my so-called euphoria

“O useless soulmate of my tedium! … we didn’t ask what it was all for, because we revelled in knowing that it was for nothing.” - Fernando Pessoa. April 25th, 2019, the raven came to me.

[primulaceas]

Roberto Bolaño, Poem 3 from “Streets of Barcelona.” The Unknown University (Translated by Laura Healy)

[lookforastronauts]

#5. Nomadland (2020)

director: Chloé Zhao cinematography & production design: Joshua James Richards

[thepersonalquotes]

““The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” - Gloria Steinem”

—

[my-so-called-euphoria]

Remember that time when most of us were remote working and life felt lighter in spite of the dystopian air outside, and whatever fragmentation your social life was undergoing, that at least you were not commuting to a job you hated to make small talk with people you never chose to be sat with, and the way the weekends felt smaller and more desperate to compensate for the prolonged boredom of the week, but once remote, days softened, the tightness in your neck released, you forgot the necessity of clothes and schedules, and glimpsed a bit of the possibility of retirement, of some relinquishing of time and place that was weirdly yours. And then they took it away again, and we all had to pretend that what we experienced was not real, was actually traumatic, and this was the remedy, five days a week commuting in proper clothes and under fluorescent lights ever on-call to management for whatever they need to waste your time more efficiently.

“Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right.”

[my-so-called-euphoria]

[acertainknot]

One might say that the backcloth of experience consists in the construction of a certain system of Wunsch or of Erwartung of pleasure, defined as anticipated pleasure, and which tends for this reason to realize itself autonomously in its own sphere, theoretically without expecting anything from the outside. It moves directly toward a fulfillment highly antithetical to whatever triggers it.

Lacan, J. (1992) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960). Edited by J.-A. Miller. Translated by D. Porter. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 31.

[my-so-called-euphoria]

Lacan's pillow talk.

[my-so-called-euphoria]

rot’s profile

rot uses Letterboxd to share film reviews and lists. 2,330 films watched. Favorites: The Tree of Life (2011), Le Notti Bianche (1957), Chung

Bored so went over the year to list the only movies I watched this year that ranked five stars (first and rewatches).

Backrooms

The Zone of Interest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Dr. Strangelove

First Man

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Now books (follow on goodreads @ Mike Rot)

Only 5 star reads so far of 2026:

Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne (reread)

White Nights (Dostoevsky) (reread)

Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning - Max Pensky

The Agony of Power - Jean Baudrillard

The Daimon and the Soul of the West: Finding identity, meaning, and purpose in a sacrificial life - Bernardo Kastrup

The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick - Philip K Dick

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto - David Shields (reread)

[my-so-called-euphoria]

Reminds me of the outcry of Mamdani’s New York: “but, but the rich are leaving?!”

And yet crime goes down and the highest surge in searches on Google of “move to NYC.”

The game is up.

From Peter Kropotkin’s Anarchist Communism.

[my-so-called-euphoria]

When the culture recedes and all that's left is the debris.

[my-so-called-euphoria]

So glad I am not a Homer purist and can enjoy Nolan’s Odyssey.

The Zendaya plot point at the end of the Odyssey is such a brilliant storytelling additive to Nolan’s version that it should win best adapted screenplay for that alone

[my-so-called-euphoria]

“Go at your life with a broadax.”

- Annie Dillard

[comparativetarot]

Moon. Art by Cilla Conway, from The Byzantine Tarot.

[my-so-called-euphoria]

Moon's like I gotta do this shit again?

[neshamama]

david inshaw, "the raven," 1971

[my-so-called-euphoria]

Annie Dillard’s Tree of Life moment in An American Childhood.

[shitiunderline]

“There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows.”

— Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

[exhaled-spirals]

« A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything…. Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla. »

— Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

[my-so-called-euphoria]

A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS is really good, and I am like the last person that would vouch for a George R R Martin project, but this one strips away all of the geek world-building and says what if we just had a lovable main character and let him stumble through a world of assholes and bring chivalry back as a virtue?