Writer's Diary
5/13/26
I spent both Sunday and Monday writing, rewriting plays, one for a reading, the other on commission. I can’t say for whom. I’m relieved to be done and to be able to close the computer screen for a little while.
Once you get marked as having achieved too much or been given too much, once you become an object of envy, there’s no limit to the cruelty that actually can be inflicted upon you socially. You’re just expected to endure it as a kind of tax you pay for having crawled forward on your knees a few feet out of total anonymity.
I have to train my brain not to invest itself in fears or anxieties, large or small. Like a car radio that has a mind of its own that keeps changing from classical music to noise and static. The important thing is not to start to prefer the noise and static, the fear and anxiety, but to recognize that there’s spiritual danger there.
In terms of “nobody reads” or “nobody can read,” in a holistic, ecological sense, I would just say: there’s no reading being done. At some point in the last eighteen months, we have fully entered the era of decoding and information gathering—rather than reading; the era of reading, in the sense of imagining and living in a hedonistic world of excess of the unreal, has ended.
The contemporary brain just doesn’t know what to make of fiction and poetry and philosophy. It cannot imagine its own symbols. It does not have the energy for that. Its energy is absorbed in sifting through all the symbols that scroll by. It does not have time for excess and play.
The counterpoint is that there’s so much information, so many purported potential tentative facts—infinite facts really via the scroll—that something like a mass return to imaginative literature might be around the corner (because literature might be the only thing that can reasonably summarize the complexity of contemporary life in a way that is additive for readers).
Condensation, crystallization, and the syntax and arrangement of thoughts might be at an extreme premium the more exhausted, the more overborne our brains become.
The person who can say the most complex thing in the simplest manner will become even more valuable the more AI stimulates the production of more video, more text, more information in general.
One of the reasons I need a long break, maybe a permanent break, from administering a theater full-time, is that I’m starting to lose touch with what my thoughts are: what I actually want to write about and who I want to write for; what part of myself I want to challenge and change through my writing.
The internal process always precedes the external process. So if the internal process withers, then the external process will die too.
I don’t want to make word content. I don’t want to make diary content or theater content. I want to translate a cognitive poetic process into a semantic poetic product.
There’s a lot of desire connected to the Hantavirus rumor narrative that I see on X.com.