All This Knowing is Killing Me
Somewhere in my notes there's an unfinished poem titled I am Sad at Things that Only Happened in My Head. My dad cried when he left for NAIA for the first time, not because he was leaving us but because he realized how unprepared he was to be a father. My sister and brothers will cry when our mother dies, as all children tend to do, despite their constant bickering. My mom never thought she would outlive her own mother, too. When I went to college my parents threw away all of the things I couldn't bring with me: my stack of old Pinoy Komiks, favorite lunchbox, collection of bootleg Pokemon cards, even my notebooks filled with handwritten fanfiction. They made room for their grief of losing their eldest that way. They didn't talk about it. They just let the garbage man haul these objects, declared dispossessed, to the dump site at the back of San Gabriel II Elementary, and with them, the concept of home.
I think I sent my Detective Conan forum best friend a message before I left. To this day it remains unread in her now defunct account.
These days everybody knows what's happening in Gaza, Iran, and all the terrible and evil deeds of the US-Israel alliance, but because we're so used to knowing everything at once, and everyone gets to have an opinion, and mainstream media cares little for truth-telling, information becomes a deluge, harder to parse and focus on, you blink and the news is already talking about something else entirely, going back and forth and back from movies to fashion to food to what's-the-latest-in-the-misogyny-podcast, and death, there's so much death, and who died and who killed and whose death matter the most and whose death would affect the price of gasoline, alternating images of Trump and Netanyahu and Duterte and before you get to the facts you'd have to wade through AI-generated heaps of more death. It's so exhausting to look at, the dying. You don't get to sit down and take a minute. So you stop looking for facts. You let the endless scrolling wash over you. Here comes the next. Everything about you is dying, but this reel is funny.
So everybody knows, but we don't all know the same, and we don't all know the right things. "Aren't you afraid of World War 3," s. asks me. I put up a brave face. "The war is already happening. It has been for years." I'm afraid.
I get to walk around the neighborhood every Saturday and I can feel the Knowledge of Everything insulating me from my surroundings. It's tiring to spend time outdoors because why should we? I can go to Instagram and check how my friends are doing. I can send them a playlist on Spotify to show I care. I'll even shoot them a message on Telegram, type up the words I could never speak out loud. We'll laugh at an automated reading of a Reddit thread about disentanglement, a repost of a repost, this consumption of carcass part of our diet. I'm bleeding out.
When I got rid of Facebook I'd hoped it would make a difference, hoped that converted to precious time, hoped I'd see my friends more often, play tabletop, talk about how we can bring mystery back into our lives - it didn't. I suspect they're dying too, just like me, through a slow methodical smothering. It's not adulthood that's the problem. It's that certain adults exist. They weaponize our inherent need to know, our fear of missing out just as much as they use bombs to destroy cities and kill children.
Google's definition for the word panacea includes this sample phrase:
the panacea for all corporate ills
See, they're in on the joke, it's okay, they understand - and don't mind that these websites that shamelessly co-opt our collective suffering and frustrations are also made using the same lines of code that can influence what you learn, how you view the world, which ideology to highlight, whatever is more profitable for their warmongering owners.
I hope we all get the chance to hop off these platforms of death, but please remain empathetic to those unable to, and those who choose to stay to keep the rest of us breathing.
By Milan Kundera:
Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.
Side-quests Accomplished
🗡️ Played my second one-shot as Alexandra Kol'lontai, my fae-cursed Wild Mage. Thanks s. for DM-ing!
🗡️ Moved the blog out of Wordpress
Today's Stat Block
STR: 0
DEX: 0
CON: 0
INT: +1 Learned how to migrate blog posts
WIS: +1 I would like to be more intentional towards showing affection as much as K.M. does
CHA: +1 Trying out new colors in my wardrobe