# 29, Monday I think I know why it was easy—well, this is more of a description than an explanation. I just had this ease that felt to me as if I didn’t mind writing at all. It wasn’t a slog, I wasn’t scrambling my brains out for words, it even felt like flow. Now I have to get out of this rut or what they call “writer’s block,” only it’s neurotoxicity and brain damage. I have to get to a point where I don’t mind—not at all, not about the most minute drudgery that I view some aspects of writing now, with AI and all. Speaking of minding, I think I know what to look for as a job. Either content creator for TikTok—will be useful for me as I grow my own account as a book author—or an editorial position where I get to exercise my newfound skill in editing. Yeah, I’m a much more discriminating mind—yeah, that took a while to recall, that word—and discerning writer that finds what’s missing and enhances already-there prose. I just don’t have that strength anymore—to pull words out of nothing, to tap into discourse out of thin air, or perhaps, I was just speaking out of my ass and being pretentious more than knowledgeable about things. What if I actually have cycles? Where I can be productive one day and absolute shit the next? I just noticed the other day modafinil seemed to lock me in, but now I just feel “lusapan” or “bleh” and a little drowsy. But I don’t even remember what time I took it. Lol, I have no idea why but my cactus comment got 1200 likes now. New technique: keywords highlight association You are veritably improving. You just don’t acknowledge it. Last month you were able to improve Chaos draft. Then this month you had a lot of tiny wins despite it not looking like it. Goal is to focus on that autonomic feeling—where you don’t know how that could happen in a reasonable way: too fast, too eerie, too instant or intuitive again. The novel Anatomy will be about luck in timing, about time, and about chance. It will have to do a lot of things like “teach” and the dreaded “please” without collapsing. Try: learning Clair de Lune again. Those feelers gotta get their oil somewhere. Breakthrough moment here: 3:33PM. Stumbled upon fb post saying brain states get similar to psychedelic ones when you get music and HVB breathwork combined. It led to thoughts about bliss, unity, and oceanic boundlessness that I felt in a dream once or more than twice. Then had thoughts about NDEs. They say the body loses bodily awareness and heightens emotional and memory processing. If that’s true, it has implications for my Anatomy of a Ghost novel. It has implications for my own hunches about death—even the Avatar state of walking both worlds. Or am I just narrowly avoiding death as I sleep or communing in the spirit world—disconnected from my actual body for a flickering moment in my dream, and just exist somewhere else where I still have consciousness? Realized also a crucial element of my novel. What I was really trying to say all these years is how tragic it was—although it isn’t as tragic to some who aren’t insecure. What I’ve come up with is that the ghost is caused by a brain yielding to its own humiliation, and her getting not exactly an epiphany of her own mind’s making, but an actual rip in spacetime. And a plot element. Or a twist—always with the twists I missed brainstorming and forgot about. My goal is to show the tragedy through some means that isn’t so obvious. So the mistress and John actually say something innocuous to each other which Donna overhears but thought nothing of. Then it dawns on her somewhere but the audience doesn’t know it—how she dawns on the idea. How could it be so painful that she chooses to die? It must be ambiguous. How could anything be more painful than having to endure a betrayal she is acclimating to as a way to stay in the marriage? The audience is led to believe that she has acclimated well and is adjusting well, but also, in the end, this isn’t the whole reason why she killed herself—that she snapped. This moment of realization that is similar to what Katniss did blowing up the arena. “To be Alone” — that is really it — and the fact that she has sunk so much into the marriage she no longer sees any future even if there’s another person who could love her again. This black hole unlike anything, separate from comparison, separate from any relation. Plot element: she botches an assignment of hers so bad it results in moderately grave consequences that causes Nancy to distrust her judgment. She has to earn it back through a really good point about history. Together, they eventually work out how to stop “it” from its telos, its energy. Nancy’s daughter killed herself at the start, exactly a year before the suicides happened. The biggest mystery of all is not hers to solve. It’s her granddaughter’s job to piece things together, even though she’s dumb as rocks and absolutely the last person to be clever enough to be a sleuth. She has to piece things together, or people involved in the divorce law passing will keep dying. The ghost is angry, for one, at the fact that it needed to die for it to have a non-existent potential happy ending, and the relief brought about by the law for others would not have happened if it were not for her dying. She had to die first as a causal reason for it to pass, but the divorce law would have killed her anyway as she was very neurodivergent and John, she discovered, was contemplating leaving her to pursue the mistress the “right” way before they decided to try poly and annulment was only feasible for overtly bad marriages. Maxima’s mother who was in a relationship with the guy who was her prof. There is also the tension of Maxima being plain compared to Nancy, who was described as a Mary Sue, perfect and desirable and great all around. She has to deal with a granddaughter who is completely unlike her, but not so unlike her because they share something, a spark, despite their differences. Show earlier scene of marriage in Donna’s life being happy, for a little while, through vignettes of time traveling “imPrints,” snapshot of a cluster of memory being recorded by nanotech. Maxima goes back to that night where she discovers her mother sleeping against the door where Maxima hears an O.S. of her reciting the Open Marriage poem, she thinks her mother wrote it but it becomes a crucial detail later about the identity of the writer who was the Perfect Guy (TM) who would have rescued her from John. He was the perfect guy who really tried to understand her neurodivergence. Mistress tries to have a good relationship with Maxima and tries to give her a glow up because she feels guilty. Central technology is DNA—for imPrints, it’s how they got to developing biologically stable witnesses because they got clusters of neuron genes to react to various recordings of events and history and every trace of DNA holds this imprint of memory, snapping into place instantly for every DNA sample out there. One day, her DNA disappears from the entire world and it is assumed that she has truly become a “ghost,” leaving Maxima and the others empty-handed of their evidence from imPrints. All the imPrints terminated themselves after Maxima views the Open Marriage poem, and her DNA at the hospital disappears too, as well as the DNA of hers at the genetic testing center, and she briefly considers digging up her mother’s grave to find answers, but she has an epiphany that causes her to hone in on the guy, leaving her to use deduction to find out who the Perfect Guy is, who has a lock of her hair that points to clues. It survived because of “true love” on the guy’s part but do not make this too obvious. Show Maxima as a reserved person with relatively few secrets and ego. But then she has to go through death-defying stunt like in Stranger Things confronting the evil that is no longer her mother but a parasite that feeds and reinforces and acts like a virus self-replicating ad infinitum in a contracted and miniscule space, which causes Maxima to feel like killing herself, and getting the audience rapt by her backstory which has only been alluded to, putting puzzle pieces together. The clue in the end is that it’s actually like a cancer of spacetime and Donna has unwittingly or not managed to convince an entire legion of fighter cells to carry out destructive blowback against not only the exact people who had a direct link to her, but what they think is the type of “cell” i.e., the type of human that caused that cancer to prevent it from happening. It is such a stain on spacetime that it doesn’t stop, and even Nancy herself is showing signs that she is going to be next. # Progress This new section is where I lay out all my progress with my brain repair. 1. Recalled a word “discriminating” and its context enough in less than 30 seconds. 2. Said “Cactus: 0 survival instincts” exercising my associative memory and it got 90 likes on TikTok 3. I like this side of me more, this pro-active testy one who’s always obsessive about testing my own memory. I don’t know but I heard struggle and mistakes keep a brain grasping for improvement. At this rate next month who knows where I’ll be if I keep this up. 4. Connected how my dad, in our illuminating conversation, mentioned China and how this relates to American imperialism and why leftist people like China more. Well, they’re still problematic, but they are the opposition. 5. Wow: 2:36 PM recalled the name of a movie I had seen in the past from a Twitter post. I used no technique, just sat with it for a while making by brain associate and stating their names. No idea how it got swept up by the feelers towards the surface. Maybe somewhere in my past I connected their names to the movie name. I remember coming across this movie’s gifs a few months or weeks ago. 6. Am I really making all this progress because of magnesium? WTF??? I can’t think of any other factor recently. Or is it just the armodafinil synergizing with it. # Intentions 1. Learn piano again. 2. A vehicle to argue—story about why you’re drawn to fiction—less direct way of persuasion. Why diary—it handles the theme—the theme about exposure, vulnerability. Most concerned about theme.