Friday Night

It’s Friday night, and I’ve seen this Asian girl before. She’s poor. You can tell from her dirty shoes, her lack of makeup, the way she carries herself. We’re far from Boston or Los Angeles; she’s out of her element, her natural habitat.

I don’t follow her around the store, but I hope to bump into her again.

It’s been a few months since I talked to “a person.” I have people online, on the phone, friends, men, but none of them are “a person.” They are people, known entities, far-away connections. Not “a person.”

A person is a potentiality. I have not “gotten to know” someone in months. Everyone is a known entity, far away, or a stranger. Not a person.

She is a person, wandering without a cart, just like me. We both promise ourselves we only need one or two things, but it’s friday night after 10pm, so what are we really here for? We are at the grocery store for love.

Love motivates everything. I write for love. People pursue love in a cowardly, stupid, inefficient way, because to come out openly and say it out loud risks certain death. It can’t be that simple.

Rather, it can’t be that superficial. Love means bumping into a girl at 10pm on a Friday night at the grocery store. Love is accidental, coincidental, divinely inspired, “lucky.” Fated to be.

Dating apps don’t allow for love — too direct, formulaic, drowning in algorithmic overflow. A grocery store is the perfect place for love.

I practice my smile and line. Something about “excuse me” “sorry” but you’re kind of cute. I laugh to myself about how ridiculous it is, how she will scowl and say, “I have a boyfriend.”

They say that the stomach has more neurons than the brain, and I am mentally ill. For some reason, I’ve started eating one meal a day. I go to the salad bar, loud up 1.84 pounds of bacon, eggs, blue cheese, and fried chicken, and consume the whole thing in a single sitting. Then I am too stuffed to eat anything else.

I made the mistake today of adding a yogurt drink to my meal, and now I am paying the consequences, hours later. I waddle around like a penguin, sloshing, pregnant with bad decisions.

As I turn a corner in the aisles, I burp loudly, right in her face.

Most of the the time, no one is watching or listening. I can burp how I like, where I want. It feels good to relieve myself of the pressuring building up. But that was unlucky. Not meant to be.

It’s not so bad. I mean, burping right in her face, it’s kind of funny. I have interacted with a person. She knows that I am bloated, slovenly, unashamed. But she ignored me, didn’t even given me a scowl. Maybe she didn’t hear me, because she has her headphones in, and she’s shutting out the world.

That’s it. She didn’t see me or hear me. I have a second chance.

She’s checking out, and pulls a few crumpled dollar bills out of her back pocket. One of them drifts slowly to the floor like an autumn leaf. And — get this — she has change. Change. Real life coins, a blast from the past. Then there’s the accent. You can barely hear her voice, but she’s an immigrant.

I know she doesn’t have a car, because I saw her walking from the next parking lot over. Does she work in a massage parlor? When I see a poor Asian girl with an accent in south Florida, that’s my assumption.

She says: “actually, can I not buy eggs?” The black cashier puts the eggs aside.

Here’s my chance, I think. I can buy the eggs for her, be the hero, and get to know her. Finally, I will become real. My life will become exciting. I will do something crazy. I watch her bag her own items. This is my chance. I need to say, “hey, why I don’t I pay for that.”

But it never comes out of my mouth, for some reason. I don’t know why. My heart was pumping, adrenaline flowing. This woman is everything and nothing: I am her savior, but she cannot comprehend the enormity of my intensity. All of my pent up loneliness is threatening to explode out of me in a sudden emotional terrorist attack. But I contain it, and in my panic, I freeze, lost in my own recursive thoughts. This is my moment. This is my chance.

She leaves, and the black woman behind the counter begins to scan my items. Usually, this is the only 30 seconds of human interaction I get in a day. But I am silent. Surprised. Why did I miss my chance? What just happened? Why didn’t I say anything? Will I always be this way? Were the haters right? So this is how it ends, right? I just never say anything? I always freeze? Stuck in a loop? Why? Why? Why?

I rush out of the store with my bags —WHY IS SHE TAKING SO LONG TO BAG THE WATER, I DON’T NEED THE WATER IN A BAG — and see this girl walking into the dark night at 10:50pm. I shout at her.

I CAN BUY THE EGGS.

I swear she turned around, but she keeps walking. She’s probably threatened, scared. I am a homeless man, wearing crocs, bloated… I imagine how bad I look right now, with my nasty long hair, Goodwill clothing, looksminning…

I shout again. REALLY, I’LL BUY THOSE EGGS FOR YOU.

She acknowledges me, and shouts back something like, “no, it’s ok, I just didn’t have enough cash.”

Next time. Next time I’ll buy those eggs. And she will thank me, in broken English, and I will get to know her, and I will become her savior, and we will get to know each other. She will smile at me, a smile of approval, and I will be validated.

There’s a bar somewhere in this city, one hundred bars, and they all have my name on them. I remember the last time I wandered into a bar alone.

Writing is safe.

No matter how bad the comments are, they are comforting. I can’t tell you how many times someone has commented, “this is the worst thing I’ve ever read.” But, you know, there’s probably worse stuff that you haven’t read.

Like the phone book. No one has read the entire phonebook, because the phonebook is really bad. Seriously! It’s boring; too many characters with superficial development; no identifiable plot; the setting is all over the place! What even is the theme? It’s really just a short series of descriptions without any coherence at all! It’s terrible!

So no, you have never sat down and read the phonebook, because the phonebook is really bad. Even the title is bad! But my article? Well, you read it, and it was the worst thing you’ve ever read, but that is still high praise. At least I know how to write good click-bait titles. That’s something.

One of the things I love about writing is that I can be as intense as I like. I can be honest. I can finally release. I can never do that in real life. Even with my closest friends, they don’t want to hear me go on a 10 minute monologue. They want to have a dialogue. But I don’t want to dialogue — I just want relief.¹

When I describe this psychology, people tell me, “yeah, my ex-wife was like that. She was crazy.” Or, “are you sure you’re not gay?” I don’t know.²

I say all this and smile.

People always call me “self-aware,” as if that is a virtue. Imagine two men sick with cancer: one knows that he will die, the other is blissfully unaware. The former man ties himself into knots of stress, worrying about the prospect of hell, regretting that he never had a wife or kids, never experienced the fullness of life… The latter man goes on normally, and then suddenly, one day, he drops dead. Who is better off? The ignorant man, or the one who was “self-aware”?

Self-awareness is really just a song and dance of fishing for pity. I am self-aware; perhaps I deserve a cookie. It’s a very effective technique that I was taught by hours of therapy as a kid. The middle aged woman would praise me for describing my own faults, and shower me with sympathy. I hacked the system.

But learning how to get praise from therapists isn’t a good life skill. Maybe for a narcissistic manipulator, it can be useful. But for long-term relationships, there’s no much utility in it.

Propaganda and Romance

I try to dedicate myself mostly to writing about non-personal topics, and sometimes that’s successful. Secretly, though, my best writing is always motivated by some hidden personal agenda. The deeper I hide my agenda, the more impactful the writing is. The more obvious I make it, the less seductive. Propaganda and romance die in the explicit and thrive in the implict.

You can’t just come out and say, “hey, would you have sex with me?” I can’t just write an article saying, “hey I’m lonely on a Friday night, please hit that like button and make me feel better?” No, the best techniques are subtle.

So among this, I need to hide something… It’s like an Easter Egg hunt. What did he mean by this? It’s in the tension that magnetism draws people in. We love a good mystery. Why? That’s the endless question.

Every day I wake up in survival mode, just trying to force myself to edit another article that I don’t want to edit. I love writing, but I hate editing. Writing is an escape from my internal world — even if you (the audience) are not here, I can imagine you, and then I don’t feel so insane, because you’re right here with me (parasocially).

But editing is nothing like that. Editing is not an adventure between me and you (my best bud). Editing is like nails on a chalkboard. Editing! I might as well be masturbating with steel wool. Make it stop.

But writing

writing is like when she places her hand on your thigh for the first time, and you feel the warmth of her life. Everything is new. Even if I try to write the same article, over and over again, 1,000 times, each time is unique and special and imminent. I am present. I am not haunted with the mistakes I made in the past, or obsessed with my dim view of the future. I am simply here. I simply am.

This is why Adderall must be a great drug, even though I have never taken it. Sometimes people find that hard to believe, but I am just a very mentally special boy. I have a unique set of skills, skills that make me entertaining to people like you. Skills that make me … weird.

I can easily write 9,000 words in a day. Easy. No problem at all. Most people cannot do it. Now many the stuff I write is slop and drivel, but still. 9,000 words is a lot. In order to get to this point, I had to train myself over months and months to sit in front of a computer and keep on typing, and I don’t stop typing.

Sometimes when I am unsettled, when I am too tired too work but too disturbed and energized to sleep, I wish that I could just stare at the screen and be hypnotized. This is what doom scrolling is: a form of hypnosis.

Writing is self-hypnosis. I am trying to dive deeply into my own psychology, dig around in the muck, and pull out a shiny diamond on a string.

If I write enough articles like this, will one of them eventually be good?

Sometimes it’s penance. When I first started reading again, in 2022, it was a punishment. I need to change. I can’t go on like this. It’s always motivated by a woman. I am a gay man who is OBSESSED with women.

Elijah Shaffer would understand.

Fear

The simp is thought of as lower than the homosexual. The homosexual is comfortable in his own skin; the simp is wracked by insecurity. His desperation makes him repellant to women, so he learns to put on a mask. But this is a dangerous game.

See, when you learn to put on the mask, it works surprisingly well. You hide your insecurities, and you can trick people into thinking you are an “alpha male” or whatever. But this becomes insidious, because it teaches the brain that “the real me is bad, and lying is good.” This can quickly spiral out of control.

It never actually fixes the underlying insecurity, the lack of self-acceptance. It just papers it over with a load of thick marmalade. Eventually, you end up drowning in lies. Who even am I anymore? What is “deep left”?

Intellectual criticisms rarely rattle me, because I am very good at intellectual critique. I am an axiomatic thinker — laser focused on theorems and hypotheses. Thus, I can talk for hours about my “flaws” in an intellectual framework. But when I am actually situated in real life, I am totally overwhelmed by the raw data and I malfunction.

Intellectually, I know that I should just be asking out women everywhere all the time. Intellectually, I know that a bad pickup line is better than no pickup line. But in the moment, these factoids mean nothing, because human behavior cannot be reduced to a series of axioms. It must be felt. That’s where I hit a wall. I know what I think, but not what I feel.

The problem isn’t “autism.” I am perfectly capable of making facial expressions and reading facial expressions. I have no problem with understanding social queues. I know when someone likes me, and when they don’t like me. My problem is not that I am socially inept — it’s that I am so neurotic that the slightest hint of social rejection causes me to go into fight-flight-or-freeze.

I understand humans — I’m just deadly afraid of them.

This is a picture of smart people. A man is trying to cure his girlfriend’s cancer. Look at these Asians, Indians, and white people. There might even be a sneaky Hispanic in the mix — you never know. This is “elite human capital.”

There was a time, a year or two ago, when I could imagine myself accidentally being invited to such a dinner. Despite having no qualifications, I had a few friends like that. Friends of friends.

Now I’m very far from this dinner, but I don’t miss it.

Maybe fear isn’t the right word. Or not the full picture.

I’m staring up at the moon, more than half-full, but waning.

My suffering doesn’t come only from fear. If I was only fearful, I would simply cling to whoever floated my way, and never let go. I would never speak up; never speak out; never do anything to ruffle feathers. I would be sitting at a dinner table with friends in San Francisco, schmoozing with people much smarter than I am, more accomplished, richer.

But fear is not my only emotion. I also feel emergency. This is something different. I have to change the world. I have to make an impact.

Curing cancer is a grift. It’s not real. It’s scraping the bottom of the barrel.

We could be saving millions of lives very cheaply. Better yet: we could be making the existing lives that we have supremely better. Better yet: we could find something more meaningful than life itself.

Saving lives is a pathetic task. Pathetic in the sense of being lowly, but also in the sense of catering to victimhood, to pain, and to suffering. I feel a sense of emergency because I want to strive for something higher than the mere avoidance of death. I want to make life meaningful.

There is no meaning in saving lives. What is the point of living?

For most people, the question has self-evident answers: family, friends, food, laughter. That was never enough for me, maybe because I saw all those things as shallow and superficial. There must be something more.

You can fairly say that I distrust the simple things in life because I never really had them. Very “self-aware” of me to admit that. But it doesn’t change who I am.

I am desperate to discover something higher than life: something worth dying for.

But no one seems to get it. No one understands.

That’s why I like Nazis, and the woke. They are mentally ill, but they get it.

Life cannot simply be an endless ritual of food, family, friends, and laughter. I don’t want to be safe, secure, and comfortable. I want a Mount Everest to climb. What is worth my life?

That’s why I can’t go to bars, or make small talk.

Again, I understand the critique that I am living “inside-out,” and this sense of emergency is just brain chemicals. My ideas are just a consequence of neuroticism.

Self-awareness doesn’t make the neuroticism go away. It is now even more intense.

I want to cry. Not because my life is sad, or because I am worse off than anyone else. I want something worth crying over. I want to see the hero sacrifice his life, and I want to become him, and embody him. I want to become the savior of a poor massage parlor employee. I accept nothing less.

1. It’s selfish, I know. If I cared more about others, listening to them, helping them, I wouldn’t be alone on a Friday night. Most people who are lonely fully deserve it. Love is earned. What have I done to earn love?

If anything, rather than trying to earn love, I actively spurn it. I push it away, because it is frightening. What if the person I love leaves me? Well, maybe if I throw them a real curve ball, that will make me feel better. If they get spooked and leave, then good: it was going to happen anyway. If they wince and stick around, I feel safe again. I’m worth all the bullshit I dish out.

2. I have so much energy inside me, and I desperately want to make a connection, but I make it impossible. I sabotage.