DEAD DIARIES OF DIARYLAND

2002-07-29 - 12:07 p.m.

Spooky Turtle starts out, seemingly, to be indifferent to any possible reader and refers to them as "heretical parasites". He speaks to readers as if he really were indifferent and impersonal to them, but his words he writes into his diary are almost perhaps intimate.

"..anyone else who had an influence on my personal development knew what they were doing. What they were sculpting within my psyche. I suspect not. I have been refined for conflict, and imbued with a will to win. There is a vast tempest of energy in flux right now. I did not summon it, but one way or another, it will push me forward. Above. Beyond."

"I think I may be lonely."

At the beginning, he parts way with a roommate, "Cohabitant" and then his apartment where they were "reduced to communication by e-mail with someone who occasionally lives just a bedroom away". He sends Cohabitant a verbal assailage and yet almost sighs since "there's no satifaction in defeating an inferior opponent" To the ending of this fiasco, he predicts that "someday, I'll look back and laugh. We all break eventually."

He has some interesting and healthy ideas to approach life; he refers to Frank Herbert who wrote of the "attitude of the knife, that of chopping off what's incomplete and saying, 'Now it's complete because its ended there.'"

Though he has baggage, he doesn't begrudge it. Indeed he seems to think that people who have no inner demons to contain and who contain no anti-social instincts as weak creatures. He comes to this conclusion because they would never develop "a measure of self-control as a survival mechanism".

Spooky Turtle comes off as well read, referring to Freud, Pavlov, and Sun Tzu. And his language is sometimes superflous, but he is aware of that too: "I weave so many words, each calculated to impart myriad interpretations, and when the conversation is concluded, I wonder if I've expressed anything at all." Some examples of titles of his diary entries: disassociated rationalization, return of the prodigal reptile, postcognitive dissonance, draconian tautology, unicode solvent, and projectile cherub.

And a random selection of his bemusing thoughts:

"I'm not insensitive; merely guided by biases of my own selection."

"Reality is a testing ground too uncoordinated to abide elaborate plans."

"I've almost never been compelled by guilt or regret, and I had an awful time interacting with other people until I understood that their behavior was much more influenced by such concerns."

"Life is motivating me to construct a self-help webpage called 'Optimism [is] for Dummies.'"

"No matter how seductively the delicate range of data appeals, it cannot be compared to the tangible mundane. Not until I can eat a .jpg of a pizza, anyway."

"There is no worse enemy than the one incapable of knowing why they may be wrong."

"Maybe tomorrow I'll write about how vexing I find stupid people who refuse to actively improve their lives. That always makes for a refreshing breath of hypocrisy."

He even has a few "dictionary definations" that could be inspired by Ambrose:

� pr0n, n. - deliberate malformation of contraction for "pornography," likely used in web pages to avoid unsavory traffic from search engines.

� uber, adj. - used as a prefix (e.g. "uberkewl") to indicate superiority over standard by an order of magnitude.

� reality, n. - an enviroment or condition that supposedly manifests when one is not immersed in the reassuring glow of a cathode ray tube... or so I've heard.

Throughout his diary, he refers to his mother as Maternal or Mudder. And his father as Paternal. And his elder relatives as "Living Ancestors".

He has some pets and loves them and worries over them when they are ill. He admires animals for they have "simples expectations" and that "plus we can share a bed at night and still be friends in the morning. Pets may just be the superior substitute for humanity that Nature intended."

His life is not a super star's and is often contained in a computer:

Mudder has, on occasion, come to the door of this borrowed bedroom, observed me intent upon the computer, and asked, "Is this all you do?"

Yes. This is it. This is what I do. I'm not in some funk or slump or rut. I am poor, I am boring, and I have no motivation to find distraction beyond this small compass of interaction. This is all, and it is enough.

A nice example of his wit:

"Hi, I'm Leigh."

"Hi, I'm [Turtle]."

later:

"Well, it was nice meeting you."

"Thanks. You're a talented conversationalist."

The punchline to be noted in this transcript is that between the first exchange and the last, there was no filler dialogue whatsoever.

Pleasantries are neurotically redundant. A compliment without sincerity is a waste of effort at best, and an insult in any more mediocre context.

And on the subject of arguing with close-minded people that:

The (lack of) effect is much akin to Sorcates debating against a chimpanzee; neither will ever convince the other, regardless of how insightful a phrase might be or how much feces is flung.

He, at one time in his life, wore a full-length duster, sleeves to the wrist, and long-hair. And enjoyed the attention he got from it. But in this "most recent year" he changes his fashion to, in his words: "scraping my scalp like a Gillette monkey, simplifying my wardrobe to brisk basics, and generally taking a Spartan outlook on materialism. Am I happier? Perhaps. I'm certainly less stifled during the summer."

One of his perhaps more controversial stances is his disapproval of the self-injury diaryring:

"I'm not nearly ambitious enough to advise however many people use Diaryland as some sort of emotional outhouse; I'm just focusing on the 310 of you (as of this moment) who constitute the Self-Injury Diaryring ..

Relief comes in many forms; I'm aware of this. I don't mean to discourage you from easing the crushing drudgery of your churning, abysmal lives by any means you find effective. Far be it from me to interfere with your pseudo-abortive efforts at rediscovering the path to natural selection.

However, do you not find it strange, as I do, the slogan "you are not alone" is proclaimed as a comforting rally? It doesn't indicate that you're "okay" or "healthy" within some social norm; merely that others share your sickness. So, for those of you who were bleeding in order to fit in, you can stop now.

Thank you, and goodnight.

I'd sell my veins to sponsor a public broadcasting of an execution that featured a subject put to death by gradual immersion in a vat of churning-hot oil. Even better, he could be repeatedly dunked, like an Oreo into milk. Once his own oozing fat started seeping out between the chains and his face dissolved into blistering chunks, the audience just might pay attention to the dripping human candle.

However, as his diary progresses over almost a year, his thoughts of bemusement and wit become more and more replaced by summaries of his daily activities and computer problems or computer talk. And one gets a feeling that he is losing interest in his diary but feels compelled for whatever reason to maintain it anyway. In time, he begins simply to create pages called "backlog" each with the words:

"I might come back to this entry and leave a more meaningful mark once I've reconstructed the events recorded by my little black box."

For a total of 22 days. He seems to have intended to fill each of these as to be faithful to his nearly daily entry habit. But he never does. There are a a handful of more entries and then, after nearly a year of diary writing, he ends his diary:

Dear Mindless Debris:

"Staring down this Add An Entry page has become an obligatory chore; an obligation to my own standards. Those standards also dictate that I shed unproductive habits which stagnate my personal evolution."

Founded - May 3, 2001 - 6:34 p.m.
Ended - Febuary 14, 2002 - 5:33 p.m.
Entries - 278

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