"Perhaps this begins a long and painful but fruitful anarchy"
- A Friend
20251022:1000a
the most beautiful woman in the world
works at the McDonald's in West Laramie
covered in grease
the pain beams from her joints to your eyes
it condenses
and runs off
the jagged edges of her chapped lips
fixed into a smile by nature and nurture
and the camera in the crook of the ceiling
her youth washes down her pale skin
mixes with oil that squeaks under her feet
and swirls into the drain
on geologic timescales
women from Wyoming
born and raised here, you know
have a certain energy
a beauty
about them
the look of a peasant
each one an endling
the suffering on their sleeve
swallowed by the silver lining
plain, eyes out beyond the horizon
a fractured voice and a blind love
they sprout up, siblings of the endless grass
and cry for rain with the sway of their bodies
in the wind
20250929:0840p
A black hole pirouettes quietly, rooted at the point of sexual contact between the mountain and the highway. Its violence acts behind the silence, under clinking chains and tires on gravel. Nature itself liquidated and reformed in its spinning spacetime, a backdrop for the development of spreadsheets. Lonely people and their sleek instruments of color and speed absorbed into lines between portable fences and transported back and forth on ropes behind layers of metal and plastic and glass, adrenaline and life itself poured into the number generation machine. Acceleration. Faster, new personal best, the smell of sweat and heavy breathing and hydraulic breaks and car exhaust emanating from this technical orgiastic rape of the Earth, itself a reflection of the great dying which has become all we know, all we see in the mirror. The town orbits closely, in a sickening elliptical vertigo. Sterile cleanliness, every building carefully calculated to project a certain age and character and fullness. These things do not exist here except as hallucinations. People aimlessly wander the streets with cameras on their chests and in their pockets. The look at the wooden frames and street signs dumbfounded. They do not live here but they wish they did, every day at the amusement park concentration camp. Very few people do. I wonder where they are, these mystery citizens, what bunker underground could protect them from the flood of lethal radiation cast from just over the crest of the hill.
20250916:0600
I looked down from the monitor and saw the man shot in the neck. No audio. The cubicles radiate a suffocating quiet, an illusory strength often shattered by the smallest breath from my nose. Double, triple check the volume on my phone. I struggle to adjust to the constant projection of nothing. It was an all day safety training. Orientation. A few hours before I joined the Teams call. "This is where the world is now," he said. Six hours of blank stares, of cameras and microphones, of a dead choreography masking the cold conduction of information through us, of signatures on standard operating procedures. Their program is one of behavior based safety. SenTri, it's called. "There's no acronym here. Imagine a sentry turret standing over you, standing up for you." The bullet passed into his neck and you saw the specter of death smother the moment of realization on his face. Blood poured from the open wound. The stagger froze into paralysis. His hands moved up for a moment in the vain attempt to protect his vital organs characteristic of living things. Then they stiffened, his fingers locked around the microphone. They trembled. Terrible fear in those now wide open eyes, then nothing. A rigid fall backward and to his left before the camera had finished its job. The sights and sounds of his execution recorded in high definition and immediately consuming the event itself in their multiplicity. I recoiled just for a moment and winced. I shook those hands, once. They were cold. It was like an earthquake forced into its reverse, not in time but in space. A terrible shaking collapsing back in on its epicenter before the fractures seal themselves and leave behind a great tension just underneath the surface. The explosive violence turned in to something else, something that does not release energy but binds it up, something that does not reveal its source but hides it away, smearing it out along a network of fault lines.
20250901:0350
I put my hand to my back and felt the ridges of my spine. I didn't mean to. I hate to think of my bones, my organs, as individual things. Forced even for a moment to feel them in this way. I imagine them moving, breaking, falling out of me like nightmare teeth. Hopeless dreams of waking up different. My body is so fragile, so gullible, so filled with gross nonsense. I can feel life hidden there and I want to run away. I sold enough blood to buy a plane ticket to Atlanta.
20250827:0400
I fear I will never know freedom. I doubt I have ever really seen it. If I have even felt it, it has come and gone, passing into my soul like a hollow point bullet, leaving behind deeply embedded fragments indistinguishable from the slavery of panic stricken grief, coagulated under scars, never allowed to sprout into mourning. It is so easy to find yourself imprisoned by guards who believe they have freed you. All of us who were homeschooled know this perfectly well. The world outside the walls and ceiling, beyond the chain link fence and lines of bushes in the backyard, melts into a terrifying sequence of nonsensical symbols, but it beckons to you like sex itself as you feel your youth grind to pieces against the friction. Faith and the family surround you, drowning you, unexpected events so few and far between memories bleed into one another and metastasize as a tumor in your brain. The loneliness of family collapsing every one of us into ourselves, spiraling in dead end miscarried self cannibalizing thoughts. For us, freedom was the world, the outside, everything we were made to be deathly afraid of. But the tragedy of it all, the gradual ugly realization, is that the world outside, the one we saw and dreamed and lusted for, was and is a fading hologram of something that died long before we were born at a point no one can quite discern, one covering the surface of a black hole containing at its center a shrinking house with its own shrinking walls and ceilings, the structure itself revealed to have been the true form of the world-fearing parents, the freedom loving prison guards. That we are all siblings of the same curriculum, children of the architecture, of the apparatus of the home school, looking out toward the receding event horizon of unknowable and randomly shifting images that physics itself prevents us from touching, stunted and frozen in utter terror, memories still bleeding. That the life we grew up in, the one we thought was a sham and a fraud, was indeed the only real place on earth and was the earth itself. Now, the pretenses are being shed, the fences are being unveiled, wood paneling and baby blue paint turned to reinforced concrete and barbed wire, the unreality of everything else brought to bear. We beg for the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting, for the synthetic freedom of the home let loose on the whole world, for the home to go back to the way it was, for the walls and ceilings to stay planted forever, for the front door to stay locked and the curtains closed. We are all now the stunted children, and as the home eats itself in the final act of its insatiable consumption we will be thrown out as all homeschooled children are, into the blank emptiness left behind, bonded together as siblings.
20250812:0200
Its almost like freedom and slavery have been replaced by order and disorder in the minds of so many people. By sleight of hand. Even the ones who cry out against the growing order call it disorder, chaos, dissolution. Maybe in a sense they are right, in that now it seems order and disorder could not hold their place on the pole that was never theirs and have crashed to the center to become one, forming something else entirely. One in the way turbulent molecules of gasoline together form a fluid that is smashed and burned to power a machine. The process of consumption and excretion bound in a chamber of metal and forced to go on forever. No one clamors for disorder. The spontaneous core of the human person and the sole key to freedom itself has become an enemy by deliberation or by atrophy, as we are ever more restrained to thinking and behaving in those limited forms allowed by our technology, following behind it in a spiral of death. Freedom and slavery have switched places, and the burning power of necessity requires the latter of us as for millennia it cried for the former. We sing and dream and live for it, for order, for peace, for eternal sleep. For a world without people, for a world full of waveforms and datapoints, souls spaghettified and turned to railroad tracks, nailed to one another but never touching, laid down to carry the weight of trains. For solved problems. How do I still find it in myself to love this world? To choose to love it? Boy, isnt that the question.
20250811:0444
I can feel the world ending, and that feeling is numb. Mourning piled so high and so fast it becomes blue with the sky. Breaches the atmosphere and pours back down as a never ending mist. It's invisible like a gas leak that makes me loopy before drifting me off to sleep. I can't study for the test fast enough, even if I could I don't know if Id ever have the strength to move when the time is right. I feel the weakness in my bones, the tremor in my hands. For some reason I think of highway 27 west from College Station. Rolling hills and cedars on the San Antonio plains. Cotton fields and oil drills. Heads to Bastrop where Id stop at bucees. Starlink is based there now, I think. The pieces are coming together, I can hear them snapping into place as I grope through the dark. Once in awhile I feel someone on the tips of my fingers, grabbing a bag from the drive through window. Too much death, too many lights searing through the goddamn screen, too cold for an August night, the whole spinning Earth chained to the bleeding tip of my tongue.
20250810:0445
I have conflicted feelings about the moon. Sometimes it feels like a friend, sometimes it feels like something worse than an enemy, like a terrible unblinking eye. Its light can feel so harsh, sharper than the sun, ultraviolet. But once in awhile its like water, letting me hold my breath, suspended in its total neutrality. It reminds me of the ocean sometimes. The Mississippi Sound that froze like glass as the sun set and the seabreeze shut down. The little sounds of waves of brackish water on fake sand. Horeshoe crabs flipped onto their backs. Concrete slabs and emptiness left behind. A future, somewhere just behind those barrier islands. It felt like a friend tonight. It was easier to tell which cars were police. The effects of this work are interesting. Being shunted onto the streets deep into the night, I see recurring characters. People who have come to recognize me in the repeating process. Its as if all the elements of a community have been shattered and reorganized into a strange shifting choreography, each one of us always visible but never seen by the other. None of us are free. The Taco Bell employees may be more free than most. They have somehow commandeered their speakers and play their own music. They forget drinks sometimes, because for a few moments maybe they are free. They allow dashers into their lobby past 11. A few nights ago someone was pulled over in their parking lot while I waited. The lights were so bright I had to turn away, not before I saw the guy sitting on a parking block. Ive seen so many people be pulled over, including myself. Police crawl everywhere at night, looking for something. Ive started to worry about every car, I couldnt afford a ticket. I worry maybe prematurely about what connections, agreements, datasets they have found themselves at the behest of. I wonder if anyone in town has disappeared yet. I looked at the moon tonight and made 140 dollars.
20250807:0245
Sometimes I think of how many layers of unfreedom are wrapped around me, that I tie around myself. I am not above admitting my little complicities. I stepped outside the shower and could somehow taste however faintly mango and nicotine in my mouth. I miss the feeling of vapor in my lungs, more than anything else. Not the taste or even the feeling of energy suddenly rushing to my head. I always held it in my lungs, letting it sting. I dream of that sting sometimes, I crave having to walk to the corner store to ask the man who knew my name by then for a pack of pods. Shoving money I didnt have down my trachea. Once a week six years ago now Id get a pack of cigarillos with a girl and smoke them at the bus stop near MLK and Guadalupe. She was a human calculator, I was jealous of her, I was in love with her, but I loved the burning nausea more. She wanted to be an astrophysicist. She texted me a few weeks ago asking for money I still dont have. On the edge of homelessness, in retrospect she always was, I always have been. Its difficult to find home and so easy to unfree yourself when everything is statistics. Of course it had been made this way whether you liked it or not, but we believed it. We enlisted to make it so. Nicotine made things efficient, kept things neatly under the curve. Little green lights twinkled through the library into the night, marking those many of us who had minds too cluttered to live alone. There was no alternative to the highest virtues of volume and acceleration, paint by factorial success. I liked to stay in the basement map room, humming yellow fluorescent lights. Constant noise, constant nicotine, constant caffeine, and an almost religious conviction in the long term future, surrounded by a centurys worth of mapping, of cold observations. I waved to the camera in the ceiling corner every night. I lost thirty five pounds that semester.
20250804:1125
I opened the door and found the sky had turned a sickly brown and had sunk low to lay with the dead grass. For a moment I worried that the mountains were burning, but I could still see the sun, not blotted out but smeared in a dull red arc across the west. Twinkles of light off the steel truck bed at the corner of the trailer park. No columns of smoke. But the smell of burning carried on the warm dry breeze felt so near, I couldnt shake the feeling that there was something to see. I threw my backpack in the passenger seat and crawled up the hill to Asphalt Lane, a place I go, a place where everybody goes, to see if a fire had made its way into town. The sun had slipped behind the smoke and everything turned gray, cranes from the concrete plant south of town still barely visible over the engineering building. I thought of how I slept there, in my office, so many times that first year. Plastic blanket, old chair cushion, curled up under the desk hoping the janitor wouldnt have to see me. Crushing, overwhelming loneliness that mixed with the mildew and the drinks with friends. I hated that building, but not more than the sound of my roommate kicking his dog. Or screaming about the Jews. Id have girls from every app under the sun pick me up at the road outside, same road Id have my pizzas delivered. I thought of those girls and their dirty cars and the tired look in their eyes. I thought of the first one, summer of 2022, who brought me up to Asphalt Lane to see the lights of the town. We leaned against the back of her truck in the high plain dryness of night that I still mistook for cold and I taught her how to see more stars in the Milky Way. Theyre lost in the peripheral, when you stare at the tips of your outstretched fingers. Thats all I saw, and smoke pouring into the valley from god knows where. I fell down 30th to get a vantage point from the south and saw a deer in the grass at the empty golf course, on its back, kicking its legs before falling limp for a moment, then kicking again. It wasnt hit, it couldnt have been. Too far from the road. It was sick. Two people dressed in black stood at a distance under a fir tree. As I passed it paused, breathing heavily, and saw it move its head just enough to look at me. Dark black eyes swirling, swelling from their sockets. And it began to cough, silent through my window. I couldnt let myself cry for the poor thing, it was difficult enough to see anyway. Corner of Boulder and Bill Nye, and the concrete plant was still there blinking in the distance. No billowing smoke from the rail yard. No emergency. The emergency was indeed spread out thinly everywhere over everything in sight, coating my lungs and giving me a headache. I slunk back to the trailer and found I had forgotten to plug in the crock pot.
20250730:0230
Thousands of little artificial setting suns shrivel the film over my eyes and the black mountain air pours into Libertys open windows and raises chills on my arms. Lightning flashes silently over the ridge like distant artillery and Edge of Seventeen somehow fits the vibe of the empty drag, the yellow lights beyond and up and over the hill at the far end of town flashing as if begging me to accelerate until my wheels lift off the cracked and dissolving concrete, away from all of this. The machinery morphs into my skin in moments like these and the creaks under the fabric ache into my bones like the future itself. I can almost feel my freedom bleeding, seeping slowly from the many wounds of the soul, between the cracks of the seats and down into the heat of the rough idle, mixing with the leaking power steering fluid, leaving a terrible sheen on the pavement. My apartment is almost empty now. The floors are clean, the internet is cut, and the damned spiders have all fled or died. Everything to my name is in boxes or garbage bags or on the seats of my car going nowhere, stuck between currents, it all in this moment of transition only chains bolted to my ankles. The last load sits behind me, save for the empty bookshelf and the empty dresser, too heavy for me to carry on my own. The algorithm that raised me, that sent me here to this vast empty place, that built the sound of my laughs, that took my virginity and my literacy, that ghosted me and showed me true love, now tells me what and where to deliver in exchange for just enough money to survive. Just yesterday it took me to a trailer park on the southwest fringe of town. I knelt under the American flag on its rotting post, placed the paper bag at the foot of the staircase, and told the app it was finished. Tipped a dollar and fifty cents. An old woman waiting for her instructions told another shed made a hundred and eighty that day. You could see her eyes sunken into her face and the marks of harsh sunlight on her skin. Her daughter ran out of gas during a delivery, and by the time the woman reached the car it sat abandoned, hazards flashing, on the side of the road. I turned and saw the wood panel over the window. Cops put it up a few days before while I sat in the drive through. A drunk driver plowed through it and into the lobby, and the employees shuffled into the back to continue their work. And I continued to sit in the line. Power steering fluid dripping.
20250723:0300
Somehow it always feels hotter once the sun goes down. Like the whole atmosphere collapses under its own weight, as its thousands of pillars of light disappear, and begins to burn as the ceiling strikes the ground. Like hell itself rises up from the infinite chasm and churns just under the Earth's crust, radiating into this dark and empty room. I feel the heat enter my skin and become fever, trapped in my hands and feet, but cannot sleep and cannot see as my forehead throbs. What terrible instruments crawl just over the crest of the hill, with eyes that swallow the fever and see through the dark, that see me tossing and turning as a bright mass in a sea of gray, a whitehead on a zit on a great plane of oily skin. Mechanical eyes peering, hidden amongst the stars, plugged in and vibrating next to my bed. Every day the sun rises more dim and the night vision googles grow roots into my brain.
20250127:0030
Howdy! This is mostly an attempt to learn HTML, and to lessen my dependence on the tech-oligarchical complex. Maybe I'm naive, but I still think little sparks of what made the internet so magical and powerful a long time ago exist, as long as we put in the effort to shield them from the wind. That's what I'm trying to do here, a project of micro-resistance.
I'll be posting things I've written, including essays and poetry, as well as links to places on
the internet I think are cool, books and movies and games I like, and maybe other things. Who knows! It'll be
whatever I want it to be. I hope you like it!
- Cypress
