Paranoid New Age Internet Syndrome

My computer has been hacked so I’ve taped up the webcam because I’m pretty sure there’s someone watching me masturbate through it. My computer is just as accessible as any porn site. It’s not even really my computer when you think about it. It’s just a computer- one cog in the gears of a massive, godly, ubiquitous, network. I don’t even know what’s outside of it anymore. Sure, there’s a lot of beauty, and even beauty within the network, but sometimes it feels just like, “Report all beautiful things back to the beautiful network.”

Why did I say it like it was a bad thing? I’m sorry. There’s something very cynical about me and I’m trying to find a cure for it but nothing’s been working. I want to be entranced by details, patterns, shapes, and nothing more, but my mind’s been programmed from a really early age to believe that there’s a linear plane and an ultimate truth and a real divine ending but I just don’t want to believe in any of that stuff anymore.

I don’t want it: the face, the names, the history, the stream of conscious memory that deceives me into feeling like I have one fixed identity. I want to be nowhere and everywhere at once, just like nature. How is it that energy stays contained over the span a specific time frame? What the fuck.

I wish Catholic schools were replaced with Matholic schools. Perhaps I’ve just accepted my death too early, like Jesus.

It’s a possibility, that I’m just chemically unbalanced in the head, or whatever. Because I can’t shake the feeling that after I die I will be at peace finally, happy and free, analogous to the surveillance that I am otherwise constantly subjugated to. So I just need pills? (Or nutrition and exercise, and an environment with less carcinogens?) Then I can go to work, become enamored again with the problem-solving I used to love so ~dearly~ as a schoolgirl. I used to want to become an architect but something odd struck me about the use of control and I became disenchanted by mathematics. I thought of myself as an anarchist, and chose to live wildly on the cusp of an unruly world that would seem to reject all of my robotic passions. Error! The opposite is true too! Math both encompasses and escapes capital order. Now I’m in my twenties taking high school algebra.

How to move the traffic of people, meandering around institutions that only facilitate the production of more people? I don’t get it. What’s all the shopping for? When will the powerful entities become one? I’m sick of all the fighting, the eternal holy war has just grown begrudgingly mundane, and all I want to do is… have sex? Or at least just trance out on shapes all day! Rekindle my love for geometry and arithmetic, it’s not too late?

Time makes me feel psychopathic. Like my body’s getting anxious waiting for something, but still I’m trapped within an elaborate series of revolving circles that have no beginning or end. I met someone who makes me feel grounded and soft though. It is truly horrific.

He’s in love with someone else but that’s okay, because I’m not sure why I have these impulses anyway. I suppose the lack of companionship is the only real heartbreaking thing.

He tells me honest things about himself, with no underlining motivation but to relieve some sort of rambling part within his interior dialogue. When we talk I feel the coldness of the regimented world melting away and it reveals a kind of beauty that I used to know very well in my youth. It feels like being suspended in time, like swinging on a swing set with nothing else to do or worry about it. I wonder if he feels that way all of the time, or at least when he’s with the one he loves.

It took me a long time to even begin to understand that word, “love.” I used to think it just meant “titillation.” At the same time, it confuses me why people choose to value one human being over another. “Romantic love,” I suppose, is the difference. Still, I wonder if its just random secretions of pheromones, hormones, “chemistry?”

He says he enjoys our conversations because he feels like he can be honest, and that I’m insightful (useful) when it comes to sexuality and psychology. What a contradiction- I hate how much I pine for him! On one hand I feel like he doesn’t deserve the energy, but on the other hand, I feel so generous with my love that I could be happy never actually possessing him, only cherishing the fact that he exists, and living silently (but sadly?) with the bud-like state of our un-blossomed romance. Why should I require mutuality anyway? I can love him from afar, isolated in the miracle that two human beings can be lucky enough to cross paths with one another. Yes.

It both irritates me and excites me to think about him. Romantic love is an addiction, says the MRI of the free natural world. Love “lights up” the same spots in the brain as heroine addiction, gambling addiction, alcohol, nicotine, creatine, anything- any vice, so what does that tell you? Nothing, really… There are millions of MRI scans and all we get out of it is modern art, a collage of random shape and color.

Maybe I should just join the army and die a civilized death. I’ll throw myself to the Upzbakistanokplians. They deserve a fair fight.

Like a pendulum swinging back and forth- is it that binary at work, every conflict being the exact same thing. Unsolvable. Arbitrary. Belonging to a temporal dimension that I’m not equipped for.

Who cares if they see me masturbating in front of the webcam? I’m just like seven billion other people on the planet.

What if instead I were to offer myself to the army as a gift of thanks? The old kamikaze pilots wondered too, why would the village women spend hours knitting gifts for them when they could just present their consenting bodies to them as a farewell sentiment instead? It’s a good question. Or how about: why the distinction at all? Because no one likes to see women getting hurt? Men don’t like to see women getting hurt? Women like to see men getting hurting? Men like to see men getting hurt? What’s going on?

Maybe I’ll become a whore for the needy, like Mother Theresa. Or else this body, these lips, my soft skin, my gentle voice, my dishonest aversion for brutality and crassness and intellectual conversation, will all go to waste.

I wonder if it’s my cynicism that detracts him. Or maybe it’s my erratic behavior. Or maybe its something more simple and sobering, like incompatibility. He should be waking up for work soon- funny that I should be getting to bed. “To the acid mines,” he likes to say, because he plays with mouse cells.

And as I recall this now, I think to myself: what would I even do with such a useless man? (Let him spoon me as I fall asleep, with our hands clasped?) Ridiculous.

And here comes the panic before I fall asleep again. I’ve almost become immune to it. Surveillance is at its peak when my mind’s unwinding, not because we require more observation at this time, but because we’re more receptive to observation. No, I don’t know what I’m saying. Far too bold, I must abandon these thoughts. I guess “surveillance” is completely the wrong word, but then why does it feel like an entire system of voyeurs are surrounding me at all times? Catholic residue, I’m guessing… No, wait, it’s the internet? The knowledge of satellites? The knowledge of governance? Cognitive self-reference? A fetishism? Pure fetishism.

I sink into that panic like orgasmic quicksand, the mockery of death propelling me into a state of pure uncontrollable elation, my blood pressure slowing, and causing a ticklish sensation around the ~highly sensitive~ areas. Sweet dreams tonight, I hope, but still my rambling voice sees no end as my sub-consciousness drifts into the forefront and ringing around is that irreplaceable chatter, chatter, chatter.