves about in my arms.

When I tell people about him, I describe him as the closest thing to my soul that you can hold in your hands. He is two decades of love, two decades of tears, a lifetime of quiet nights spent alone. He is the space on my chest for a head to lay, the comfort on my lap during scary movies, the reassuring smell of home when my nose has forgotten it; it is no coincidence his front legs fit so perfectly in my grip, I've been doing it since I learned how to clench my fist.

He is my favourite plushie and my closest friend. I’ve always known that I want to be buried with him; that little girl turned to that teenaged boy turned to this honest adult, lying in the cushioned interior of a casket with my hands crossed over his back, Scruffy cuddling into my chest the way he always had.

The thought of what comes after I’m dead isn’t new; I remember being in the old house, being in primary school, and crying quietly to myself, scared of the truth of it being the pain of dying followed swiftly by inconceivable nothingness. I was not raised religious, and I did not yet understand that there’s no subtext to this life.

When you’re a kid it feels like there are rules to be followed, untold commandments that only adults can understand, that’s why they don’t tell kids about them. ‘I’ll tell you when you’re older’ they placate you with. Now that I’m older, an adult if you want to get technical, I've been let in on the secret truth that is scarier than any pain of dying or empty void of consciousness afterward.

The secret is that there are no rules. There is absolutely nothing innate to tell us to what to do, how to do it or why we must. This little society we’ve built of governing bodies and industrial systems is just the hamster cage – ignore the imprisonment allegory there – that we’ve built to cope with the fact that otherwise we’d be bumbling around asking the stars or the wind why we’re here and what we have to do about it.

Some people freak out about this and go crazy and lose their minds; others follow their friends and family into organised religion to get some rules to follow, something to do lined up for the afterward. But I know what’s actually up: we get to, or more have to, make it up for ourselves.

You can’t be scared of death, but you can’t be scared of living either, though. After we die, we’ll have only the marks we left on the world and the remnants of the body we inhabited, the individual we designed, the life we lived. You can’t take anyone with you but you can wish them farewell and give them the memories you made together so that in some small way you can live on forever in their minds. But, and that’s a strong ‘but’, if I get to have any control over what happens to me after I’m dead, I’m going to be buried with this little bundle of fabric and stuffing if it kills me.

She’s still with me, in a way. She died a long time ago, but she’s still in that casket of dark oak and red velvet, in her little pink nightie with Scruffy resting gently on her flat chest with the tiniest of hands clasped around him like he’d float away if she let go. I accept the fact that I killed her but that doesn't mean I hate her; I love her, obviously. She gave me everything she could and I'm thankful for it, for this passion project of a body.

Tegan did what she could. She was a sad girl who didn't understand yet, didn't know the rules or lack thereof. She didn’t know that she didn’t have to worry because I’d be there, I was inside of her and I was going to make sure she lived on. I’ll carry her with me until I get into my own casket, and when they put Scruffy on my own flat chest, she’ll still be inside me. She’ll get to hug him into the darkness, and I'll be there with the answers for her. Don't worry, I know what to do. We're going to hug him tight, and he’ll hug back, and you don't have to worry about anything else ever again.

My odd guilty fantasy is that I want to do a full email scrub and password of my online presence. It's an incredibly difficult and messy thing to do if I am not alright with the idea of losing everything I may have attached to my emails, such as my social media accounts and other accounts and emails and government account contact details and all sorts.

I would just like all of my accounts to be under the same email, and have passwords that are all unique but have a similar theme, it would feel like perfect wire management, all colour coded and ziptied together to the same inbox. Not to mention being disconnected from Apple's iCloud email group, or if I decide to stay with iCloud, having an Apple ID email that doesn't include my deadname in it.

If I ever was in the position to completely abandon everything I've done online up to this point, or to go through the tedious work of swapping my email over on all accounts, I would love to do this. It brings me immense, immense pleasure even just thinking of it.

I keep getting distracted writing this by thoughts of how I'd delete all my accounts with messy details, old phone numbers and unaccessible email addresses. I'll probably come back to this another time.

The bad parts of me are unavoidable. I start every day taking my antidepressants and end every day trying not to trigger a trauma dream as I try to put myself to sleep. Every part of my body is scarred from blades I used on myself and where there are no scars there is ink, or dye, or jewellery I use to fill in the gaps. Whenever I feel bad I’ll zone out in front of you and pick at my fingernails until you’ve got a breadcrumb trail right to whatever mundane thing triggered me this time.

Even in my non-physical existence there’s evidence of damage; the way I can't engage in relationships with people I deem too 'undamaged' to understand where I'm speaking from, how I disappear for days on end in the middle of conversations because my tolerance for other people ran out.

I'm like a banana that overripens every other fruit in the bowl. I'm not upset by this, I just wish there were more banana's.

Grief is something I don't understand. I don't think I experience it, I certainly never experienced it when my nan died, or my uncle died, or my cat died, and there is absolutely no feeling at all when I hear of far away tragedies parrotted to me from my parents facebook timeline.

Logically, I understand that when you lose someone you grieve for them, which is a type of negative emotion characterised by sadness, anger, confusion, numbness, and other such feelings. Grief makes you wish for something back, for something to be completely forgotten, to become a living memorial of this thing you lost.

I like using grief as something to explore in my writing, I like taking it to extremes and illustrating what grief can turn people into, make people do to the memories of the people they loved, but I don't think I will ever even feel healthy grieving, and so all of my writings in this area are just deformed expressions of what I can feel; guilt.

Following from a previous entry, another thing about being genuine is the fact that you do not have any obligation to stay as true to yourself as you possibly can.

There is no 'one true self' of a person; if you decide something about yourself, you are the only person who can enact or change anything about who you are and nobody decent is going to ask for proof. Your favourite colour, your favourite number, what clothes you wear and how you wear them, your staple breakfast, all of these things are arbitrary and decided. Nobody is going to call you out for deciding horses are your favourite animal when you clearly have a cat paw keychain on your backpack, nobody will fight your staple breakfast of buttered toast when you decide a bowl of cereal will do you for the day.

There's a rampant misconception that individuality is something that can only be naturally come across; if you decide you are unique and enact this through what you decide your favourite X, Y and Z is you are a fraud — this could not be more far from the actuality that is, if you do not decide who you are, you will end up being nobody. If you spend your life trying to refine your experience as a person down to find out who you 'truly' are as a person you're going to waste a lot of time and end up with a weak answer.

You decide who you are. You do not have to prove this.

Cancer runs in my family — I think. Cancer affects 1 in 2 people worldwide, so I think it runs in everyones family to some extent, but I've been told by my family it runs between us. Two of my nans died from cancer and my mother has had it twice herself, so I'm probably next.

I think, if I ever get cancer myself — which I believe is probably a >50% chance — I won't be upset by this discovery. I won't cry or mourn for the expanse of my life that I won't live because it is as prewritten as a novel; of course I'd eventually get cancer.

I don't know how to express my feelings towards cancer without resorting to cliche words like 'beautiful,' but that's not what I mean. It's melancholic, it was always going to happen, it's the clue in the beginning of the book coming back to bite you and it affects 50% of all people. I'm at peace with this hypothetical tumour already not inside me, with the cancerous cells that will one day overpower my white blood cells, with the treatment I won't seek out until I either get too scared or find something to be scared of in the concept of death.

This sort of links to a previous entry of mine where I talk about how I'm not scared of death, which probably explains my lack of emotion towards what is probably going to kill me before I do. I think it would be the perfect way for me to die, not killing myself intentionally but my own body succumbing to itself; a cowards gambit.

Genuinity is something I treasure more than anything; regardless of how rude or cold someone comes off to others, if they're genuine and sincere in their coldness I find them someone I want to be a friend to.

Other people find rude or cold people unlikeable, negative, brutally honest for the sake of being a downer, but nothing makes me more platonically attracted to a person than if they genuinely live their truth. An example of this would be, probably ineffably, Sheldon Cooper. He's regarded as an unempathetic and arrogant person who the other characters of The Big Bang Theory have to put up with, but I really like him.

He's self aware, he doesn't compromise his morals for emotions, he is logical and rational within the bounds of his feelings, and so on. He is shown to be 'hard work' in his dietary habits but everybody is hard work to those that care about them, its work we enjoy. I honestly really respect him, he is autistic just like me and that may be an influencing factor in why I like him, but regardless.

I find genuinity to be something a lot of people lack, whether it be hiding their true feelings to not shake the boat or feeling shame for a harmless aspect of themselves and hiding it. When someone tells you who they are, and doesn't worry about whether you will arbitrarily 'accept' them for being who they are, that is when I start admiring them.

I have a very strange relationship with money. I grew up poor, cold concrete floors downstairs and bare wood upstairs with planks you could pick out of the floor and hide things under. Money was sparse and we knew it, and that was ingrained into me before I even knew what money meant.

I never asked for new things. I still don't, now I bristle whenever my younger cousins point at the TV and ask 'can you buy me that for my birthday?' I have a vivid memory of sitting at the bottom of the stairs, opening stockings at christmas, and feeling gut-wrenching dread when my sister pulled out a Littlest Pet Shop toy she already had and asked me if I wanted to swap.

Now, as I am 18 and have access to the money my parent was saving for me, I find myself afraid to spend it. I lend my money sparingly and with tight hands and refuse to spend frivolously unless I can absolutely justify the purchase; new hoodie for the cold, new bike for the transport, and so on. It angers me when people with financial issues spend their money on things they don't actually need, like new clothes for an outing or decor, but I am an absolute hypocrite when I think like this because I too love a valid excuse to spend money. In this way of thinking, I spend a lot of money on cheap short-time enjoyments like fast food.

I don't have a specific goal of writing this further than getting out and down my relationship with money. I'll probably expand on this once, if, I get the job I've applied for and have an actual income. I have more solidarity with others who go through financial issues than I ever will somebody who has grown up well off, so I hope that I find a way to calm down my anger

In the past, when I was more involved in the art community – joining groupchats and art projects and what not – I had friends who called themselves artists, but went weeks without making art, or didn't feel the need to share their art at all.

While I'm a firm believer that art is one of if not the only concept that has an utterly unrestricted definition, and these people were just as much an artist as one of the Great Names of Art History, it utterly fucking baffled me that they could have such a lax relationship with their art.

Art means everything to me. Art is one of the unmoving constants in my life. Even when I'm in art block, I'm engaging in art communities and collecting inspiration and references for the art I will make once out of my slump.

The way someone could make art but not share it, make art but go long periods of making nothing, make art but have it be a separate and comparatively unimportant aspect of their life, it is absolutely unthinkable to me; not because I don't approve, it's that it is just so out of my mind that art could be something that someone enjoys enough to participate in but not enough to commit themselves to. I suppose I'm biased because I'm autistically fixated on art, but I could never apply my grey-area mindset to my art. It is my life

I wonder what those friends are doing now. I hope they continued making art at whatever pace they prefer, and if not found something else to find themselves in.

I'm not scared of dying – I used to be scared of dying, I used to lie awake at night and think about the endless nothingness that I was sure would come after, by virtue of being raised areligious and disbelieving the passive influence of christian believers around me.

I used to cry, alone, on the top bunk of my shared bed and cry out for my mam who never came to my room for whatever reason, not hearing me or being too asleep or ignoring me. But, I don't actually remember why I would do that, all I remember is doing, so it not relevant.

I stopped being scared of dying as I got older and got more depressed, more suicidal. I was shouted at for posting drawings on instagram of anime girls saying things like 'this life is a prison and death is the key.' I did not get shouted at for taking painkillers I didn't need and making myself too sick to go to school, however, and I think somewhere between then is where I lost my fear of dying.

I'm not scared of pain, either, because I cause that on myself and know I can bare through it, but I'm more scared of almost dying and living with that pain than I am being in pain and then dying. I think the worst fate that could happen to me is going through unimaginable pain I cause to myself with the intent of dying and then I have to live through it all until I recover back to square one.

I think the people who want to live despite being in such unmanageable pain are stronger than someone who wants to die because of it, I guess. I'll cut myself to hurt but won't commit to the slit because if I survive, I'm fucked. That's not strong.

In the past, when I was more involved in the art community – joining groupchats and art projects and what not – I had friends who called themselves artists, but went weeks without making art, or didn't feel the need to share their art at all.

While I'm a firm believer that art is one of if not the only concept that has an utterly unrestricted definition, and these people were just as much an artist as one of the Great Names of Art History, it utterly fucking baffled me that they could have such a lax relationship with their art.

Art means everything to me. Art is one of the unmoving constants in my life. Even when I'm in art block, I'm engaging in art communities and collecting inspiration and references for the art I will make once out of my slump.

The way someone could make art but not share it, make art but go long periods of making nothing, make art but have it be a separate and comparatively unimportant aspect of their life, it is absolutely unthinkable to me; not because I don't approve, it's that it is just so out of my mind that art could be something that someone enjoys enough to participate in but not enough to commit themselves to. I suppose I'm biased because I'm autistically fixated on art, but I could never apply my grey-area mindset to my art. It is my life.

I wonder what those friends are doing now. I hope they continued making art at whatever pace they prefer, and if not found something else to find themselves in.

I've always wanted to write poetry but I never find myself conventionally, actually, writing poetry. I love words and language and neologisms and playing with the images I can conjure through variations of these same 26 letters but I've never found the poet in myself.

I prefer writing, blogging, simply talking for the sake of talking, more than I do trying to impress an anonymous anyone with iambic pentameter and structural rhythm; there's a pretence to poetry that you're intentionally trying to make something that can be ignored when you're falsifying it. There is an intimacy to making something you intend to be seen that I just can't cope with.

Annotating poems is where I truly shine. I love to dive deep, to discuss and debate the meanings behind what is written. Even when I do try and do peotry, I still end up doing it in such a clunky and stereotypically messy way it doesn't register as poetry. These are just my margin scribbles. In an ugly way, it's the perfect poetry for me.

My safety net barely holds up this blog, I know I'm using big words but the understanding this is blogging rather than writing or god forbid poetry keeps it under wraps. For now the bare-faced lyricism can stay in my notes app.

One thing that is reoccurring in my life is the way I don't hide things completely.

Taking an example from my most recent ex boyfriend, where we had issues with only stating our true feelings on vent sideblogs and upsetting each other before agreeing to change our URLs and hide them from one another, I changed my URL to another running the same theme as the last URL and then sent him a clue. I used song title and artists, and sent him the song.

I have an overwhelmingly lax relationship with being confronted, or found out. In my real life, I kept my razor blades visibly in a drawer next to my bed, I keep my sex toys in a box beside my drawers, I have my packer on full display and my heart on my sleeve.

I don't exactly know why I almost want to be caught and confronted — with my ex boyfriend it was because our arguments were always more exhilarating than our passive times. I don't hide things about myself, but I also don't bring them up unless it's relevant. I use all the same usernames so that somebody could track my social medias if they wanted, but I'm not sure why somebody would want to

Even when being caught in a lie, or asked an embarrassing question, I don't hesitate to tell my truth. If I am crushing on someone I tell them should they ask. If someone asks my opinion on them I give it as honestly as I can despite my weird attachments. My weird interests, my opinions, it is all just a question below the surface. I suppose this is because of autistic logic thinking, since telling lies is alogical and mostly only serves to negate embarrassment that I wouldn't feel anyways, but that doesn't explain for why I leave breadcrumb trails for the nonexistent onlookers

Talking about and explaining all of the phrases currently in my 'phrases I like' notes app document;

Deep-Sea Gigantism - An easy one to explain, I like the concept and the name of it is very pleasing. The way something has to get bigger to survive crueler environments is just so fascinating, eating so many things so much smaller than themselves. It's just a really neat concept with a really neat name.

Industrial Catholic Bugcore - The titled 'genre' of the song Honey I'm Home by Ghost And Friends. The three words are so oddly different but when put together bring insges in my mind that I really enjoy the aesthetic of. Brutalist societies worshipping megainsectoid gods, the imagery of a praying mantis trapped in a rosary on the hot asphalt, bare American churches overrun with infestation. It is a nice aesthetic

Spontaneous Combustion - I first heard this phrase in a DVD of Aaahh!!! Real Monsters where there were a few episodes and one of the monsters was diagnosed with 'spontaneous combustion.' I didn't know what it meant until I googled it a few years later (because what kid pays attention to plot in DVDs?) but it holds a special place in my heart for being two long words with unclear meanings

Cannibalistic Living Dead - From a Harley Poe song, Date With The Undead. It is simply a nice sounding and succinct way to define zombies, and I like zombies.

The Milk Of Human Kindness - It's an oldy but a goody. The parallels of milk and human, human and kindness, the thing that literally keeps humans alive and the thing that emotionally keeps humans alive. It's even better when paired with "drunk on the milk of human kindness," the state of being intoxicated from care and love. It's almost uncomfortable by thinking about the milk of humans, and that's a big reason why I love it.

Self-Realisation Through The Other - I like the meaning of this and the things that can come from it more than I do the actual phrase; don't get me wrong it's a good phrase, but it's not my favourite. I think it would sound better with Actualisation rather than Realisation. Regardless, the act of realising oneself through this unnamed 'other' is a really fun idea to play around with.

Burn After Reading - This one sounded better when somebody I liked said it to me for the first time, and I was hooked more on the person talking to me than what they were actually saying. It is a nice phrase though, and I like using it in ways that don't explicitly mean 'burn this text after reading it,' vis a vis 'stop replying after the breakup,' 'throw away the object after misusing it,' et cetera.

In my spare time I like to think about holes. I think about the material host of a hole and the material guest of a hole and I think about how I love holes and their oddly unnoticed nature of being both incredibly common and utterly undefinable.

A hole is something where there was something, but now there is not. A hole is the absence of something. A hole is a thing, obviously, as we are talking about it, but it is a thing that physically is not a thing. You cannot touch a hole but you can touch what's around it, its material host and/or its material guest. You can be the material host or material guest of a hole

I think this is so interesting to me because it is oxymoronic and if I love anything it is truthful oxymorons. It is also a beautifully multifaceted word — a hole can be physical, emotional, mental, literal, it can be a lost something or a broken something or a something that is regarded as bad, it is a very flexible metaphor and I think the material host/material guest narrative only adds to that

I used to call mole hills, mole holes, until I started drafting this monologue and realised that a mole hill is the very opposite of a hole. If a hole is a thing where there once was but now isn't a thing, a mole hill is something where there once was not a thing, but now is. Technically, I guess it could be called a hole, as it has a material host (the soil) and a material guest (the mole) but its antithetical to what I believe a hole is, so I stopped calling them mole holes.

Something I've been thinking of for a while is my piercings, and my scars. I don't know how to go about this but every time I think about this monologue it starts with the same phrase;

I get the same thing out of new piercings that I do out of cutting myself. Its the unavoidable notion that there is something different about me, it feels like the toxic colours on a dart frog. People look at me and whether its the scars or the steel they see first they know that I'm different.

I don't particularly not like being different, I like smiling at kids who stare at my chrome face on the bus and reassuring their parents 'it's fine, I know I look funny,' but there is something about being different that I also like for different reasons. I like it when people know I'm damaged

My profile picture of this blog is the bruise I had for a week after getting my cheek pierced. When I told people who mentioned the dirt on my face what it actually was, I liked the grimaces and the shock. Nobody mentions the horizontal scars because who doesn't know what those implications are, but nobody puts together the dots between me hurting myself for fun with blades and me hurting myself for fun with needles. It's acceptable and it's exactly what I want from my scars

I don't know if this means I should reset my I Am Sober streak everytime I get new pokes or if I've found the perfect cope, but regardless. I get the same thing out of new piercings that i do cutting myself.

Starting this blog out with the statement that I thought about making this blog with a specific post in mind, and as soon as I opened my phone I completely forgot what that was.

I knew that I wanted to have the phrase 'my life in 26 letters' somewhere here, because, as well as there being 26 letters in the alphabet - and those are the only letters all of these posts will be made up of - my birthday also falls on the 26th day of January, and I also used to live in a house numbered 26. As far as these things go I guess 26 counts as my lucky number, but 12 is what my birth certificate type-thing told me was my lucky number and I've always preferred 23.

This blog, I suppose, is going to be the blog where I cram all of the fancifully worded shit that I'm too lazy to make into a comic. I have a problem with trying to make comics that only serve the purpose of saying something, so all of the pictures are wasteful filler, and I eventually get tired and drop it. As such, here is a blog.