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<h1>I Do Not Seek Annihilation</h1>
<p>published: 2020-10-31</p>
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<p>Despite the voice in my head that shrieks <strong>"KILL DESTROY KILL DESTROY"</strong> at every slight inconvenience, I neither find pleasure in nor gain satisfaction from gratuitous violence.</p>
<p>Once, during a vacation sometime in the cusp between elementary in middle school (2011, I think, although I am too lazy to rifle through my photos and find the date proper), my family and I went to some cave system out of state. There was a side attraction, a video game theater, where one overpaid for a ticket and then entered a small theater with a plastic laser gun and played through some short interactive movie. One of the movies had a barebone plot, if any at all, that distilled down to "cowboys genocide aliens".</p>
<p>I told my mother that I did not feel comfortable partaking in such senseless violence, even if simulated. What had the aliens done to me to deserve such a gruesome fate? Were she to pay for a ticket, I would not participate; I would sit it out. I offered to save her the fifteen dollars or so that my ticket would have cost and wait on a nearby bench for them to finish.</p>
<p>My mother told me to shut up and that I had no choice. She paid for five tickets and dragged me into the dim room that reeked of sweat, and my parents and my brothers spent the next seven minutes or so gleefully bursting open the swollen green heads of any unfortunate extraterrestrials that wandered onto the screen.</p>
<p>On the ending credits, there was a big fat zero next to my name.</p>
<p>I think she grounded me afterwards. Which I find hilarious, if not "doomer fuel", because now <em>she</em> is the one proclaiming herself a pacifist whenever she sees me and my brothers playing Smash. But there is no death in Smash, merely a ceaseless cycle of knockouts and respawning. Everyone knew what they were getting into at the start. Everybody is okay at end of day.</p>
<p>If only I could say the same.</p>
<p>Were it up to my mother (or any other entity deigning to fill the role) to decide my path in life, I would be nothing but a daughter, a reference to someone else's reproductive exploits, never an individual in my own right. A certain level of achievement is tolerated, this is true, but only so the mother can point and say: "<em>My</em> child did this." As if I am only a conduit for unlived dreams, a vessel to be vicariously lived through.</p>
<p>I consider myself an antinatalist because I do not think it ethical to give a person life, and thus the guarantee of experiencing suffering, without their consent. But I am already here, and to return myself prematurely to whatever lies beyond the veil would be too painful of an endeavor for me to undertake. To make that choice for others would be just as abhorrent as to put them in that situation to begin with.</p>
<p>I do not yearn for the flame of all I am to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201022022634if_/https://www.reddit.com/r/antinatalism/comments/j97cfc/a_dissolving_ouroboros_gif/">flicker out forevermore</a>.</p>
<p>I do not seek annihilation.</p>
<p>I want my life, and this world, to go on and on and on for as long as people wish to live in it, forever evolving in form and experience. I want to be a tree, and a wind that carries along words and birds, and a flower blooming in the cracks in a concrete jail wall in all defiance... I want to dive in the depths of a black hole and hike along a trail of stars and catch a ride on a comet. I want ichor to ignite my veins like a fuse and ambrosia to scour my throat, dissolving the dreck, leaving only the highest-grade poetry behind to sing for all time.</p>
<p>I want Stirner, and Novatore, and de Cleyre. I want freedom, and love, and my ego, my Self, my Unique.</p>
<p>I do not seek to end my life, but to change it.</p>
<p>I do not seek annihilation, but <em>liberation</em>.</p>
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<h1>Deitus?</h1>
<p>published: 2020-10-24</p>
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<blockquote><a href="http://sonic.net/yronwode/arcane-archive.org/religion/satanism/thelema-xeper-deitus-1.php">DEITUS is a new Word for a new Aeon. It is the realization that man's consciousness is eternal and omnipotent. It is, further, the realization, that the individual Will is a direct manifestation of the Will of the Universe. The Law of the Aeon of Lucifer is THELEMA, XEPER, DEITUS or "Will to come into being as a God."<br />When you attain DEITIS [sic], you become a manifestation of the dynamic consciousness of the universe... you become the very embodiment of God or Satan...</a></blockquote>
<p>Last night (at the time of writing this), I was dragged into work on a day I would usually have off for a late-night team meeting. Truth be told, they were supposed to have happened every few months or so, but because of Corona-chan, the managers had been putting them off until now. So I donned my work-issued vest and followed my co-workers, also confused and mostly new enough to have never gone to a work meeting before, and sat down on a cold floor upstairs while a handful of managers lambasted us for everything we'd done wrong and chucked candy at us like so many bullets whenever they thought we "looked bored" or were "going to sleep".</p>
<p>I imagined a sword in my hand, or maybe a beam of fire, as we were told we were not licking the boots of the General Office hard enough. I wondered what the building would look like covered in flames as the manager talking admonished <em>someone</em>, an impersonal <em>you</em>, for taking twenty minutes in the bathroom.</p>
<p>Over and over I have dreams where I am in some kind of vulnerable position: at school, at work... A teacher, a customer, someone else irate corners me, presses my nerves until I make some kind of honest mistake. And then, threatened, my blood glows aflame. A sudden rush of power. And then the person dissolves into a pile of ash at my feet, threat neutralized.</p>
<p>There are a great many things I would do for the power to defend myself, to protect myself. But a god I do not wish to become, for, as the old adage goes, "absolute power corrupts absolutely." To become a deity, a being sans conflict, would be to forever <a href="../march/epilogue.html">live in the Epilogue.</a> (Or, if there are other beings in the heavens, to cause massive collateral harm as mortal beings get caught up in our struggles.)</p>
<p>For a few months, I have been tossing the idea back and forth of a pair of archetypes. Similar to the lesbian <em>butch</em> and <em>femme</em>, I feel the persistent presence of the <em>ocean</em> and the <em>moon</em>.</p>
<p>A woman first appearing shallow, emotionless, detached from the world. Reclusive, withdrawn. But below the frothy skin is an ocean of terrifying depth, home to a litany of unnerving creatures, each more marvelous than the last. Only a tiny fraction of the depths have ever been mapped, far too vast to explore in one lifetime. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201008180133/https://www.insidescience.org/video/what-would-happen-if-there-were-no-moon">She needs the moon to regulate herself, to keep herself from succumbing to the chaos within.</a></p>
<p>A woman too dazzling, too radiant, to behold directly. A fierce being of unstoppable ambition, ego higher than her lunar namesake. But she is lonely. She requires an anchor to keep her from flying off in a moment's haste, a reason to keep returning to the earth. She needs someone to appreciate her shining bright, someone to look, someone to acknowledge her. She needs someone who will gladly accept the secrets she casts off like meteors, take them to a watery grave.</p>
<p>And while <a href="../../../books.html#mm_tpf" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Edell III">I could easily fit myself</a> within the loose description of the ocean, it is merely that: a description, not a prescription. I do not look at a label and go, "hmm, I shall mold myself to it"; I look at it, and if it already describes who I am, then I toy with it (although I would rather discard the whole concept of labels altogether).</p>
<p>Why, I wonder, are so many occultists hung up on molding themselves to something Other? Emptying themselves in hopes that a deity will take hold of their sack of flesh and live through it instead of themselves? Regardless of whether or not I am a part of THE ALL, there is a reason I am down here and now separate from it, and I am not so keen on cutting it short and returning early.</p>
<p>I examine <em>thelema</em> and start down the path of <em>xeper</em>. But I hesitate at <em>deitus</em>. I do not wish to live as an "embodiment" of anything other than myself. I do not wish to manifest the entirety of the collective universe, only that which is Willed to myself and <em>only</em> myself. What is the real difference between a person who gives up all their possessions and kills their ego to become one with a so-called "benevolent" god, and one who discards their humanity and seeks to become a mere conduit for the devil? Both are chasing phantasms, false machinations of their own minds. Both put so little value on themselves that they are too afraid to live without some being beyond this realm to vicariously live through, to sacrifice themselves on the altar of.</p>
<p>A world full of plastic people who are only a god's playthings would be either numbingly boring in its perfection or mindlessly cruel in its meaninglessness.</p>
<p><em>Thelema, xeper, egomet.</em></p>
<p><em>I Will to come into being as myself.</em></p>
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<h1>Thelema</h1>
<p>published: 2020-10-10</p>
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<p>Throughout my life, I have had many psychoses. And while they abate after some time, they never truly go away, merely changing form.</p>
<p>The first one that I can recall was in seventh grade, where, after having read a book on angels I had picked at random in the middle school library (there were many classes with mandatory reading time, where one would be given detention if they had the misfortune to show up without a book the teachers deemed acceptable), I was overtaken with the sudden and violent desire to acquire wings of my own. I prayed, <em>begged</em>, my childhood god, still two years out from losing my faith, to grant me the ability to fly. I admit I was myopic. How would I have explained it, had it happened? Humans do not have wings. Their bodies would not be strong enough to support the amount of force required to make their bodies airborne. My entire anatomy would have had to be gutted, rewired, replaced.</p>
<p>But yet I persist in having dreams where my wish is fulfilled. Almost always it is coupled with running away from home and the deep terror of my father giving chase, intending to murder me via a stab to the chest or neck. Sometimes my bra presses too hard into my back, and I can almost delude myself into feeling those extra two limbs there, feeling the breeze rustle in my feathers, thirsting to catch the wind and laugh in the face of the sun.</p>
<p>In the beginning days of my first year of college, likely as a coping mechanism, I was seized with a tumult of emotions I could not easily explain: I wanted to go home to places my rational mind knew never existed, return to people my rational mind knew were mere machinations. It occupied my every thought, my every action up until my habit of randomly up-and-leaving social media accounts without "proper" goodbyes to my mutuals pissed the wrong person off one too many times and I got harassed off Neocities for explaining (in the previously linked post) how I'd changed my mind on who I was, who I was allowing myself to be turned into, how I was returning to what computer geeks know as the "last known good state".</p>
<p>Even now it remains. I know who I am, and yet I look for myself in every fictional character I come across, my first instinct to wonder: "Were I you in another life?" As if I am insecure in who I am, in what I have accomplished in my short time in this body, needing to vicariously live through some other personage in order to have something to feel proud about. Occasionally I indulge myself, just <a href="../../../poetry/m/melia.txt">long enough</a> to <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Sorrowful Laika">let forth</a> a <a href="../../../poetry/u/uncharming-veneer.txt">few poems</a> <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, liberi">before</a> the floodgates of living in the past (or future) come back.</p>
<p>And now? Now, I am burdened with an impossible task: to become nothing.</p>
<p>Somehow, in some way, minimalism took hold of my heart and started throttling it. I beat it back over and over and over again, and yet it returns every time. I have blood on my hands, it says, for the crime of existing, of using more resources than I technically need, of using <em>any</em> resources at all. The only way it will be satiated is when I am using <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201005024238/https://collapseos.org/roadmap.html">Collapse OS</a> on a Z80 (or some other low-power machine) powered by solar batteries and am living in some poorly-constructed hut in the middle of the forest with no other possessions to my name than what I absolutely need to survive- and yet continue writing.</p>
<p>I do not want to be broken down into my barest essentials. Line art in itself can be beautiful, can serve one's representational needs, but how much more <em>captivating</em> colors and shading can make it! And no matter how far I would go in cutting myself down, it would never be enough for this psychosis. It would only be satiated upon my death, and yet it does not long for this- for the cessation of my being would mean its end as well.</p>
<blockquote>"But since he can't get away from the world, and in fact can't do so for the very reason that all his activity rises from his endeavors to get away, therefore in <em>pushing the world away</em> (for which it is still necessary that what is to be pushed away and rejected continues to exist; otherwise there would be nothing more to push away); thus, at most, he reaches an extreme degree of liberation, differing from the less liberated only in degree. If he himself achieved the deadening of the earthly senses, which only allows the monotonous whispering of the word "Brahm," he would still not differ essentially from the sensual human being."<br /> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201005023015/https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-unique-and-its-property">- Max Stirner, <em>The Unique and Its Property</em></a></blockquote>
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<p><em>Thelema</em> is a Greek word that roughly translates to "will". In occult circles, this "will" is <a href="https://archive.vn/https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Will">not will as in willpower (doing whatever you want) but rather one's destiny, one's purpose, the grand course of one's life.</a> Maybe even one's <em>fate</em> (even though the other voice in my head, at least in her earliest days, would rail against such a thing).</p>
<p>I have often said since the very first days of this blog (and even before then, on websites whose only remaining trace of existence is <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, clouds">one poem</a>) that I am destined for greatness. But what is "greatness"? Who decides what is great, and what is not? To some, the fact that I have accomplished so little in such a short time is great. Some part of me would relish in this, to be able to rest on my laurels for a while, exhaustedly venting my burnt-out spirit. But is there some threshold somewhere of how many people need to like me, even <em>know of my existence</em>, before I can be considered great, before I can fulfill this "destiny"?</p>
<p>If there is, then I will forever be the lowest of the low.</p>
<p>I have also said that I do not wish to be famous but to be respected. <a href="https://archive.vn/https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/15404-perhaps-one-did-not-want-to-be-loved-so-much">Not to be loved, necessarily, but rather to be understood.</a> I do not think it likely that my purpose on this earth is to pander hard enough to have a positive impression on the cultural zeitgeist, to become another Avengers, another Mario- a "cultural default", if you will.</p>
<p>So what, then, is my destiny? What will be my fate? What is my <em>thelema</em>? <strong>Is it even necessary for me to have one</strong>, or is it okay for, as some random person on Twitter puts it, "find interesting things until I die"? I ask Goddess over and over and over, but she does not respond. Possibly she is not there, was never there, just a construction of my mind. Maybe she just wants me to figure it out myself.</p>
<p>I have heard many an occultist expound on the value of listening to one's dreams. Prophecies, maybe. Divine visions, perhaps. Wisdom from one's unconsciousness, most likely. But being autistic, I have never been good at sussing out metaphors, forever wishing others would stop with the needless mysticism and just be straightforward.</p>
<p>Take flying, for instance. Am I to literally become an angel, to escape this mortal coil in some deity's service? Or is it a metaphor for freedom, and my <em>thelema</em> is to find a way to escape the reach of the government, or even just my own parents? There is only so much I can do alone as an individual, so much liberation I can lead others towards. The only person I can save in the end is myself.</p>
<p>Is my obsession with past lives an indication that my <em>thelema</em> is to discover which ones truly <em>were</em> mine, and to integrate the knowledge from them into this one? I do not even know if I <em>can</em> call them mine, for this assumes that one soul is always the same soul, never splintering, never merging with another.</p>
<p>Those who have read my books understand my theory of soul shattering, where upon death a soul splinters into hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces and blends with others to form a new mosaic. Most lose their memories, while a few somehow manage to retain them, flashes of images and disembodied sounds as they were. This leaves room for those who manage to remember their reincarnations, while also explaining why one might see many people claiming to be the same person (usually people who were in positions of power, while this also might be just a desire to vicariously live through the dead): one person's memories may be passed down to multiple people.</p>
<p>If this is the case, then this explains why I have so many disjointed "memories" of so many different people from so many places, some of which do not even exist in this dimension. But can I truly call them "I" when other people with memories, different but of the same people, would be just as legitimate in claiming them as themselves?</p>
<p>How horrifying it is to think, when I die and if I do not manage to evade this dimension's soul recycling mechanism, there may soon be a group of people with memories of my private moments, bickering over which one of them is the real "I".</p>
<p>But I do not wish to always be living in the past.</p>
<p>I am not going to throw away this life I have now in the service of previous ones.</p><p>I am not going to throw away my life.</p>
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<p>Of course, as usual, Goddess does not give me a straight answer, nor does she grant me an audience with her so that I may question her freely with the full use of my mental faculties. Instead, she gives me a dream.</p>
<p>I am in my old elementary school, a sprawling one-story building. From the looks of the teacher who nervously paces the room, I am observing my old sixth grade class. And yet this must be a new addition built since I left there nearly a decade ago (am I really so old?) as I don't recognize the room at all, long and dim with a bare concrete floor. If not for the desks, I would have thought it a hallway, or maybe an art gallery sans the art on the wall.</p>
<p>I am sitting at a desk next to a boy who was quite annoying to deal with in real life. He has brought in two massive curtains made out of Minecraft cake, except somehow skinned to look like giant chunks of red meat, and hangs them up in front of his and my desks. The teacher is not amused, but continues with class.</p>
<p>I come back the next day. I am walking down the long hallway to the sixth grade classrooms when I suddenly realize that I have completely forgotten my backpack at home (which <em>did</em> happen to me once, but only once, and only in kindergarten). All I have in my possession is my phone (my current smartphone, not the flip phone I had at the time) and its charging cable. I wish for the school day to be over with already so that I do not have to suffer through the embarrassment of being forced to use a Chromebook and curse the school for expecting all their students to keep all their files, even personal, in their state-mandated Google account.</p>
<p>I arrive in the classroom. Nobody is there. In fact, the whole school appears to be empty.</p>
<p>I have the bright idea to go searching for my old assignments when the teacher walks in. Thinking I am interfering with her grades, she threatens to report me to the police- as "Melia". <em>Not</em> my legal name. (<em>She must not recognize me,</em> I think.) But, she offers, she will not press charges if I take up the role of self-hosting some of the district's network services for its students.</p>
<p>To her shock, I reply that I gladly would, but I would need to be provided a server to do so as there was no way I would be able (or willing) to do it on my residental connection at home.</p>
<p>Suddenly another person walks in. The city has a princess, and her name is also Melia, and she is fuming at being accused of breaking into the school.</p>
<p>And then the <em>actual</em> Melia (as in, the character from <em>Xenoblade</em>) walks in, also angry that she is being roped into this-</p><p>I hear gunshots from across the building. I leave them to their bickering over who is the real Melia and take off at a dead run. Almost immediately, a few rooms over (which somehow just <em>happen</em> to look like the hallway stretch from the Sunday school wing of my childhood church), a bunch of students are ripping into a cartload of cardboard boxes that had been delivered to the school, full of pillows and mattresses and such. Their eyes are feral, fingers bared like claws, tearing the boxes and everything in them completely asunder.</p>
<p>We meet eyes, and suddenly they are after <em>me</em>. As usual in my dreams, I can use telekinesis, and so I throw them aside the moment they leap into the air. Some of my friends have been caught in the fray, and so I give them openings to escape. The rampaging students grow fiercer, and so I start using pepper spray to subdue the ones with actual weapons. Some of my friends are injured, and so I summon a huge wagon (the type you might pull behind you on your way to a picnic or the local park) and start helping them in so I can pull them out.</p>
<p>I see Luce. A shard of metal the size of my fist is sticking out of one of her legs. I scoop her up in my arms and start fleeing with the wagon full of people.</p>
<p>The ringleader stops me halfway down the seemingly endless hallway. A boy I had the misfortune of knowing in high school: as wide around as I am tall (maybe even more), mountains of fat and sweat cascading off of him, leaving behind an absolutely rancid smell everywhere he went. (I promise you that I am not exaggerating.) He blocks almost the whole path.</p>
<p>"Do black lives matter?" he yells at me.</p>
<p>"Of <em>course</em> they matter," I respond. "Some of the people I am trying to save are black. Do their lives not matter to you?"</p>
<p>This answer enrages him. He lunges towards me as if to strangle me. Suddenly there is a pistol in my free hand. I unload several bullets into his fleshy mass, stopping him in his tracks, and continue my desperate escape.</p>
<p>Outside, there is a schoolbus waiting for me. I help Luce into one of the seats in the front row and start helping load the others into wherever we can seat them fastest. Apparently we miss some, because the bus drives one block and then u-turns, remembering the others.</p>
<p>And then we set off for the hospital.</p>
<p>I wake up in a hot sweat, the single blanket over me askew. It is five in the morning. The sounds of my brothers getting ready for school echo down to me from the first floor kitchen.</p>
<p><em>You save Luce over and over again in so many dreams,</em> I think. <em>Why?</em></p>
<p><em>Because you love her.</em></p>
<p><em>Your</em> thelema <em>is to love,</em> I suddenly think. <a href="https://archive.md/https://sites.google.com/site/thelemaforbeginners/home/4-love"><em>Love shall be the whole of the law; love under will.</em></a></p>
<p>Sometime mid-April, I had drafted a post where I wondered how in the world I was suddenly able to pull off a five-hour shift at work despite barely having been able to do two and a half hours at my shitty work-study (more like work-work and no study) job my first year in college. I theorized that it was because I had developed an alternate personality, someone infinitely more outgoing and helpful. I wanted to meet them next shift, I wrote. I wanted to ask them what in the world they were doing inside of my body.</p>
<p>I showed up that next shift to find the lobby locked due to Corona-chan, every employee working the drive-through. That shift was, and I do not exaggerate, hell on earth. How in the world am I supposed to juggle taking orders, taking payment for orders, and keeping track of orders so that each person driving through gets the correct food? How is <em>anyone</em>? Truly, fast food is a violation of human dignity.</p>
<p>The lead manager, who had spent the shift <em>literally throwing</em> steaming-hot bags of food at me, had the audacity to ask me if I was free that weekend to take additional shifts. I told him I would check my calendar. When he texted, I told him I was busy.</p>
<p>I would have quit on the spot, but the would-be rage of my father held me back, and so I searched for job openings between sobs in the parking lot as I waited for him to come and pick me up.</p>
<p>I can only consider it a stroke of luck that the COVID that had robbed me of my adequate position working front register gave me a new job at a retail store, paid fifty percent more to do fifty percent less work. <a href="../../../books.html#tyia" title="Three Years In Absentia, Parthena II">"Corona-chan will set you free", indeed.</a></p>
<p>In the beginning days of the new job, I was just as grumpy as my co-workers. But soon I found I did not have the energy to constantly curse my existence and also do my job correctly (it turns out scanning barcodes actually uses quite a lot of brainpower to keep track of everything). Where my co-workers grumbled and gave dead stares to approaching customers, I danced and greeted everyone and was patient as I explained things to them.</p>
<p>I felt a strange love for the universe, for everything in it. I did not have it in me anymore to sustain such hatred in my heart, to always have my defenses up, hardened and afraid. True, at home, they would tense up again around my parents. But more often than not, they were down, and the house would feel a little bit like how a home should.</p>
<p>I would close my eyes at night, exhausted, and dream of a life of purpose, an existence with power, a world without end.</p>
<p>As I pace up and down in front of whatever register I have been assigned that day, I wonder: <em>Is my</em> thelema <em>to love? To find that world? To create it, even?</em></p>
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<h1>Xeper</h1>
<p>published: 2020-10-17</p>
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<a href="https://archive.md/https://heart-fools.tumblr.com/post/121094768429/at-some-point-growing-stopped-being-painful-and">
<blockquote>you must allow yourself to outgrow<br />
and depart from certain eras of your life with a gentle sort of<br />
ruthlessness<br />
- katy maxwell, "girl of the earth"</blockquote>
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<p>Tiny bugs swirl all around me as I sit here in the backyard. Microscopic, infinite, brought in by the wind. Quickly crumbling to dirt as I swipe them off my body, off my computer, off my purse. It is just hot enough to make wearing my hoodie uncomfortable, even though it is the only shield I have against the ceaseless onslaught of insects.</p>
<p>At least, save for going inside, which I am able to do at will as a human.</p>
<p>I peel my jacket off my body and flop down on my bed. My skin is covered in faint black streaks, little disembodied insect legs, red spots that itch. I turn my fan on, turn on some <a href="https://archive.md/https://setsvko.bandcamp.com/">calming music</a> to help me write.</p>
<p>Two years and two days ago (at the time of writing this), I remember, I abandoned the lab time scheduled for my Intro to Python class early. Usually I would stay for the full time, even if all my assignments were done, and work on my website, answer comments on my site on Neocities, scroll through my Tumblr page unbeknownst that its remaining days were in the single digits.</p>
<p>I opened my profile, ready and eager to publish what I would soon rewrite as <a href="../../../poetry/f/fatali.txt">"fatali"</a> (then only what is now the first stanza) and was immediately flooded with accusations of being homophobic and transphobic for the crime of... not wanting to be a fictionkin anymore. I cleaned up the comments, but they were quickly replaced (by the same person) with nonsensical strings of Korean letters. I don't think there was a block function at the time, but if there was, it was useless, because very quickly other people started admonishing me for not wanting... <em>literal spam</em> all over my profile.</p>
<p>I downloaded the zip file containing my whole site and deleted the Neocities account. Just like that, I had become undone. I had unpersoned myself. The only evidence that I had ever existed on the internet as Vane Vander lay in that precious little file that sat in my Downloads folder.</p>
<p>Searching for a webhost without any kind of social aspect, I eventually returned to <a href="https://archive.md/https://www.freehostingeu.com/">the very first (actual) host I had ever used</a> four days later and <a href="../../../poetry/o/october-7-2018.txt">immediately went back to writing</a>. It would be a few more days before I would discover Keybase, which carried me until I got access to my bank account and could finally rent my own VPS.</p>
<p>The <a href="../july/html.html">very first website I had ever written was actually an online game</a>. I made several, each just as broken as the last: first a clone of Webkinz (which never really panned out beyond a mockup in PowerPoint), then of Howrse and Babydow after I got banned for spamming Christian propaganda on the forums, then of a generic pet care game. There were no actual server-side mechanics to control anything; I would have to go in and manually update the HTML every day after checking about a hundred different page view counters and recalculating each entity's stats.</p>
<p>Funnily enough, it was a youth group pastor at my old church who introduced me to blogging. He had asked me one night early in seventh grade if I could make a website for him. Excited, I spent the next week slavishly gathering all the website-making resources and tutorials I could- and then, come the actual night, he shrugged his shoulders and said he had just gone ahead and signed up for Google's Blogger. I think that was the start of my resentment towards him. I never had enthusiasm for Wednesday night youth group ever again.</p>
<p>I stayed on Blogger until about early 2015, when I jumped ship to WordPress. Not because I knew anything about Google's evils yet- that would take another year for me to realize- but because my parents had <a href="https://mars.mayvaneday.org/blog/2019/0919.html">threatened once to contact Google's support team in order to hijack my account</a> if I did not acquiesce to their censorship. The more spread out my online presence was, the harder it would be for my parents to push one button to shut it all down the moment I said something they did not like.</p>
<p>Of course, it didn't take them long to find the WordPress blog I had set up. But I persisted. And after I had deleted my Facebook account, it was like my parents' knowledge of my having a website completely vanished from their consciousness, as if, without it spoonfed to them in their home feed, it was outside of their electronic myopia, had ceased to exist altogether.</p>
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<p>"Xeper" is an <a href="https://archive.md/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Set#Self-deification_and_Xeper">Egyptian hieroglyphic term</a> that roughly means "to come into being", mainly as an act of apotheosis. It stands in opposition to traditional occultic practices, namely the Hermetic ones, where one is expected to surrender their sense of self and subsume themselves into some higher entity: THE ALL, God, the universe, whatever other names collectivists have given it. It is not a one-time action, but instead a continual process, a constant state of change.</p>
<p>My mother tells me that I came into this world face-up, instead of <a href="https://archive.md/https://www.babycenter.com/pregnancy/your-body/posterior-position_1454005">face-down like a baby is supposed to</a>. I came into this world dysfunctional, bogged down with chronic fatigue and a speech disorder and a mind fundamentally alien, at odds with the society around it.</p>
<p>But my body was human. And so, ultimately, I was raised as a human.</p>
<p>For a long time, I have <a href="../../../poetry/r/regnant.txt">wondered</a> what it would be like to take on some other form. Whether I would be free to <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, As Cetra">switch between my human and animalistic skin at will</a>, or <a href="../../../flashfiction/e/erin5.html">be stuck forever</a> as <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Bear With It">one or the other</a>, or to be freed from <a href="../../poetry/a/atlas.txt">the constraints of the physical</a> and be <a href="../../../books/mm_tac.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Adoration Corporation, Berke Broke">something new altogether</a>.</p>
<p><a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, degenesis">It does not always end well.</a></p>
<p>I can feel a strange sort of change rustling in my bones. One does not wake up in the morning briefly feeling themselves in a different skin, a more fitting one, for no reason. But what am I becoming? <em>What am I coming into being as?</em> What <a href="https://archive.md/https://xeper.info/pub/pub_hp_welcome.html">hidden potentials</a> have long lain locked within the deepest recesses of my heart, now threatening to come into full bloom, pushing through my skin like a sprout breaking through the surface of soil?</p>
<p>Some creature foreign to human eyes, too beautiful and strange to behold. A holder of the cosmos, privy to its deepest secrets, fully capable of actualizing my <em>thelema</em>, of charting my course through the stars.</p>
<p>Through every stage of my website's existence, it has been nearly unrecognizable from the one before. <em>I</em> have been unrecognizable from who I had been the previous revolution, and yet still holding a continuity. But this time, I feel, there will be no grand restructuring of this HTML necessary to accompany who I will become, whatever form I may end up taking.</p>
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