Assorted Plaques from My Dope Line Mausoleum
Here's a guided tour of words that insist on bouncing around in head.
I am searching for something that doesn’t exist (yet).
I love parentheticals. I love the additional commentary of an afterthought. I love the fleeting nature, the tucked aside, the ephemeralness imparted by parenthesis. It’s a recurring thing I find myself using in my writing.
This particular line was from one of my earliest one page comics I never got around to manifesting. It was a starting point, I think around 8 panels (which honestly looking back still might have been too ambitious, although this was a straight reduction of scope from the graphic novel I attempted to script before I realized I needed to start smaller and also before I realized I don’t think in panels) and it’s one that I keep around because it still rings true.
“I am searching for something that doesn’t exist.”
There is fatalist, futile interpretation of this sentiment for sure. But for me it was one of discovery and realization. It’s this idea that true love is not something that is intrinsic/inherent. It’s this idea that it doesn’t exist not because it is incapable of existing, but because the exact reaction hasn’t occurred yet. The exact alchemical process had yet to be discerned.
I think in the context of the comic, the actual line was “You are searching for something that doesn’t exist yet” because it was spoken by an alien species to a human lamenting on their romance woes (as humans are wont to do) and given that Valentine’s Day is at the end of the week, well, I suppose there’s a reason all the plaques I’ve pulled from the Dope Line Mausoleum are tinted red.
You’re a proximity mine. / You’re in proximity of mine heart.
This entry is a significantly older. This comes from my 2017 days. The still trying to be a slam poet days. I would later drop the microphone that summer in favor of… well, not the three minutes with a ten second grace period. It would take a minute before I ended up in my current niche of personal essay and cultural critique, but there is something to be said about how slam made me a better person and also taught me a lot of useful things about the playfulness of languages as a whole, but that’s a slightly different arena.
I think a lot about attraction as a function of proximity. I think there are equal parts wisdom and foolishness falling for your best friends. I don’t think I’ll explain that further.
That said, I don’t think love is a battlefield, the use of proximity mines as a metaphor notwithstanding. The apps are hell, but more in a Sisyphean rather than combat. This is ironic given how my favorite ships are from the Gundam franchise where mecha combat is repeatedly used as a metaphor for the lengths of which an individual will go for the sake of love, but I also think there’s a truth that to a degree that love is supposed to be… not easy, but certainly not requiring 24-52 episodes to realize you have feelings.
A confession in the imaginary plane / i / I... / Aye, yes, indeed.
I deleted all my tweets at the end of 2024. I did not delete my twitter account because I still find it useful even while it burns. But I wasn’t about to let me tweets be used to train Grok because GenerativeAI is very much my antithesis, my archenemy, and the genesis of my villain arc.
I did however download my tweets and while the archive isn’t particularly friendly search, it’s not like the original was particularly good either.
Twitter was where I kept my Dope Line Mausoleum and the archive did manage to produce this one.
What was a pseudo-collegiate group reunion in the midst of a global pandemic became a rediscovery of the love of writing for the sake of writing became a place where we write occasionally and most just keep in touch because rituals are nice.
I suppose here is a reminder that there are different types of love. But I do want to cycle back a bit further and because I like groups of four better than groups of three.
Like scratched and scuffed, a sign of being well loved.
I suppose after all these words, the conclusion is that:
love changes us which is a forgone conclusion honestly.
there exists love outside of the romantic variant even if pop culture doesn’t always acknowledge that
I am not the cynical miser I occasional feel I am (although we’ll see what happens after the latest season of Love is Blind).
I probably should have stuck with three bullet points, but I wanted to show you four “plaques.”
I don’t think this will be a fixture, but it was fun walking through the digital mausoleum that is my archived brain.