It only took Trent Reznor to get me out of my bed, lmao
So, hey, hi. Yeah. I haven't been feeling great. I had the COVIDs. I also was terrified of everything inside my home and outside my home. There's nothing really scary going outside, except September in a college town, which I am making a short story about somewhere else, but basically a lot of new people who seem to be controlling whatever the fuck is fucking me up in my brains, as well as new students. I called named it Wintermute, and when I got COVID it went away. ALSO WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT SO SOMETHING IS WRONG VERY WRONG AND I HAVE NO WAY TO EXPLAIN IT WITHOUT SOUNDING CRAZY~ Sometimes it is nice, and I call it Springbreak, which is not canon in Gibson's Sprawling Trilogy, but whatever. I am doing better. Little by little, every day, things are getting better and better. It's better to think that if you consider the alternative.
My name is not Case. I am not an addict. My name is edgeMuted, I haven't used the actual Internet in a very long time. You know, social media and the three websites that we are mandatorily supposed to use to be part of society. Fuck Meta, Alphabet and Amazon. And all the rest, specially Uber, you fucking slave-machine that pushes food and services into people's lives. PLEASE DO NOT GO TECHIE, THOUGH.
Yesterday, on the first September 11th that I don't believe that something horrible is going to happen Nine Inch Nails had a concert near me, I went for a walk that Google says takes only 10 minutes. I shall describe it in the Following Chronicle:
I went down the stairs, I made it. My feet still can sustain the weight of my body. I raised my chin up. Walked outside. The street was closed. Maybe just for me? I thought. I also thought of how stupid that thought was. I didn't really care about that. I watched people in the face, or wherever my face was at any given moment. I was not checking out people. I was looking at them. Seeing faces. Meeting their eyes. The journey had just begun. I kept walking for what seemed like an eon to the University southern gate. I was already exhausted, sweating, I could almost smell the alcohol that I just drank. I had to go up the hill, which from now on is the Death of a Nine Inch Nails hill, because it was fucking hard just to walk up to the top. I kept my chin up. All the time. All the way. Until the very end. I was carrying my keys, my phone and my wallet. My clothes. My working shoes. Young, beautiful people paraded around me, faster and what seemed better than me, in every direction. I could still meet their eyes. I was afraid I wouldn't make it. Maybe a heart attack? A stroke? I had not slept for 2 days. My mouth was completely dry. When I thought the hill was over, the stairs began. I had been following people dressed in black, I don't like to use my phone for walking directions. They easily walked up, laughing and smiling but I could see something in everyone's face. My reflection. Humans. Just humans. People who could be in the cover of a magazine if they still existed where just as human as I was, with as complex lives as mine. Perhaps in very different ways. Having to keep-up their healthy freshly perfumed selves, whatever. I looked like a madman. After I had finished looking up, I went up all the stairs, not missing a single step. I was not drunk. I was determined. I had to see Nine Inch Nails. I wanted to. I needed to. I remembered the old fat dudes at metal concerts that I saw the first and only previous time I saw them in a completely different reality. They were nice. I went up. At top of it, I crossed a street, and the line began at the very bottom of another flight of stairs. I had time to take a break from my walking. I had never seen so many Nine Inch Nail t-shirts in my entire life. I think I never will, except for a goth t-shirt store. Mine doesn't fit anymore. I kept going up Death of a Nine Inch Nails hill until at the very bottom, security personnel checked me as if I was walking through an interdimensional gate. It was indeed an interdimensional state. The Greek Theater's staff waited for me to show them my "digital ticket". I was logged out of the site. I didn't remember my password. Who does, anyways? I reset it. Showed them the thing. Nothing did any beep in their device. They just let me in. I saw the Agora of Berkeley. It's massive stands oppressing whoever had the luck to be in the stage. I couldn't find the row of my seat. I asked an actual human being. They had no idea. I matched two numbers and asked another actual human if that seat was empty. I sat. Looked at the crowd. All dressed in black. Me included. So many faces that my mind could not possibly see them all at once. I had finally arrived. I had just conquered Death of a Nine Inch Nails hill, feeling fine rehydrating my up to that point pretty unused body.
So, yea, I am in bad shape. I have been dealing with AGORAPHOBIA for an extremely long time, unable to look or meet the eyes of others or see their faces for years. I haven't left my home without looking down for years. It seems silly that I could do it and I just needed the idea of being helped, but I needed it none-the-less. I don't think my agoraphobia has been cured, but it's a good start to face a literal Agora, well, almost literal, because it was more like a Coliseum. All it took was Trent Fucking Reznor and his band to come to Berkeley to do it. The band rocked, but they always do.
I met an actual individual in the concert. He was sitting next to me and said hi. So, he began it, but I was like, ok, hey, and we were like ok, we are both old, I didn't understand his name, but it sounded like the one of a cousin I have and haven't seen a long time and he somehow seemed planted but stated he wanted to know what I do. I told him I am a writer. He asked me very politely, of what. Then he went to state that he worked for YouTube, or well, he said more humbly, Google. I thanked him for the YouTube algorithms because they seem like the best of all social media since some time, but my algorithms have been acting all weird since I saw one video that I saw on a Discord chat where I never write a thing and suspect that might be full of planted personnel by Wintermute or just bots. I don't know if I coined the word Botnoia, but I have it. It is the phobia that everyone in an online situation to be bots who impersonate others. Botphobia sounds stupid.
After talking with an actual individual, which was with other people but was as old as me, I guess, we saw Yves Tumor. I asked the aforementioned individual if he knew who they were, and he said that he thought they were from the Bay Area. They rocked. The guitarist tried to channel Satan and failed. The crowd was unresponsive.
Nine Inch Nails were Nine Inch Nails and did what they do, and the crowd was a bit more responsive. In the alternate dimension I come from, the crowd went insane when the band stated the name of the place they were in. I'm unsure if I was being louder than the music. I headbanged with actual long hair for the first time. The fans began to judge me in the weirdest setting possible, an industrial rock concert. I didn't give a fuck. Nothing matter. My health, my blood pressure, my weight, the rest of my life, the massive crowd that could get me on stage and dismember all of my limbs at once in a weird delusional fantasy. I know that most of these fears are... delusional. Some of them are... uh... supernatural, to the point of what everyone knows about the state of science, because it is actually happening, but: 1) It is none of my business and 2) I don't know or can know who, what or why is it happening. That's the Wintermute/Springbreak/FUCKINGSHUTUPANDLETMESLEEPPLZ phenomena. You might get harassed by it one day. It will suck.
But not even that mattered. I knew all the lyrics, I recognized every riff-song-cue-musicalstuffhere, and Trent Reznor seems to have stop abusing steroids. That's just for SEO reasons, but yea, he is thinner than in 2008. Maybe older, but his trademark jet-black hair was still all black. The rest of the band, I guess Atticus Ross does something, but I am unsure. His guitar rocks, though. I knew how it all would end. I knew the ending very well.
The sky turned from orange to pink to dark blue and finally full of stars. I couldn't find Orion. I looked up every now and then. I tend to search for Orion. It is easy. The band did the weird ritual of going away like your mother and returning afterwards so it wasn't really that exciting. Maybe because most people had already seen them a thousand times and this was just their regular mating pilgrimage.
I didn't hurt myself that day, but the old familiar feeling of the alternate reality I come from came back and I wondered what I had become, but my sweetest friend is no longer talking to me, and if I could start away a BILLION miles away, I'd keep myself, I'd find the way.
I cried like I haven't allowed myself to cry in ages. There was too much noise around. I overheard people just laughing and saying "he is high" again in the weirdest context possible. I then laughed, because it was so cliche and I was a living one. I never thought I would become this, but after the show was done, with no new songs, except for an extended coda of God Break Down the Door that I'll post after this long text, I tried to find my way back home.
On the way back, I was full of strange emotions, still meeting people's faces with my own eyes, and they could be talking about me or not, but I felt no fear, I felt longing for the time when the concert was in a place where people that I knew were in complete awe and not just another day at another concert with a distance of whiteness that I cannot believe. No one talked to me again. The YouTube individual said something along the lines "this is why I always talk to them beforehand" when I was crying, never to be seen again.
As I was walking back home, downhill this time, I felt that people planted by Wintermute, which knows that I'm afraid of, well, people who want to get rid of minorities, where walking just in front of me and talking about me, in a language I couldn't decipher. It was dark and we were alone. I thought that they reacted to my thoughts. So, I began whistling a little song that I like to whistle when I feel that something bad might happen. They went further away from me, walking faster, but also going in one direction and then changing to the same one I was taking. I was only full of my own tears, sweat and other biochemical stuff. I kept seeing faces. One of them, reaching the vicinity of my home, nodded. I nodded back.
I made it back home, still excited like a little girl who... that's sexist, like a fanboy who just met Miku the Vocaloid Avatar. The excitement didn't stop. I faced my fears head-on. The fear. The Agora. I still have it, hesitation, doubt that I will ever be able to do it again, but I would totally do it again. Now I just have to meet a human being who is not a complete snob and who can be my friend. I'm open for friends, you just can't be a pedophile, sexist, racist, and the list goes on, so I'll just try to meet whoever I can one day and maybe I will be able to do what I haven't been able to really do by myself since 2017. Trusting new human beings.
On a darker note, the Internet is getting to a point where I can't tell if it's a superimposed fake internet or a real internet that is actually happening and young human beings are just living inside of it and going outside of it with it still in them and interacting with others like the YouTube guy. Treating humans like fucking broken machines. Hurt is supposed to be a sad song, I don't know if you lighter lighting fuckers realized that crying is a natural reaction to a song that is extremely sad and crying in public should be more normal than wearing a fucking pink mohawk and a NIN t-shirt. But, alright, maybe there's still humans out there. I'll be the guy with a lamp, because I ran out cigarrettes for a lifetime.
I've been doing a deep dive into Internet culture, as an observer, but that's a story for another impulsive writing day.
If this line has found you in trouble, may your troubles soon be over.
-- edgeMuted, officially the edgiest kid in Berkeley. Or the last edgy kid? Only history will tell.
P.S.: I hate lmao, lol, wtf or anything of that sort when used outside the Internet. Fucking post-post-ironic Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Reminder to Self: Make a unreadable review of the best game I've played since Quake 2, except that maybe I have played better ones but never one that teached me Internet Culture as much as NEEDY STREAMER OVERLOAD. I finished Quake 2 with the new next-gen graphics a few days ago. The next-gen graphics are unnecessary, don't upgrade your GPU. Also, sorry for not saying more loudly that NFTs and Cryptocurrencies are a hoax, like the aliens that are talking to you.
In case that you can't see the video, sorry about that, here's anime fanart of Trent Reznor with my two favorite birds:
