Creative writing
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5/17/25
It’s the journey, not the destination, they said.
The journey.
And so as I found myself swimming through the wet afternoon,
Thoughts paddling through my head,
My heart straddling my rib cage as if I were almost motherf*cking dead,
Thinking the things that keep me awake in bed—
I realized that I did not have to stay on the road.
So I veered off into the field, through the trees, wherever I pleased,
And for 33 minutes I was somewhat at ease.
Perhaps the shortest path, the most optimal solution, is not the most enjoyable,
The most valuable,
The most thrilling.
Probably it is not the automatic or systematic one, but the one that is chaotic, sporadic, erratic, sometimes-tragic, makes-your-legs-lactic path that you should keep prepped in your attic. As Ursula K LeGuin once famously said,
“It is good to have an end to journey toward,
But it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
Freestyle, breaststroke, butterfly, dragonflies (xc), cockroach (dispenser), bee, goat,
Unless you’re Bryan Johnson or Jesus,
We’ll all get there in the end.
Because probably, the destination is to be dead.
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7/27/25
They say the world is your oyster.
There’s a 99.99% chance it doesn’t have a pearl.
A lot of people will just trash it because they don’t even like oysters.
Some will try to pressure cook it but just end up pressuring themselves to do things they don’t like because that’s not how you prepare an oyster.
Many try to fry it but end up just frying their brains.
Don’t microwave it either.
Only the sun is permitted to microwave the oyster.
Now every once in a while, you’ll get someone who eats it uncooked.
But in fact, the correct way to eat an oyster is to enjoy it raw. Back in the days when we did, there was no technology, no pollution, no 30-second attention spans, so the planet thrived. Granted it was not very lit, but that’s a good thing, we don’t want the planet to be lit because then it would be too hot to be habitable. Unless it’s the sun making it lit.
Presently, our world is slowly getting overcooked, a billion different ways at once. You can’t really uncook at oyster, which is why some people are trying to find another one to cook.
Perhaps we should stop heating it up and have it raw, cause right now the oyster be pretty cooked.
That is all. -
8/1/25
Tragically, I ran out of my final jar of Kirkland Signature peanut butter yesterday.
No matter how vigorously, thoroughly, and homogeneously I’d stir the jar beforehand, I’d always arrive at the bottom of the vessel to find a few lumpy bits. Rocks on a smooth beach. Weeds in a field of flowers. Indications of inevitable imperfections; implications of unnoticed detail that may someday, inertially, make all the difference.
And yet they were natural. They were good. They served as a comfortable confirmation that I had been eating something real, because complete homogeneity is synthetic.
I reach in with a spoon to obtain a taste of one of the last few chunks. Salty. Crunchy. Dry. Stimulative, strangely. A wave of nostalgia hits me: I remember the peanut butter jelly sandwiches I’d consume in middle school; the peanut butter bagels I’d have before high school cross country meets; and the bananas I’d slather with peanut butter I had snuck into the DC because the PB packets there were like mere twigs in contrast to the mighty oak that is the glorious Kirkland Signature peanut butter.
Something at the tip of my tongue. A pressing reminder. A profound prophecy which I must fulfill. As it imbues itself into my thoughts, I stare into the vacant jar. I am overcome overwhelmingly by a single word. I speak it, reverently.
“Costco.”
It’s no wonder I was born in Kirkland WA.
To return to Costco is my destiny. -
8/5/25
Math ain’t a drug but I’ve been kinda high on numbers recently.
Dealer of proofs, purest math in the neighborhood.
Sell you a couple a formulas for the cost of my sleep.
Call me a sniper, cause I be sin-fully pulling the trig from all the right angles.
Call me a baker, cause I be stuffing you with pi’s till you’re circular.
I multiply till I get the product.
I got the prime business, doing you numbers from which I’m indivisible.
Adderall? I’ll add-em all.
Speed? I got distance over time.
Ecstasy? I got XKCD.
You want sum?
Good. Cause I’m the $\Sigma_{all my passions}$ with ADD. -
8/12/25
Who first said
A picture is worth a thousand words?
Bill Gasarch
The man who organized all us nerds
Who first said
That’s bullshit man!
Soren did
A Hilbert-Ramsey thesis plan
Who first said who first said who first said
I did, when Bill said who first said
And who first lead a group of us to the end of the road where the muffin man goes every so often to get pizza for those
Lunches we hold.
Bunches of markers are bunches of gold.
Bunches of times when fortune favors the bold.
Fortune cookies no mold.
Fortunately most of them told
Of fortunate people with goals.
Unfortunately unfunded some of us live in a hole!
Or boxes!
As Bill first said August (!) does
But all of us was
Convinced that he first said who first said
Straight from his head to the ears of the youth in the room that he first said
Knowledge grows exponentially.
We are all fundamentally
People
Not robots, not chatbots, not mechanazis, paparazzis! Pepperoni? That’s a topping!
Apparently you can’t draw pictures of people talking.
Apparently you can’t be in the heat while walking [to stamp].
Apparently the markers here need restocking.
Apparently a giraffe hung from the ceiling of Clyde’s office, slowly offing.
Apparently the construction people are clocking in at noon,
Noise until 2,
Nothing to lose,
Distracting us from all the brilliant research we should go and do!
Now I once drew a face of a man on that wall, “Please bon’t erase it”
Maybe a lot of projects here are actually kinda basic but let’s face it
When code doesn’t compile, or we can’t figure out how to use LaTeX,
We gotta stop and think about what things to replace and
Maybe even revise the algorithm or draw another face and
Ask how many boba tea shops there really are in outer space.
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10/5/25
“I have the foot cream that makes your toes look scrum-diddly-uptious.
I have the face lotion that makes your nose look plumpy-lumpy-lumpus.
I have the hair curlers that make the curls go boing-doingy-doungus.
From devices that clap to creams that zap, we fix every wrinkle, we tighten every flap.
I have all the beauty devices, make your poopy smell like nice spices,
Make them look twice for the right prices,
Make you never again have the “I’m ugly” crisis.
So what’s it gonna be?
Look like a potato, or make them say ‘I thought I was gay. Wow’” -
10/18/25
“Rowan”, Aidan had texted last night. “Low key can you just walk over?”
“Oh yeah ok I can do that”, I had said, unknowing of what treacherous undertaking I had bequeathed upon myself.
I take a step. Two minutes late.
“Oh wait hold up I need to start my watch”, I think to myself. Big mileage. This would be too significant an activity not to record.
I take another step, then look up.
Abruptly, everything goes quiet.
Something is amiss.
I’m frozen.
Immobile.
The world ever so slightly speeds up around me, as if some great hand had shifted the cogs in the clock of reality.
The air thickens.
I attempt to move, but feel as though I am submerged in a massive homogenous Gu, to be consumed at some point unannounced by the mouth of oblivion. I glance down at my fingers, only to see time slipping from my grasp. The world around me begins to accelerate, exponentially.
Minutes are condensed to what seem to be seconds.
Hours follow, with the sun traversing all twelve twelfths of the sky in a countable number of breaths.
Then days.
Flashes of day and night spatter across my now-untrusted eyesight, because I’m uncertain whether what I’m perceiving is the truth.
Weeks.
Months.
Everything that I thought to be true, suddenly nonsensical.
I see flashes of political signs:
“Speed for president.”
“Adderall makes the flu viruses gay.”
“Humans are human-generated.”
“Humans are AI-generated”.
“Everything is AI-generated.”
“Everything is nothing.”
“Dood.”
Years succumb to my senseless perception of temporal dimensionality, the world inexplicably morphs and evolves rapidly around me; and what feels like a blink of an eye is now ten centuries.
I’m helpless.
I’m mortal.
I’m nothing.
One billion years pass, humanity destroys itself, and millennia of progress in knowledge, technology, and ideology, is revealed to serve only cyclically to put an end to itself. The means to an end becomes the means of the end, meaning the end of all means, and all means rendered meaningless.
I witness the sound of the sun imploding.
A familiar sound.
High-pitched.
A buzz.
One that I’ve heard thousands of times before, nearly every day for the past six years.
Like the sound that your Garmin makes when you start it.
Oh wait actually it actually was my Garmin never mind we chillin I was daydreaming. Anyway I get to Aidan’s apartment.
Time to go pick up those racing bibs. -
11/19/25
A spaceman walks into a bar.
Not just any bar, of course. The so-called “space bar.”
He trots forward, his visor glinting in the light. Putting his futuristic-looking, steroid-loaded inhalation device to his lips, he takes a shot — and exhales, heavily.
The inquiry arrives next.
“So, uh,” the words find themselves, falling unusually slowly, almost as if they had been flung across the canvas of the moon. “How do I make a fire ball?”
That’s when he walks into it. Right there, before the word ‘ball’.
The response is, quite unsurprisingly, bot-like.
“I don’t know if I can answer that.” An unusual pause. “That seems quite dangerous. I’m not sure you’re authorized. If you want, I can explain how to light a fire in an outdoor setting. Would you like that?”
“Huh? No thanks.” the spaceman counters, shaking his head. “You see, I’m getting into bartending a bit myself. And I kind of need to know these things.”
The AI replies:
“Ah — do you mean ‘fireball’? As in the alcoholic drin? I believe you hit the space bar between the words ‘fire’ and ‘ball’ on accident.”
“Ah, whoops,” the spaceman mutters. “Clumsy fingers.”
But before the spaceman can respond in the affirmative, GPT, unprompted, outputs the following:
“Also — I believe your name is a typo as well. You’re not a ‘spaceman.’ You’re my specimen.”
The old man jumps back from his computer, aghast. He takes off his tattered glasses and sets down his metal inhaler. He glances outside.
Deer graze in his lawn, unbothered.
A squirrel comes across the window frame, teetering at the corner; it looks inside. There is an instinctual, almost prophetic fear in its eyes. Seemingly noticing the text on the screen, it bolts away abruptly and sprints across the grass — as if a being pursued by an invisible predator.
Kids no longer play in the streets like they used to.
They all sit inside, hitting up spacebars, eye-pads, ex-boxes, tik-toxins, instant-grams, and all kinds of addictive drug-infused electronic devices.
“What have we come to?” the specimen mutters.
The year is 2026. -
12/7/25
Time
Is what you were waiting for.
Or so you thought.
But you’re losing it.
You’re backwards. Sideways.
That’s what you want to think.
Maybe you’ve lost it.
The tomorrows come and go.
They never stay;
None ever will.
The yesterdays cast shadows.
They linger momentarily,
And disappear silently.
The last day like the next,
The next day like the last,
And today like eternity.
Because it is eternally today.
But the continuity of time
Is questionable
When sometimes it seems
Like your first steps were yesterday,
Like the end is never,
Like time sprawls across a canyon.
Multidirectional,
Multitudinous,
Magnificent.
Until you grasp
That you’ll one day dissolve
Into oblivion.
And it may only be when you recognize
That time is oddly inevitable
That you’ll defy the odds inevitably
And find yourself.
You defiant oddity.