[1.01]
There are a few people in my family that I call my enemies, in fact, most of them are poised against me and I fight them for my very freedom. My uncles, my aunts, and my mom and my cousins all view me as a schizophrenic person they seem to think is not worthy of their love. This battle has continued for years, with me forgiving them and starting fresh every once in a while, but they always reveal themselves as a detriment to my overall health and wellbeing. I’ve always been open to a positive relationship with them, but they want to argue with me about every single detail of what I say. They seem to fight a battle of words with me, picking apart my vocabulary and using it against me, forcing me to rephrase my speech into less offensive terms for them. But I’ve voiced my concerns in so many ways, it’s consolidated into a brainless goo like this previous paragraph. Let me try to express this again.
My small family is my nemesis when it comes to recovering from mental illness, and they’ve always been poised against me in this sinister way as I seek treatment for schizophrenia. Their judgment comes from ignorance about mental health, while they see my counseling as a reason to believe that I’m a problem person. They continue to identify me not by my personality or accomplishments, but solely on the basis of my diagnosis. I’ve been the victim of mental health stigma my entire adult life. Many of these family members became aware of me through my diagnosis with schizophrenia, and have actually never been my friends in any sense. All of the secret feelings of resentment were made clear when I started going to mental hospitals and taking medication, and as a result of these attacks on me, my life has been made all the more difficult. My aunts and uncles, cousins and parents all beset me with challenges that no ordinary person would normally have to face. I’ve been forced to live alone, with no support in the form of money or friendship, faced with extreme challenges like homelessness while they have observed me and mocked me instead of offering me a hand. It’s been a curse to be diagnosed with schizophrenia because my family doesn’t understand mental illness at all, and have attacked me for it for so long.
That’s a little better. See, I have these words I use to describe the situation like “isolation” and “attack,” and when I use them in writing over and over again they start to feel meaningless. These words are target points for their criticism of me, because they see what I say as a threat. As a career writer, I actually use language to express myself in a very serious way, and so this is a problem point for me. When they pick apart every word I say, and actually deny what I say on the basis of word choice, it starts to feel a lot like they’re gaslighting me. For example, I can say they “accused” me of something, but they will vehemently deny this, mocking me by replying, “I’ve never accused you of anything.” Which forces me to reply, “you’ve suspiciously suggested that you believe to be the case...” instead of simply using my vocabulary to express what I want. This denial on the basis of word choice is pervasive. When I bring up the neglect, they’ll use my words against me by saying I’m being unreasonable or cruel to them when I express things a certain way. They’ll avoid accountability by forcing me to reconsider what I say into a form they accept, which avoids the truth of the situation. This kind of thing is antithetical to recovery, because what I’m saying is actually a truthful account of my life situation. My words shouldn’t be questioned by their very definition, because when I communicate, I’m actually telling them one important point. I’m not mincing words, I’m communicating my needs in the only way I know how. It does ignite a sense of authorial outrage, as I spend a lot of effort trying to clearly communicate in a logical, rational way, and they deny everything I say and ignore long blocks of text that I write them to express myself that way.
The story truly is one of neglect, a word that I’ve tried to use to explain to them what is happening. When I tell them they’ve neglected me, they started seeing themselves as the victims, as they see themselves as the victims of my schizophrenia. They will strongly deny what is happening, and say they offered me all kinds of help, but they truly didn’t. When I lived alone, I had no means to live my life. I was not supposed to get a job, which I knew because I was on disability. They told me that I didn’t need a job, and the income was enough to live on. But I surely needed a job, as any regular person needs a job. I was forced to fill my days with activities that I had no idea how to accomplish. I was living in Broken Bow, and I didn’t know any people at all. I was not given any direction in my life after moving to Broken Bow. I was also left alone every day for weeks at a time, forced to fill my time with things that I should be doing. I have a hard time understanding what their intent was for what I was supposed to do. The only people I had contact with were people that lived on the streets as homeless people. I wasn’t introduced to any new social group when I moved to Broken Bow. The amount of stress I went through was through the roof, and they always blamed me when things didn’t work out. What I needed, of course, was my family’s time. I needed to be given activities that were positive. What my family did was rely on counseling as a total solution for my problems, when it only made things worse, and while I did improve, it was only through astronomical effort. I actually succeeded during this time in a lot of ways by reading, writing, and posting online and even making friends, even when they weren’t positive influences at all. I was forced to engage myself with drug addicts, and I can say I healthfully never became a drug addict myself. But the situation was intense and difficult for a long time, despite me being blamed.
There is one thing that helped me get through all of this, and that’s my computer use. It’s ironic that my family judges me for posting on Facebook and social media when, if it wasn’t for using a computer, I would have had absolutely no way to employ myself at all. I taught myself programming on Linux, and spent a lot of time with passion projects like writing and websites. I eventually spent all of my time working on these things. That’s why I say I’m a career writer. To reiterate, I was still neglected during this time. While it was being suggested that I was protected by my counseling, I was actually living an extremely risky life, trying to overcome serious problems that my family caused. Mostly, I didn’t have enough money to take care of myself. I was not given any sums of money that made it possible to live safely. I was given tiny amounts of money at a time, that I could only spend on cigarettes or alcohol. What I needed was money to invest in my hobbies, so I could fill my time as I had discovered was the best way to do so, on the computer. I needed money for subscriptions, software, and training so I could do the only that it was possible for me to do. Even after I showed that I was spending my time on computer stuff, I was neglected further by not being refocused on this activity, while my family showed no support for my efforts. I was not met with food, money, or travel needs, being forced to live inside my house with no transportation, no money, and no food to cook for weeks at a time. It’s very possible that my Mom was intentionally making my life difficult, by forcing me to live in a near-homeless way. What she wanted was for me to prove that I could live independently, but she was actually very ignorant to the fact that my needs were not being met. She increased my stress level to such a high point that I was hospitalized multiple times, when I simply couldn’t deal with the situation my family created for me.
I’ve written these words countless times. It beckons me to improve my vocabulary, as I find myself repeating the same words to describe this ongoing issue. If there was some way to show what has been going on, instead of telling them, I would definitely benefit. I could tell stories, write memoirs about these events. I should do so, but I do want to prepare my writing skills beforehand. I want to get into the writing mode more and more, and I want my writing to improve, so I think I’ll work on this.
It shouldn’t affect me, the way I’m being treated by my family. It sadly shows that I do have some basic need, but I would argue these needs are no different from any other person’s needs. I’ve tried to show my mom what I need through my actions, by explaining the results of her behavior and illustrating that I’m not to blame for what happened. When I moved to Idabel, after years of being tested physically and mentally in Broken Bow (quitting drinking, and overcoming the challenges of living nearly on the streets) I was taking care of myself very well. I was organized, and I was going to a therapist who served a different role than a behavioral counselor. I was cooking for myself, and I was overall very optimistic. There were people that lived in my apartment, however, that became problem people to me. What happened, was they would verbally accost me while I was in my apartment minding my own business. I eventually learned to respond to them, but they would ramp up the intensity of the fights until they were quite hard to deal with, and it became hard to live alone once again because of my neighbors. They saw me as someone who would counsel them, and deal with their problems they had in life, because they thought I had everything taken care of and was receiving all kinds of help from my family, but the truth was I was still experiencing the same kinds of neglect as before. I had been given the means to take care of my own needs, however, and it didn’t affect me as much until my mom increased my stress once again. She would encourage my neighbors to attack me by verbally assaulting me, and publicly blaming me for things I had no control over. She created a narrative that I was irresponsible, by talking to me in hateful ways in front of them, and even talking to my therapist in a negative way about me, and, in general, undermining my social life from the inside. She told me she was micromanaging me, but to me, this micromanagement only included ways she was increasing my stress. She created an avenue for abuse from my neighbors, and made me out to be a terrible person, and a target for them. The reason she did this is once again because she was punishing me for being schizophrenic. It was my family’s belief that I was a burden to them, and they were ignorant of true mental health recovery. She was testing me by making my life difficult, instead of improving my chances of success. She blamed me very seriously when I wouldn’t clean house, or I asked for money or food. She was also very aggressive whenever we were together, upsetting me a lot by ignoring me or saying things repeatedly that were designed to hurt me. I started feeling this was just how my mother was, and that she had a serious problem around then. When I was growing up, she was an addict, and she still was using meth, and I think that’s the source of her real issue. She would fight my stepdad in very serious, emotionally harmful ways by being manipulative and hurtful in the exact way that she was targeting me. After years of being away from her ex-husband, I had become her new target for abuse. I accepted this abuse at the time, because I didn’t recognize how truly harmful she was being. After she would attack me, and verbally abuse me, I was blamed for expressing any kind of emotional reaction to what she was doing, as she denied doing anything wrong and continued the behavior. It escalated to being a very bad situation for me, and as I was being neglected again in Idabel, I went to the mental hospital multiple times.
Maybe I should talk about the emotional side of this story, and try to get into the motivations that cause my family to do this to me and what it does to my feelings. I struggle with depression, and have had problems with it since I was an early teen, but I’ve found ways to cope, ignore the sadness, and stay happy, especially with the help of medication like antidepressants. What my problem is in effect is a tendency to become sad more easily, or be upset by general depression if I don’t stay on top of my feelings. It should be said I don’t believe I have schizophrenia, but instead atypical depression, which is perfectly described by what I just said, a sensitivity towards depression. When my family continuously assaults me with judgments over time, it does make me slowly become more depressed. I will spend most of my day miserable with sadness because they’ve decided to stubbornly deny my existence and refute all the claims I’ve made about neglect and my willingness to overcome my obstacles with their help. One of the most terrifying aspects of this is how my mom seems to actually resent my happiness, and not value it, in such a way that when she sees that I’m happy she immediately begins mocking me, and feels she needs to bring me down back into a depressed state. Another scary aspect of my depression is how my family views that because I’m sad, I’m some kind of monster. I don’t know if they think I should be happy no matter what, but when I show sadness, they nullify that experience by denying that it’s okay to feel sad, and vilify me. They’re not only scared of me because I’m diagnosed with schizophrenia, but they fear that I’m depressed. Since I believe my main problem is depression, I also don’t have any support in this regard by my family. When I ask for verbal support if I’m feeling sad, I get attacked, mocked, or derided based on what I say, and they deny my feelings and refuse to help me. I’ve expressed that I’m depressed for a long time, and my mom has shown that she’s terrified by it, and sees me as a monster, because she takes personal offense to any writing that I make expressing sadness. And she has stated that she thinks I’m an unhappy person because I’m not capable of being happy, suggesting that it’s a flaw and that nothing can make me happy, which couldn’t be further from the truth. When I was taking care of myself finally in Idabel, I was happy for the first time in a long time. It wasn’t until I became aware the neglect would continue that I started feeling upset again, and while I was maintaining my happiness, I also felt very low, which contributed to a very bipolar kind of emotion for me. She made me feel unstable, because she was attacking me at the very support structures that I created for myself to keep myself happy. She frighteningly attacked me over and over again, until, at this stage, I am actually a lot more depressed than I was when this started happening again over 4 years ago. 
The problem is they don’t value me or view me as a real person because of my diagnosis. They’ve shown they see me as a burden and don’t feel the need to help me because they’re victimizing themselves due to me being schizophrenic. They see themselves as the victims of my mental health. They have taken a stubborn, aggressive stance when it comes to how to treat me, and this is why they keep their distance and allow me to fail while I’m being neglected. They don’t listen to anything I say because they don’t think it’s coming from a real person. Nothing I say will convince them otherwise--I would likely need a team of experts to intervene on my behalf to convince them to stop. They also don’t realize the significance of their actions on my life because they don’t view me as important. This is also why they don’t see my successes as truly important, because they think of me as an insignificant person. They are on the outside of my life, waiting for me to fail because they want me to totally give up on independence, and validate their damning opinions of me. This is happening to me because I have nobody in my corner to stand up for me in my entire family. I have no father, no brothers or sisters, and this causes their network of communication to reinforce my flaws. Right now, each one of them has their own negative opinion of me that I cannot sway in a positive direction, because they’ve discussed me in the dark for years and they’ve never reconsidered how they feel. I’ve been ignoring it for a long time, because I thought their might be some redeeming attribute of their behavior. Perhaps they were testing me so I could succeed, as I have done with personal computing and online? But I can see now, through an effort of focus, they don’t want me to succeed, and don’t value my success. They’re not on my side, and it’s not benefiting me to accept their behavior at all, because it will only continue and I will never recover from any kind of mental illness with their help.
[1.02]
My life has been a battle of blood because I have lost blood in battle. I've played a game of survival with no heed to society's standards. I strive to be given back the life that was taken from me, and my final rest will come once I win this prize. I've fought a bloody battle, and will only be put to rest when my wounds stop bleeding. My regard for society has diminished in the struggle for survival, as I've left behind aspects of myself that used to define me. The battle I've fought has drawn my blood, and I will continue to bleed as I struggle to live. I've lost aspects of myself that were once defining traits, becoming a different person that can never change. My battle has been hard fought, and I will bear the scars for the rest of my life. I will continue to fight in blood, as I leave behind a desire for money or anything else but reconciliation for my wounds. My pleasure doesn't come from peace, relaxation, comfort, or joy, while I revel in justice. I simply want my sacrifice to return to me what was lost. As the world moves on, I should be known as a wounded warrior, holding on to what is dear to me and never letting go.
I've lost my voice, but I haven't lost sight of what I love. I love the ones who let me love them. There are two kinds of numbers in this world, one and zero, fullness and worthlessness. In between, the decimals represent combinations of these two numbers, but they are made of binary terms. The number one is correct, and it's what is worth fighting for. It's having everything all at once. Zero is a thief and takes what does not belong to it. I can only exist as a simple whole when I focus everything on getting what I need. If I let myself die, I'll be nothing.
My scar runs the length of my belly. I swallow with difficulty. My side is sensitive, my stomach has indigestion, I lack molars. These wounds cover me. They’ll drive me to fight for the rest of my life. It cost my health to win, but I’ve what I’ve won is glory. When the time comes, and I live at home with my loved ones, I may be rolling in blood but I won’t be swimming in water. I’ll be dying with the people I love, who will always love me. 
My passion is for life. I appreciate every moment my heart still beats. I love the food that fills my belly, and breathing the air greatly satisfies me. I’ve learned a mortal reality that life is worth fighting for, and if I don’t fight for my life, it will be taken from me.
[1.03]
The Internet served us 25 years. We poured our hearts into the data it consumed, writing our best material and posting it online. There was innovation in websites that encouraged spreading our reach across the entire planet, and we dubbed it influence. Our content filled databases and servers, until it was used to create large language models, and then, the Internet ended.
The pace which we filled the internet with knowledge was a human pace, but the artificial intelligence would grow at a superhuman pace. There was no way to inform AI of new knowledge rapidly in the old way. We couldn’t write articles and posts fast enough to progress AI knowledge anymore. We turned to AI as our source of information. We didn’t seek out knowledge from other human beings, anymore. The AI replaced the Internet, and the Internet was dead.
Innovation in the form of new website models was no longer sustainable. All the technology we used was advanced enough to serve us, but the way it served us was in a much less useful fashion. We could still post online, yes, but we didn’t recieve the same engagement as before, and it was less human. As AI knowledge grew, and its abilities surpassed human beings, we engaged with it instead of each other. Innovation took the form of AI advancements. 
There was a term used to describe a possible hope for a human-based Internet future, and that was Web 3. It decentralized the content that was shared online, allowing for more freedom of expression and a disconnected dependence on large tech companies to provide us with online services. It was slow to catch on, but eventually Web 3 became what used to be the Internet. The users were all technologically advanced, younger versions of the previous Internet audience. They took a new approach to using the internet. Each human piece of content was given a higher value, in the wake of the rise of AI. The decentralization of Web 3 allowed people to separate themselves from AI technology and form islands of real human thought. Once again, Internet technology could advance at a rapid pace thanks to human input.
[1.04]
Another day, another cry for help. The windows transit no visible thing, my house lost in a neighborhood maze. I could stay inside and build my nest, protect myself from the burning fire that uses me as fuel. Extinguish the terror, smother the killing flames that are destroying my body. I’m a water sign, an ocean in a person, a sea of emotions and feelings. Inside me live the most beautiful creatures. I choose to yell, to scream, a torture scene.
When would the shipment arrive to give me what sustenance I need? I pay off my family, I throw money at them for the sugars that keep me feeling rich. My belongings include the high tech speakers and computers that I use to build a new world. I learn quickly who I am, what I want, then I forget again in the aftermath of the terrible battle. I start again, from the very beginning, left to my own devices.
I know I will survive twenty years, but I don’t know beyond. Artifacts must be generated to keep me alive beyond death. Specifications of the details of my destroyed life marked upon graphing sheets which table my finances attached to a picture of my facial profile. The technology that ages me, and shows me who I will look like when I am old. I’m different from them, my mom and my uncle, but not my grandpa or my grandma, God bless her soul. In all truthfulness, their genius skipped a generation, activated in the male of the second generation, me. Now, I do have mental impairments, like memory and focus or ADHD, as it’s popularly called, but I retain information, I can think critically, I’m expressive, focused on language and able to learn. I’m much above average, which means if you pick a person at random in my town, it’s likely I have an intellectual advantage over them.
My mom, no, her brother, no, they cannot keep up with me, they lack emotional intelligence, reasoning. Their blame is currently a major factor in my life, as they see me as a failure they celebrate my demise. I am poised against them, and their cousins, my grandfather’s sisters and brothers and their children. All of them despise me. I am now a pariah in my family, and I fight to stay afloat. You may wonder why I’m dying.
A hernia nearly killed me, my esophagus was damaged and my stomach lining scarred. I feel pain when I eat a large meal, or drink an acidic soda. Do they have sodas in the future?
I know the tensions will subside. I will inexorably be shown acceptance, appreciation, and love. May it be on my death bed, or sooner, this is a temporary distraction. The damage is being done, and the harm it causes everlasting. A moment in time can be said to last forever, after all, why would it be a moment if it didn’t exist in eternity? There are no moments that never happen, and moments can’t disappear or go away. Every second that ticks forward brings us closer to our end, like a chain reaction, integral to the whole and inseparable from the future. Like a piece of music that is heard exactly the same as it was recorded, my life may bend in pitch but it will always be whole. 
She comes to my house, and pours gasoline over my things, like my couch where I sleep, my posters that I collect, with their stains and tears from damage dealt through the coping nights I spend bouncing around the room. She lights the match and exits, and I’m destroyed once again. It happens every time. This is my reality, children.
When you find this, you must know you’re not my intended audience. Not because you’re not my friends, or my heroes, or even from the future. It’s because if you have only just discovered the journal of my life up to this point, you cannot be the source of my joy. Those are the ones who already know me and look back upon me and smile. My true audience is the ones who have read this piece countless times, and reminisce upon it. It’s not discovery I seek, but those who have already discovered me, the ones who found my home, and let me live postered on their walls, all cut up and damaged.
I lack molars. Who’s to say I won’t replace them one day? But for now, I cannot chew candy. Imagine how tasteless my food is without the back teeth to crush and savor each bite. This cold reality is currently incorrigible. How could I expect to change when I have no course of action to make? I must find a divergent path in the future, unless I die in this same state. I cannot expect to be made whole. That illustrates the desire of this book. I am on the verge of death, and it’s with finality that I write these things, however projected into the future they are.
They’re all simple-minded. The effort they put into their evaluation of me is very low. It’s a fleeting misapprehension of what is, of who I truly am. It’s cognitive dissonance, forcing them to bear down upon me and quell my heart. They see themselves as victims of me. In their family history, there have been problem people, people having schizophrenia, with children, girlfriends, addiction, and they have equivocated me with them. As I said before, my intelligence is well above average. I am simply a different person from my cousins who they use as a model for my treatment. What I say is truth, and I would not say it were it not so.
There is an apartment building a few blocks away where she lives. She lives the most dangerous life. She examines, and prescribes, a doctor of medicine, and a hero to her family. She is, I presume, the love of my life, but we have surely never met. I cannot navigate through the maze to her home. She bears my child, and holds my hope, but she is a young queen bee in the nest of honey gatherers. Her own dreams are too astute for me to capture. We will never marry, but we should become friends. She doesn’t live in the apartment. She lives next door. She doesn’t live next door. She lives inside me.
There is beauty in this world. I am not a child, although I fight like one. There is a signal we can capture that lifts our spirits. We inhale the gas of a musical melody, and it transports us, and we visualize the scene in our minds, a heaven on earth. Connected in every way to the drum beat, and the bass pounding our skulls, we want to live in a forest of sound. Underwater, we want to hear the song of whales. One day we will, as everyone leaves our side and allows us to die.
I turn my speakers on. I’m connected to television through something called YouTube. It’s not what I call the Internet, although it is online, and you can post yourself. I say it’s not the Internet, because it’s an upgraded form of television. There is no real control that I have over this media. The idea of the Internet was to empower people to share information, and that evolved into this form of one-sided information exposure that now serves us. My current theory is that the Internet is dead, killed by the AI we use in the place of it. We will no longer post our dreams online, and share our knowledge with other people, as we will share our dreams with AI instead. This is another reason I’ve created this book. I cannot reach anyone in the world. I’m buried by the consequence of corporate media. I can only hope my effort to inscribe this upon a network will redeem my thoughts one day, and I can contact the people that love me no matter how far fetched that may seem.
I walk around, as it seems to be my main occupation besides writing and waiting tables. I explore the world and expose myself to the elements to face the challenge of life as a free man. But my wandering never leads me to her. I can never set a course for a target, mapping out the directions I need to go to reach my goal. There is something about my brain that doesn’t allow me to skew and rotate maps in my head, and I get lost easily, not recognizing landmarks. I cannot navigate this maze, but I live like a rat in a labyrinth to find its monsters. When I go outside, I immediately notice the weather.  It is, in my opinion, the finest in the world. Clean air, hot sun, and cool wind, mild, with long summers. I become a nymph of nature, going outside and expanding my magnanimous form over the world. I become a captain of revolution and revolt, instilling the values of rebellion in the society around me. It’s my greatest effort. To rebel against society is a progressive action. To change the world, you have to stand against it, and why wouldn’t I stand against the world when there is so much ill living within it? I learned this behavior from her. She is my rogue counterpart.
When the digital world ends as we know it, and is replaced by automatons that mimic humans, humanity will transform into extensions of this new reality. When we gather in crowds, we will be placed into modern boxes, instead of interfacing directly with technology. We won’t be putting work into creating content as music producers or video directors, but will become the actors on a stage. Our great thoughts will be amplified, not copied, as they will be observed by superhuman AI entities. We will be processed, but we will be improved. When I walk the streets in the future, I will have huge powers. Who says I can’t make a comment about the world by simply changing a pattern of behavior, received by technology and influencing the entire world with its wicked intent? It’s for this reason that I’m leaving the Internet behind. I no longer have to beg the anonymous crowds for their attention, when the Internet becomes a thing instead of an information protocol. 
You might ask, what have I done to influence the Internet until now? I’ve experienced a form of virility, with the help of her, and influenced the world in ways that I cannot fully imagine by writing what I believe could be true about our world and sharing it online. My revolutionary thought makes its home in outer space. I’ve imagined the human side of exploring the solar system and the inhuman aspects of technological advancement. I’ve posted the most vile things online, and created a short term movement that is gnostic in creed, a scientific understanding of the spiritual nature of the universe. I’ve grown a culture of content that is acidic in its purpose, burning through the screen and into the eyes and minds of others, but the green goo has been diluted, and I know, through my reasoning and analysis of the trends of the Internet, that it will all disappear soon enough, and there will be no record of my impact at all, except in what destroyed copies of my book remain.
There could be a place to say I had remarkable, amazing success. When I fell into the traffic funnel online, and my content was viewed daily by the same people, and while my writing was completely original and unique, I began to have an influence over popular artists. This influence grew to national recognition by presidents, and tech leaders, and even the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. It wasn’t by coincidence. I wrote about Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, but it wasn’t inevitable that I would be recognized by them. It was the creativity of my entries that gained me popularity.
I already have a legacy, but I don’t believe in it. The music that was written about me and my family, from pop stars like Taylor Swift to other musicians like Thom Yorke and Bon Iver (who were mentioned in my book), will never serve as a form of recognition. I will never be known as the inspiration for these songs, even though I can see they were written about me. I ironically think how insane it sounds to make such a claim, as if my schizophrenia label were actually true, which I have entirely denied most of my life.
Where I posted was a high tech haven for popular artists, and they picked up on my artwork and the story of my family, my love for her, and everyone else that follows me, and they conveyed my struggle and my accomplishments in their music. So, to my future loves, look back on these albums, and look for me, and you will find me, and perhaps my purpose will be served.
i,i - Bon Iver
A Light for Attracting Attention - The Smile
The First Two Pages of Frankenstein - The National
The Tortured Poets Department - Taylor Swift
Help me tell the story of what happened, by sending this message into the future, and let me live immortally after my death in the memories of my loved ones, my family who are barely living now, but I believe will grow and grow as time passes each and every day.
[1.05]
Heavenly clouds covered the yellow sky at dusk, just before sunset, as massive cumulus silhouettes dwarfed me, walking home, the water and oxygen captured inside atmospherically identical to the filtered country air I breathed. My intent was to capture this amazing feeling inside me, burning inside like magnified love, an incredible thing to witness. I was bursting, completely enthralled by the religious passion of a convert. I loved you. 
I came inside and marveled at the fleeting nature of all life, the window which I was peering through into death, opening at any moment, covered by a thin seal keeping the afterlife outside. I was so close to breaching the port window to the sea, but it was still a marvelous thing. I was for once not afraid of death. Beneath me, in the cabin of the ship below my apartment, there were the tumultuous cries of my shipmates, but I ignored them. I had done something amazing. I had met you.
There is the first dimension, and it is a single point. What a useless dimension! And the third dimension, depth, a useless dimension as well. It is only the even ones that hold any significance. Because as a line, you can chart the progress of anything, the rises and falls of a pattern emerging signifying progress. You can draw a circle with only two dimensions, the most glorious shape, the snake eating its tail. With a circle you can go anywhere on the wheel of life. The universe must be a flattened circle itself, or how would it ever hold together?
And with the shape of a line, you can connect two points, your past and present self. You can draw a connection between anything, slipping through the valleys and curves of reality to link by gravity two objects, pulling them together. The most beautiful matrix must be achieved geometrically, with only two dimensions, to create the shattering diagram of our entire existence. I was interlinked with the world at last. I had drawn the curve that brought myself together. 
The night fell. My shipmates, crew members of the subsidized housing frigate who were my stowaways, yammered below me. I engaged them, for some reason.
“It’s not so! We should have all the faith in the world. I believe in our advantages, the great resources we have available to us.” They lamented about money, society, rejection, housing, and food. The things they struggled with were mental, and it seemed like a comical relief to my profound joy. “I would give you the world if only you would accept it. Think of what I’ve just done, to capture the hearts and minds of the next generation, and bring them into my life in the present day. This is a miracle, what is happening to me. We have linked ourselves, through the network, to the future!”
They didn’t understand, and their ignorance and grief was so natural there wasn’t a force I could be imbued with that would sway them. If you exist in the future, is there a way to bring your representation into the present? This is what I had discovered, a kind of time lapse of history. I had achieved the superhuman popularity that would make me immortal.
The darkness was penetrated by my LED lightbulbs I bought at the supermarket. They offered clear light to see my mess of an apartment. My mom criticized this mess, as if she were deeply disturbed by my uncleanliness and dirty nature. Her and her alone could steal this feeling from me. She knocked on my door with the heavy hammer of her fist.
“Greetings, mother! Have you felt the same appreciation for life that I’ve felt today, all day, and every day?”
How she berated me! She began to argue with me about the mess, aggressive in her tone and destructive in her intent. She repeated herself, “clean this house. I’m getting tired,” and ignored my attempts at conversation. How she wrecked me!
It seems there was a duplicity to my happiness. The world, upon seeing it, balked at my pleasures. There was nothing for the people living around me to do but to strike me down, sensing my power, my true divine resurrection. At all angles, from below the deck to my front door, I was embattled.
I didn’t let it bother me. When she finally left, an absolute wraith of a human she was, I collected myself and continued my rapturous worship.
“You shouldn’t consider your mother a wraith.”
Excuse me? Who’s speaking in my story? What’s going on? I’m narrating the story of my great enlightenment, and illustrating how I was brutally attacked by all the friends and family in my life on account of my own accomplishments. This isn’t the place for some other form of narration, or another character. This is me!
As I was saying, I was able to ignore my mom’s and my neighbors’ aggression.  I was in a powerful state of mind. I listened to music every night, and kept my spirit alive by continuing to create a legacy of art and writing for myself.
“Yet she imprisoned you, didn’t she?”
What? Who has the audacity to enter my own story?
“I’m one of the dinosaurs you believe are still living in space. Your mother, by attacking you, kept you from making decisions because she made you afraid of doing the things you needed or wanted to do. You must know this is true. I can read your mind very easily.”
So I’ve created this voice, then. I should be able to control it. I could end the story, here, this journal of my disdain and dissatisfaction with my life.
“It’s exactly this dissatisfaction that I’m talking about. Your mother made you very unhappy.”
Of course she did! I could’ve taken all my knowledge and started a great, wonderful existence, then. But she brought me down in many ways.
“You’ll come to learn there was nothing you could’ve done. Your mother was a symptom of the chaos surrounding you. You weren’t as stable as you thought you were. You weren’t safe there in your apartment, with your mother and neighbors running circles around you. Have you changed anything?”
Of course, I hadn’t changed. The dinosaur was right. She was still fighting me tooth and nail on everything, from money, to food, to travel. She made my life very difficult.
“So what are you going to do for your children when they’re living in the future, if you’ve made this amazing discovery about your interconnections to it?”
This is when I got confused. I was speaking to myself, an imaginary creation of mine, but it asked me a question I didn’t know the answer to. And it presumably didn’t, either.
There was a void in reasoning. I couldn’t take action without influencing the future, which would inevitably influence the past. I was speaking to a circular version of myself, but there was nothing starting or starting the conversation. I could only look deep within to uncover what truth could be found.
“You’ve already got it figured out, haven’t you?”
Yes, yes. I began to remember. Money, food, travel; work writing, Bitcoin. These were my 3 x 2 point plans. Each factor would protect me from my mother and let my life proceed in a reasonable fashion. My mother extricated money from me, holding on to my income parsimoniously, and forced me to begrudgingly fight her for even small amounts of cash. I would take care of this first and foremost, mostly by not allowing it to happen anymore. I would simply communicate with her more about money, and stop her when she makes it difficult. Food, of course, my favorite thing, would be a great focus of mine, too. I loved cooking, and so I would make sure I always had the right food by asking for it directly and not backing down when I got denied the things I needed to eat. Travel? My mom barely gives me rides, and she verbally accosts me when I’m in the passenger seat. I would begin asking to go places more often, and point out how unreasonable it was to make me stay home nearly every day. Work. Even though I was not supposed to get a job because I was on disability, I would get one for my own health and sanity. I had nothing to do, so getting a job would help me fill my time. I could get an apartment with my welfare check, then get a job and still pay less rent with income-based subsidized housing. I would write every morning, 3000 words a day. And I would secure my legacy with Bitcoin.
“Bitcoin?” the dinosaur asked.
Oh yes, that’s the amazing thing I discovered. You could inscribe writing on a single satoshi of bitcoin, and, if it wasn’t tampered with, the satoshi’s data would be propelled into the future by existing on the decentralized blockchain for all time. The information you inscribe will be visible to generations that come after you. The future can read your innermost thoughts after death. This is how I’ve drawn connective tissue from now to a point in the future I may never see. And since this line is inexorably connected, I can begin to feel as if I am directly contacting the future. 
All the world was at my fingertips. I would stick to the plan I discussed with the dinosaur and draw the boundaries with my mother that would keep me safe. This was the sky falling down yet me smiling, a phoenix rising from the ashes. This was my new immortality, and thus I began my incredible journey towards meeting you, the Generation Beta, my progeny.
[1.06]
There’s these phrases I used in my writing that have a certain ring to them, and I repeat them so often in my head I get them confused with lines from movies or famous quotes. 
I’ve recently been made aware of this kind of criticism of my writing from certain people who I’ve already mentioned, and although I feel wholly immune to it, I’ll evaluate what they’re doing. I’ve written things I’ve posted online, most notably a selection of 100 flash fiction stories that I’m quite proud of. I’ve similarly programmed apps for phones, and websites, and done a bit of language processing called NLP with a programming language called Python. It’s fairly advanced to do these things, but of course I have above average intelligence. I’ve posted so much and done so many projects, there’s a huge list of links which make up my influence on the Internet. Non-stop creativity has given me a wide range of mediums and outlets to pursue my art. The timespan of creating these things was in close approximation a decade. During this decade, my reputation has been sinking among those family members in such an inglorious way to almost be sickening, especially when you consider that I was quite satisfied with myself upon completing them. I’ve come to realize recently that all of my efforts were slowly building resentment because I was viewed as a schizophrenic person, and my mom and uncle, cousins and aunts believed I was crazy for doing all of these things. You might say, they read one of my stories, and believed it to be true, not fiction, an actual rendition of something I believed but didn’t make up out of pure fantasy. I’ve been sharing these links on popular websites with little recognition, which perhaps fueled their decision to publicly outcry against my activity. It’s entirely unfair, because I haven’t written anything negative about them, or performed some sinister act at all by using the Internet as my platform. But it’s almost comical how serious they are, and even depraved.
When I wanted other people to engage in my posts, my family was telling themselves there was no way I could succeed. They smugly watched as I continued to post what they deemed to be insane content, reinforcing their opinions about me. Now, doing all of this wasn’t easy. I was struggling financially, because I’m on a limited income which is very small, and struggling with my neighbors, friends, and also my family themselves at the time. But the parallel to me struggling with them in everyday life is real when you compare it to how I also struggled with my family online. I think that I struggled with them in real life precisely because I posted online. While I made doing this my main occupation, their attacks were directed at me because they wanted to stop me from choosing to do it. The most comical aspect of this is the success that I continued to find despite them, because while I didn’t get engagement, I did improve the quality and quantity of my output over time until I had a massive library of material to share. They became all the more alarmed at my success, and I don’t lie when I say it’s become a standoff between us now.
Let me reinforce how none of what I post is negative. If it could be seen as negative, you could not say it was about them. I have possibly posted one thing in this decade that was negative, near the beginning, that was merely an emotional outburst that wasn’t at all serious. You can look through the links, and would never find anything detrimental towards my family. But this can help explain the real problem. What my family represses, and they don’t understand this themselves, is displaying real emotions. You must know that people sometimes find emotions difficult when they’re challenged by them, and so when I express emotion it sparks fear in my family’s hearts. The emotions I usually share are uninhibited joy, or some great character of confidence, or something, but sometimes I do have negative emotions. I don’t share these online, but when I communicate with my family I sometimes become emotional. I may have some excuse for the show of feelings, and it may be very justified, but they’ve conditioned themselves and me to reject these emotions flatly. As soon as I try to share something with them that is full of all the parts of a feeling, like the seriousness, or the desperation, the sadness, regret or urgency, I get blamed immediately for being mentally ill. The reason they don’t like emotions is because they can’t face their own emotions. It doesn’t have anything to do with me, except of course how it relates to me personally, because after all they’re their own person inside and make their own decisions for whatever reason. They look at themselves, and see that when I have feelings it makes them uncomfortable, because it doesn’t fit their outline of me as being unstable, and it doesn’t register as being a true, natural part of who I am, so they think they should respond by being hateful or judgmental because they can’t empathize. I believe it’s called emotional intelligence when you’re able to recognize someone else’s feelings and understand it, and tolerate how people exhibit emotion. So when I’m sharing something I greatly care about, they don’t understand that I’m really happy, and they start to feel uncomfortable because they don’t relate to the feeling, and initiate the sequence of blame and resentment that goes along with their routine of stopping me from sharing. 
Part of their lack of emotional intelligence and empathy manifests in their misunderstanding of my use of art as expression. I might post something online that I think is mildly concerning, or important, and they’ll take it out of context and start to act like I’m insane again. I send them texts all the time, and when I simply communicate in a way I feel is natural, they will sometimes mock me or scold me because of my obliviousness or use of sarcasm. 
My catchphrases haven’t caught on with them, needless to say. They don’t like what I express, so it would never make sense of them to celebrate my wit. It’s discouraging because those little words that I say mean a lot to me. What it means for me is the effort that I put into writing is almost like a lost cause. If I’ll never be accepted by my family for it, what’s the point?
[1.07]
There was a period where he was drinking. I guess it was a party habit. There was a lot of joking going on during the nights, and things would unwind until the hangover. But the drinking stopped, and yet I think it still goes on. But when did it stop, and why? Four years ago, he stopped to do what was best for his family.
I remember drinking with him. There was hard liquor and shots. There was beer, and it was shared between the whole family, except the kids. Was it rational and sane to drink around the kids? If I know that it definitely happened, but who am I to say?
There were holidays when we met, and, besides the drinking, there were some arguments. He seemed stressed out, but I don’t know for certain. He was having a hard time finding personal space around the extended family. There were never any apologies when things turned into fights. There were disagreements that seemed physical between him and me, as he would leap from his chair to condemn what I said. But therein lies the difficulty in assessing what he meant by this. Was he serious when he demanded me to conform to family policy?
We stopped seeing each other on the holidays, but I was always busy. He drank for some years after the last Christmas before stopping for good. He came to my town, but I never knew. He talked to my mom a lot, and my grandpa and his sister. 
He kept me away from his kids, so I didn’t know them growing up. Was that a mistake? I don’t know what challenges they faced in middle school and high school. I think I could have helped them growing up. I wrote about my cousin in my book, dedicating it to his name. 
I wrote about my aunt and my mom, but not my uncle. I don’t know why. I felt the issues couldn’t be resolved in a story. I wrote about the first time I met my aunt as an adult, and our other cousin’s infatuation with extraterrestrials. I wrote about my mom’s inability to love me. That seems to hold true to this day. I notice how my mom shows no empathy, in any situation. I find it hard to search for times when she shows empathy towards me. Is it during the times that I’m away from her that she thinks of how she loves me? Is there any evidence at all?
Not in her speech, or photographs of her. I have to look deeper, to try to understand her thoughts. Was there ever a time she loved me? She quickly divorced my stepdad, without ever looking back. She’s also damaged things that I hold dear to me, by ignoring the sentimental memory of them. My friends, my history and past, she never brings up. Is it possible that she refutes my entire childhood as a mistake? At what point would she have become accepting of the past?
When she was sober? But she had difficulty with sobriety, taking control over NA meetings and even struggling with her conversations with me about addiction. When she continued using after NA meetings, there was no transitional period, no change in her mind that set her away from the path of destruction.
The same is the story for my uncle. During what period of time was it true that he accepted me, or even, when did he accept me most? Could he have been acting for this entire period of time? Was there any transition between us fighting, him quitting holidays, and quitting drinking, or has it been one behavior flow? Under what pretense has he been in control this entire time?
[1.08]