Writing for an audience

 I just returned from a week-long road trip visiting friends in Toronto and Chicago, Liam and Marley. I wanted to go on this trip to see people who mean a lot to me and who both feel far but close still. I really enjoyed seeing both of their lives. They lead such different lives. I was really moved by the love that Liam's friends had for each other. Maybe I just felt confident in Toronto because Liam made me feel welcomed or maybe its because of how these people are or maybe its because I got to escape familiarity, regardless of the why it was very heartwarming and lovely. In Chicago, things felt much more familiar. Saw a lot of people that I had known in Philly, had a conversation with an academic communist and a friend of my ex. Nevertheless, everyone there felt like they chose to be there, they were with one another because that's who they had. In Philly there is this ever-moving social paradigm that can be suffocating. I have very few people in Philly where my relationship ...

Resisting the worms from eating away at my ability to be happy by hating everything. Declan called me a professional hater once and I laughed. Hating is the easiest way to exist but it is definitely not the best way. Maybe that makes it the hardest. To be happy is to be full, to not be crawling across the floor begging for a crumb of temporary satisfaction. Love can bring you that. Love can also accentuate what's missing from your fullness; when no one is relying on you in that intimate and vulnerable way, what's missing can feel less shameful. I never wanted the people I loved to know what was missing. Living in these false realities can feel like you're on a 50-foot tower made out of toothpicks; looking above the dirty truths that lie below, but knowing that you will be crashing down into them any moment. And that fall hurts. I don't know when I'll be ready to be in a relationship again. The emotions that I feel in relationships feel real because everything I feel...

Seeing something in myself that I've seen in so many people that came before me. I am exiting college and have gone from joyously untethered to dejectedly untethered. So many of my friends and relatives have gone through the same experience of struggling to find their footing after college and I really didn't think it would happen to me. I thought I understood myself enough to feel at least relatively at ease with the life I was leading. And maybe I'm feeling this gray fog of ennui because the farm didn't work out and it destabilized this notion of self that I had, or maybe it is because I am craving companionship, understanding. If someone offered me coke right now I would be very susceptible to getting hooked on it.  Every relationship in my life that felt simple and uncomplicated before now feels like trying to catch a fly with bare hands. I am trying not to project my bullshit on people; it feels like most people in my life are living fairly uncomplicated lives and ...

 I spent my early childhood feeling alone. I felt like I had parents and a brother that never understood me. I had a couple friends and I spent a lot of my early childhood on the internet. I would watch superhero cartoons and things of that sort and I would look over at my parents or my brother to see a confused look on their faces. They never judged me for liking these things but they could never understand why I liked them. I remember I was on vacation with my family and my cousin who's a couple years older than me but I've always been very close with her. I was in a room that she, my brother and I shared. I was watching a Pewdiepie playthrough of Last of Us, and my cousin and my brother walked into the room and I embarrassedly closed the laptop with extreme haste so that they wouldn't see what I was watching. They thought I was watching porn. I felt like they wouldn't understand it and therefore wouldn't understand me, so I never gave them the opportunity to not ...

 Birhtdays... can't live with em'... can't live without em'.

 I just had my first day on the farm I am supposed to work at for the whole summer. I'm really depressed by how much I hated it. It was so physically and emotionally defeating. I really don't want to go back tomorrow. I definitely idealized farming. I thought it would simplify my life or at least my problems. I would take all of these abstract and existential problems and either make them feel smaller or bring them to the surface so that I could actually identify them. I can't believe how much I hated it. Every minute was torture. I am really scared for MD. She's been feeling similar to me in that she thinks that farming will simplify her life. But honestly, MD has a much stronger ability to commit than I do, so maybe she'll fare better than I. I know that this experience is worthwhile and all. Like I know that no matter what I am pushing the ball forward, I am doing action which is the most important thing in this life. I am taking something that I have only ever t...

My friend Graham wrote a poem about Ted Kaczynski In his book I Have a Gun It made me think of Ted Kaczynski I decided to learn all about Ted Kaczynski during the peak of my isolation during covid times I thought I was losing my mind because I agreed with him I was terrified to tell anyone that I was becoming interested in Ted Kaczynski Because then they would know that I was losing my mind And I thought that it would be fine if I lost my mind as long as no one knew about it. Then I went to a party at one of my cousin's friends' They were all at least five years older than me I got harrassed by a thick man over adherence to pong rules I made jokes to my brother about how out of place I felt I struck up a conversation with the one vaguely alt-looking girl there And somehow the conversation veered its way to Ted Kaczynski I told her that I've been reading a lot about him and his manifesto recently And her response was "ugh every guy is so obsessed with Ted Kaczynski...

 Saw a fight on Thursday Some guy was blasting Jazz out the back of his car on Front A guy was yelling at him to turn it down That guy got beat up I was eating ice cream

Grahhhhhhhhh Grahhhhhhhhh Grahhhhhhh I am alive, I am alive, I am alive, I am alive. Have I just been tricking myself and the world into thinking I am the person I want to be seen as? Sometimes I feel like a stranger to myself. I feel like I have done an expert job at convincing the world I am a better person than I am. I just want to be seen, that's all I've ever wanted. How can I ever be seen if I am constructing this facade? This thin bullshit facade. Do I stoop to the level of person I think of myself as in these moments? Do I try to live up to the image I have tried so hard to curate? Why do I fucking care so God damn much? Why do I think about myself all the God damn time? Why can't I stop? Why can't I Just commit myself to something or someone and just be done with it? Just stop fucking searching. I'm so tired of searching. Sometimes I think that I am blessed with the ability to search. I didn't have to go to the mines at 15 and never think about myself u...

I, like a lot of us these days, have a fear of what the future may bring. The fear ultimately stems from a lack of knowledge. The ambiguity is what keeps me up at night. It's easy to reside in a sort of soft nihilism where you have just accepted doom so it justifies forgoing moral and ethical decision-making. That's a lifestyle I just cannot accept. I worry that this need for purpose that I have will destroy me someday. If I keep on this path of naive gravitas about my own life, I will have nothing left. I have taken great strides in mourning the change, I used to have really debilitating spirals when seeing how the world feels so different now than it did when I was a kid. I now know that that feeling of change is somewhat inevitable, but being able to come to terms with a changing world is the most powerful tool we have against this soft nihilism, it maintains our ability to not fall into hopelessness. The way people cope with this unknown that we are all feeling is very inte...

In my heart of hearts, I am a deeply lazy person. I sometimes think that talking smart and smooth can give off the perception that I'm well-read and therefore not a lazy motherfucker who stares at my phone rotting my brain for hours every day. When I get confronted with having to address my laziness it frequently causes existential crises. Just recently I told my professor about my first blog post and he asked me to send it to him so he could read it. So I took out the part of elderly Jewish men liking the sound of their own voice and I sent it to him. I prefaced the email saying "please don't take this too seriously, I just wrote this for fun". It didn't go well. At the start of the next class he said in front of everyone "Gabe I read what you wrote. I think that if we disagree on this fundamental level of seeing skepticism as the ultimate form of understanding reality, then maybe you should drop this class". I just looked back at him with stunned Pikac...

I saw a TikTok of a teacher talking about how far behind Gen Alpha students are in school. I usually react by writing it off as alarmist anxiety. One of the comments on the post said “Well why should they care, the illusion of working hard in school, and going to college, guaranteeing to lead to a better life, is gone”. I think this person is right in some ways. When I was younger, in middle and high school I was never inundated with cynical ideas of my economic future and I was allowed optimism. I think the absence of optimism could go two ways with the development of Gen Alpha. It could go the way of radicalism, where these kids never feed into the propaganda of the capitalist system and are actually able to change the system and the world we live in. They have the capability to not be inhibited by the shackles of familiarity that the majority of us have with the current system. Or, it could go the other way. This absence could lead to an apathetic immorality; these kids have the pot...

Just let that be known. The need for skepticism is fueled by skepticism. Skepticism is a parasite eating away at our peace of mind. Just because something brings up more internal questions of reason and understanding of God and/or the world around us, does not make it more fruitful. I don’t want to lead my life with a constant feeling of never understanding, of unending angst. Why have we accepted persistent skepticism as the only way to truly see reality for what it is? I refuse to accept that this self-flagellation of believing that “you’ll never understand, but you can never stop trying to understand” is the only way to pursue a spiritual well-being adequately. Do I need to feel a neverending, punishing, sense of pursuit towards understanding God and what he expects of us in order to be a good Jew? I don’t think so. I reject it, actually. The Nuer people in the Sudan have a, according to E. E. Evans Prichard, cut-and-dry view of the divine, what they can expect from the supernatural...