Maxell UR 90 Cassette Tape

[Start tape.]

If you are listening to this tape. I regret to inform you that you have not discovered someone's last words or juicy tea.

Can juicy properly modify tea? Tea is already inherently liquid. A better adjective is chunky. Yeah, no dis-track or substantial confessions to admit.

Well, I must confess my Parental Unit B. I am responsible for The Fruit Fly War that infested our home that summer.

On the way back from a hike I left some peaches in my backpack. Once the smell prompted me to open its zipper, a horde rushed out signaling the trumpet sounds of Armageddon.

I know you spent money buying traps, time in insect military training on YouTube. Oh, the countless nights of buzzing, the shell shock. I'm sorry. It hurt me more to see you suffer from my mistake. Such character development.

Moving to New York has provided me with opportune runes for experience points and side quests. In Houston I was a level 29 vagabond, now I'm back to the tutorial.

It's given me much to conquer. Like the Red Light Camera Bosses that require obedience with sentry's eyes, ready to give you a $150 ticket when: you didn't know if it was a turn on red, or a no turn on red, or a stop then turn on red. It refines your fear based decision-making skills.

Back home I would walk in the woods, among the canaries & squirrels. At night the woods are essentially the same. However, New York has this nighttime feature that changes the player's map, kind of like Minecraft.

I was walking down 35th street to Penn, when a rat sprints past me like Sonic, to go fight the rat across the street for a dirty napkin. I jump, then wonder- with such complex social dynamics, one would think they would get along.

But I guess when squirrels shame you for being born in a trash can, you lose your sense of self when you are forced to feel like a rat.

That's why we should learn to be okay with being mediocre. I don't mean this as an insulting or self-deprecating statement. It's a powerful realization.

Hear me out.

I'm going to say something to be genuinely helpful, but it's going to sound mean. Hopefully, with clever wording and well-placed tonal inflection, I'm going to gaslight your brain into feeling encouraged.

Sidebar. People wonder if this reality is real. Like how do we know our brains aren't generating all this? Life hack. Find a random avatar and make them look at you with your thoughts. Doesn't work.

Now stand up and shake your head back & forth with a rotational force of three newtons accompanied by screaming. After your vision stabilizes, you will have successfully proven the avatars staring at you are in fact human.

"People in general, are people in general."

In our quest to define our uniqueness, we try to be accepted by others, learn skills, and become a niche. But isn't justifying your existence so tiring? Have you ever dislocated your nipple to your shoulder?

There is an unhealthiness in trying not to be ordinary, we hate being average. Truth be told, you are. I am to. We all a remix of human genres that have come and gone. Your personality is as archaic as anything that "was back in my day."

We are not exceptional or on the extreme fringe of being "built different." And that's fine.

We are paradoxically grand & ordinary.

We are designed & an accident.

We are magnificent & mediocre.

When we stop saying we are unique, we perform our uniqueness.

How?

Feelings of awe. Awe tends to drive us to things outside our selves.

"Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something so vast, that it transcends our current understanding of the world."

Eight Types Of Awe*

Moral Beauty

Collective Effervescence

Nature

Music

Visual Design

Spirituality

Life & Death

Epiphany

*Money, materialism, and status signaling are not correlated with awe.

Awe is beyond the self. We will be "shocked into the wonder of being" when we stand outside the world and bring what we find in. We are the most beautiful thing when beautiful things make a home inside us.

So, read this poetry collection.

Learn a few things, indulge my narcissistic personality, by experiencing emotional spheres and higher consciences, by venturing into the astral plane of your mind, enabling my screams of delight, as I continue to make art like some entitled monk on a hill as the world collapses.

[Tape ends.]