ELEVENTH POST

July 15, 2026 · 5:43 PM

It’s really interesting to watch a word bloom.

I don’t mean like, you invent a new word, and then watch it catch on. I mean that it’s really neat to watch someone develop a language, or reach for a word that means something slightly different, and rotate that into being something everyone else starts using.

I wonder often how these things work. I think there are multiple kinds of people that are language benders, and one such class is the amplifier. They don’t necessarily create the word, or use it for the first time in a novel way, but they are the one that give it attention. They incorporate these things into their language, and then they broadcast it outward with something like embedded meaning and spread power, and then people start picking it up.

I’ve noticed that this happens with me and some of my friends (and things that are more complicated than friends) often. It’s especially apparent on twitter that these kinds of people like to group together, and play with the shape of words. They’re word rotating, so to speak.

I’ve had quite the productive day today. Husband is out of town, and I was exhausted so much (see previous posts) that I went and picked up three different nicotine vapes to try and help me get through. Spoiler alert: I am smoking them all like a little raccoon freak. I am totally feral. I am eating chicken out of the fridge with my bare hands at 1:30am. I am sleeping in three day old clothes. I am generating massive amounts of output… some of it is even useful.

Here are some type of guy I interacted with this week:

Guy making a run at the Peptide Industry (and his team is actually good, the ones to do it IMO)
Guy who has been created in a lab, perfectly groomed since birth, to be a high-level mover and shaker to the point it sounds expensive when he talks
Guy who wants to make a video game
Guy who is growing biological computers from neurons in meat
Guy making farcaster but on bluesky
Guy working on engineering microbes for better industrial agricultural processes at scale
Girl who is psychic and has the most magnetic and intense scorpio-ass energy
Guy making an actually interesting permissionless prediction market (I know I’ve said that before… but lord do I love the concept of financialization in general)
Guys who want to help me make one of the festivals work
Guy who builds rockets and says yes ma’am and then reads the Bible
Guy who wants to do what might be the best iteration of the festival work
Girl and friends who taxonomize and decide what is and isn’t slop, at scale

What an interesting and strange collection of minds. Most of them are not in New York, for one reason or another. I’ve found that the trick to living in New York is that you have to leave often. You should stay in New York for up to three weeks at a time, and then it’s an imperative that you fuck off to the woods, to the beach, to literally anywhere else. Otherwise, the city, its heat and cement and metal structures and energy fields and frenetic pace of time slipping through your hands like sand will drive you up a wall.

That, and like, It’s 95 degrees today in New York.

It’s the kind of wet, sticky summer heat that I can’t stand. It reminds me of home. It’s like someone threw a hot, wet towel over you. Now it’s pouring rain. Apparently all the flights that were heading to LGA have to divert to PHL. I’m watching some of them circle on flightaware. The way the weather has shifted here, to being something like where I’m from, is strange. It’s like no matter what I do, there I am in a really hot place where it’s extremely rainy.

I do love a good storm. I love watching lightning flash across the sky, I love hearing and feeling the thunder roll through. I love watching sheets of rain, watching the way it bounces off of things. I love watching plants toss and turn, a little beaten down by something that will help them flourish dramatically, in the right proportions. I even love when lightning hits something nearby, and the resulting clap of thunder jolts you right out of your skin.

I’m on this new medication that has been really, really helping my sense of self. It’s been doing wonders for my anxiety. I’m not even a little anxious about the back door being open right now, I’m just watching and listening to the storm. The raindrops are fat, satisfying, warm. I love summer rain.

Anyway, this new medication. It feels like when you go to the optometrist, and they do the thing where they’re like “one, or two”, and they hit two, and everything snaps into a really sharp, crisp focus. But for my self of self, identity, and inner voice. It’s really pleasant to not be so harshly second-guessing myself, ruminating on things I’ve done or not done, things that have happened to me. I have some sort of ipseity disturbance, and often feel like a collection of 5-100 people more than I feel like one. This medicine has reduced that down to maybe 2-3 different “me”s, and I am pleased to be feeling more integrated.

I am much less pleased by how much energy it seems to be stealing from me. Allegedly, it can take 4-6 weeks to get used to the fatigue and for your body to adjust. I’ve been doing my best to push through. It would be nice to have a medication just work as intended, even if that’s never been something that’s happened for me on the first try before. We’re on week 5, and I’m still depleted of all energy, all fight. I can feel this lack of power in my bones.

This is why I have been having trouble writing, and beyond that, having trouble thinking. It’s nice to feel calmer, less anxious, less pointy, but it’s coming at the cost of sharpness, of ability, of execution. Much like the strawberry plant in on my back porch, I suppose it’s the dose that makes the medicine. Too much rain will drown you. Too much calm will steal my creative spark.

I kind of refuse to idly sit here while it’s stolen from me though. I’ve been pushing fiercely, and I’m determined to post often, even if what I post isn’t very much at all. I’ve been world building, architecting, buying seventy fucking domains on a whim. I hope that what I see, and what I want to make, will enter the world in the way I want it to.

Plans have a nasty habit of not surviving first contact with the enemy.

As such, I have not made a plan. I haven’t even made a roadmap. I’ve barely done the storyboarding. The end is a surprise, mostly because I also don’t know how it ends, so whatever ends up flowing out of me will be at the very least surprising. I’m not good at endings. I prefer the Irish Goodbye, the sort of goodbye that slips you away before anyone notices, and then you sort of muse on what sudden absence feels like.

I’ve had two particularly unsatisfying conflicts resolve this way lately. I don’t mind that these goodbyes were particularly quick and unspoken. I don’t mind that they were abrupt, and over before they deserved to be. What I mind is that they were narratively one sided, and indulgent at that. No one bothered to ask me anything, consult me at all, or even hear what I possibly had to say. The other parties made their own stories up, mythologized, assigned motives, and then swiftly enacted their will. It didn’t actually matter what I had to say, the real Me isn’t as important as the one they made up. I resent the ghosts of these things a lot more than I resent the actions people take once they’ve decided to go this route. It makes me both curious and sad that people don’t really seem to do this, don’t seem interested in finding out if their personalized and constructed inner narratives actually match anything exterior. Maybe they don’t need them to the way I do. Maybe you’re comfortable telling yourself tall tales, comfortable with your campfire myths and legends about the evil people, comfortable in your stagnation. Maybe you don’t ever want to confront that maybe it was more complicated than your myths. Maybe it’s load bearing that you don’t.

I wish I worked that way, but I am far too concerned about how often my insides don’t match my outsides, which I guess is solved in my case by medication, and in regular people it’s just something they never even consider.