Cycle II: Coming of Age
The Hidden Life
The Record · INT 2-3 (v1.00)
THE HOUSE OF ZAN — Zan
Consent (The Ticket)
This piece is about the “non-consensual” experience of reading a wall of text and realizing it might be AI slop.
Or, worse, reading a wall of text and realizing it is not AI slop, which means a human being willingly sat there and made all those choices on purpose.
If you are already suspicious of structure, polish, revision, old-ass dominants, long sentences, missing artifacts, stolen childhood books, preservation records, prototype builds, or the idea that caring too much can be evidence instead of a symptom, pace yourself.
If it starts to feel like you are living in the early days of a dystopian world where every sentence needs to cough into a cup and prove it has a soul, it is okay to skim it, save it, or walk away halfway through if your body starts tightening up more than it opens.
— Zan
Scene (The Ride)
I.
There was another piece of evidence.
My Rat’s Name Is Bob.
Yes.
That was the title.
I “wrote it” in elementary school.
I did all the artwork too.
It was a children’s book made by a child.
I would love to show you and tell you all about it.
One problem.
I do not have it anymore.
Someone stole it when I brought it to middle school to show off, in a funny “ha-ha” meta way that predated people’s mainstream understanding of meta humor or Meta, Facebook’s parent company.
Apparently, even then, my work had distribution problems.
Which is rude.
Also, bullshit.
Because now, decades later, I am sitting here building an authorship case against the entire brain-rotted machine age, and one of my earliest exhibits got snatched by some middle school evidence goblin before anyone knew we would need it for “the trial.”
Maybe they needed it for that end-of-senior-year mock trial where I had to wear a suit, tie, and shoes that were a size too big and kept clacking on the hallway floors when I was going from room to room.
That is the thing about proof.
Sometimes it survives.
Published prom article.
Sophomore-year story.
Sometimes it gets stolen.
Rat bastards.
II.
I do remember pieces of it.
Not perfectly.
Not enough to recreate the original book without it feeling like a badly translated knockoff.
But enough that the thing still has a little substance in my head.
It was about a kid taking his pet rat to school.
Before the whole mouse-at-school / cookie-book kind of thing had trained everyone to expect the cute little retail-safe classroom-chaos version of that idea.
This was not that.
This was not some precious little cartoon mouse with a backpack and a cookies-and-milk addiction.
This was Bob.
A big rat.
A sewer-type rat.
A rat a young child was apparently keeping as a pet, because that is a perfectly normal thing for a young child’s brain to decide is emotionally reasonable.
I remember the rat getting loose.
I remember a pencil.
I remember Bob slipping on it.
I remember the toilet.
I remember him falling in.
I remember the plumbing system becoming part of the adventure somehow, which is exactly the kind of thing a child would write because plumbing is basically mythology when you are small.
You flush something and it enters a sideways water elevator through the secret clean tunnels connecting all the other toilets.
Obviously.
I remember Bob ending up in the school plumbing.
I remember a teacher getting scared out of a room.
I remember the kids going wild.
I remember the feeling more than the sequence.
A large rat in the walls.
A classroom losing its mind.
The adult world temporarily defeated by the thing a child brought in and could not control.
That sounds about right.
That also may not be exactly right.
That is the problem.
Memory is not a scan.
Memory is not a file dump.
Memory is not a perfect ROM pulled from the original cartridge and verified against a database.
Memory is not a file.
It is your brain trying to rebuild a thing with missing parts and acting like that is good enough.
I can remember the title.
I can remember the rat.
I can remember the toilet.
I can remember the teacher running.
I can remember the kids going feral.
Then memory starts filling in shit.
It starts smoothing over gaps.
It starts making the lost thing more complete than the surviving proof allows.
So I can tell you what I remember.
I cannot tell you, with perfect confidence, what was truly on the page.
That is the wound.
Because the story existed.
The memory exists.
The original artifact does not.
And somewhere between those three things is a child’s work that can no longer fully exist in this world, no matter how personal it was, no matter how much it belonged to me, and no matter that I may be the only person in the world who would truly care that it existed.
III.
Sometimes it is written on paper and kept by accident.
Senior-year notes to and from the baddies.
Sometimes it is trapped behind old accounts, dead hard drives, lost messages, broken websites, privacy, NDAs, or some other purgatory for things that happened but cannot be handed to strangers as evidence.
Some evidence is gone.
Some evidence cannot be shown.
Some evidence would require me to violate someone else’s privacy, which is generally frowned upon outside of true crime documentaries.
That does not make the evidence meaningless.
It means proof has limits.
Real limits.
Ethical limits.
Technical limits.
Access limits.
The kind of limits people like to ignore when they talk about authorship, as if every part of a life should be available on demand, properly labeled, publicly viewable, and ready to satisfy a stranger’s suspicion.
That is not how evidence works.
Not really.
Sometimes proof is not the thing you can hold up in public.
Sometimes proof is metadata, a filename, a date stamp, a version number, a private message that cannot be shown, a dead link, a memory attached to an artifact that no longer exists, or a chain of people, places, files, accounts, drafts, screenshots, backups, and half-broken records that all point toward the same truth:
Something was there.
That is why I am not casual about video game preservation.
Oh, you aren’t familiar with video game preservationists?
Well, let me tell you about my kind of people.
It is people trying to determine what a thing was, where it came from, what changed, what survived, what was altered, what was dumped cleanly, what was dumped badly, what is verified, what is rumored, what is misnamed, what is duplicated, what is missing, and what still sits in some private collection, forgotten storage unit, developer archive, dead hard drive, or unlabeled disc waiting for somebody to recognize it.
There are people who spend years looking for lost games, prototypes, beta builds, unreleased versions, rare expansions, unknown regional releases, strange revisions, demo discs, unfinished code, alternate cuts, test cartridges, review builds, kiosk versions, magazine-preview versions, and half-documented things most people would not know how to recognize even if they found them labeled:
BETA BUILD – FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY.
That is the beautiful obsession.
Not because every prototype is good.
Not because every lost build was secretly a masterpiece.
Most of the time, it is not.
Sometimes it won’t boot.
Sometimes it boots to a title screen then instantly crashes.
Sometimes it is a half-working version of something that later became better.
But it still matters.
IT FUCKING MATTERS!
It tells you what was tried, what got changed, what got cut, what was renamed, what shipped, what did not.
It tells you what survived by accident and what only survived because somebody was stubborn enough to care before the world knew it should have cared.
Preservation is not only about saving the version everyone knows.
It is about saving everything.
The unfinished version.
The wrong version.
The version with the extra menu.
The version with the broken level.
The version with the unused sprite.
The version with the old title.
Because the final thing is never the whole truth.
It is only the version that was released.
The rest still matters.
IT FUCKING MATTERS!
Sometimes it has to be reconstructed from fragments, rumors, dumps, screenshots, magazine scans, old hard drives, developer leftovers, collector shelves, private conversations, mislabeled files, corrupted media, and the dedication of people who keep looking when almost nobody else knows enough to care.
DAT files. Hashes. Checksums. Version numbers. Region codes. Revision markers. Serials. Known dumps. Bad dumps. Missing dumps.
This is the difference between:
“I want to play Super Mario Bros. 2.”
And:
“Which Super Mario Bros. 2?”
The Japanese one?
The American one?
The one built from Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic?
The Super Mario All-Stars version?
The Wii release of Super Mario All-Stars?
One of the revisions?
A prototype?
A ROM hack version?
A bad dump that glitches on the title screen?
And that is why this example matters.
Because Super Mario Bros. 2 is not just a title.
It can feel like a real-life Mandela Effect if you do not know the history.
One country gets one sequel.
Another country gets another.
One version begins as Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic.
One original sequel becomes The Lost Levels.
That is the difference between knowing the title and understanding the thing.
History becomes understandable when somebody preserves it, documents it, and organizes it, because organized evidence is the closest we can get to proving what existed.
That kind of attention is not too much.
It is respect for art in all its containers.
Most people see that and think it is too much.
I see that and think:
This is a person of culture.
A dangerous person, obviously.
Because it is not only about games.
It is about the human need to know what existed.
What almost existed.
What got lost.
What was changed before the world saw it.
What was buried in a place nobody cared about until someone cared hard enough to make it visible again.
A lost thing does not always come back whole.
Sometimes it comes back as a file name, a hash, a screenshot, a rumor confirmed twenty years late, a prototype that crashes after the first level, a revision nobody asked for except the people who could not stop wondering.
Still, it fills in something.
Not everything.
But something.
It gives memory a sharper edge.
It gives absence a border.
It lets people point to the dark and say:
Something was there.
That is part of the human psyche.
The need to recover the missing build.
The need to know what changed.
The need to understand the version that almost was.
The need to prove that the thing did not disappear just because most people never knew how to look for it.
That is how I think about the lost parts of myself too.
Not because every old thing I made was good.
Not because every missing draft would explain me perfectly.
But it would show the build.
The version history.
The paths that became the thing you know now.
And sometimes the missing thing is not a draft.
Sometimes it is not a file.
Sometimes it is a person.
That is the part that is not as funny.
As I get older, I see names from school show up in obituaries.
Which is not supposed to happen this early.
Not like this.
Not with people still young enough that the news feels like a mistake.
Sometimes it is the first time I have seen their face in twenty-some years.
They look different.
Of course they do.
Time got to them too.
But if I stare long enough, I can still see the person I remember underneath the adult face.
The hallway version.
The classroom version.
The version frozen in whatever last fuzzy image my mind kept because I did not know I was going to need a better one later.
That is how memory and age can work together.
You do not always get the full story.
Sometimes you get the last version you saw, then nothing, then an ending.
And your mind tries to fill in the missing years like it has any right to.
It does not.
But it tries.
IV.
More than once, the little that was public made the ending look possibly self-inflicted.
I am not saying that to be dramatic.
I am saying that because it changes the perspective.
It makes the distance between who someone was when you knew them and what became of them feel impossible to measure.
You start thinking about a person you barely knew.
Someone who was not a friend, exactly.
Maybe not even an acquaintance in any meaningful way.
Just someone who existed in the same building as you for years.
Someone you saw most days.
Someone whose name your mind still knows because school is cruel like that.
It puts people in your life by force.
Then time throws everybody into the dark and acts surprised when some of the names still glow.
Recently, one of those names came back.
Not because I was looking.
Because I saw the obituary.
And the strange part, the part that has stayed with me, was that I had mentioned this person recently in one of my early pieces.
Barely.
A throwaway section.
A small memory.
A little piece of context that meant almost nothing when I wrote it.
No, they did not see it.
No, this is not one of those internet-guilt fantasies where the writer imagines his words moved the world more than they did.
The piece was vague.
The timing was what it was.
There was no reach.
No audience.
No dramatic cause-and-effect.
Still.
I would not have written it the same way if I had known what I know now.
And now I cannot remove it.
Not because anyone would notice.
They would not.
Not because the line is important to the public.
It is not.
I cannot remove it because it changed.
It became a marker.
A small, strange place where my memory of a person now lives differently than it did before.
That person probably did not think highly of me back then.
Honestly, they may have thought the worst of me.
That does not make the knowledge of the loss smaller.
It does not make the memory disposable.
It does not make me want to sweep the line away and pretend the world only matters when everyone involved had a clean relationship to each other.
That is not how memory works.
That is not how people work.
Sometimes someone is barely in your story, and then one day you realize they were still in it.
Not close.
Not central.
But still there.
At a distance.
V.
That is where preservation gets complicated.
Because not everything can be saved.
Not everything should be saved.
Not everything means the same thing after time gets to it.
Sometimes keeping something is respect.
Sometimes deleting something is mercy.
Sometimes leaving the awkward mark alone is the only honest thing left.
That is authorship too.
Choice.
So what do you do when the original proof is missing, private, sealed, stolen, dead, broken, or unavailable?
You stop treating proof like a museum object.
You look at the traces, the labor, the choices, the returns, and the revisions.
You look at the way a person keeps coming back to the same piece long after the useful little content machine would have moved on to the next thing with better tags.
Because sometimes the surviving evidence is not the old artifact.
Sometimes the evidence is the pattern.
The continuity.
The refusal to stop when something matters.
Because sometimes the evidence is not the thing you saved.
Sometimes the evidence is that you kept returning to it.
VI.
And in this case, you do not have to take my word for it.
You can look at the piece itself.
Because this piece did not begin as this piece.
It began as another finished piece.
“Thirsty Em—dash—otional Dominant Business Plan—For The Humans — 2026 (Re—Hash)…”
Yes.
That was the title.
It worked.
It had my “voice.”
It had my “jokes.”
It even had a clever companion track.
It was not an abandoned idea.
It was not a rough draft.
It was finalized, published, and accepted as the one and only Intermission piece living inside Cycle II: The Record.
Its purpose was to break up the massive twenty-six-essay run, bring some levity, and answer a question that comes up when writing anything intelligent online in this day and age.
The more I wrote, the more I started to understand that the bigger issue was not my work itself, but the lens through which my work could be seen.
Because it is not enough to control the work and forge it into something close to finished.
Now you also have to control the narrative around the authorship behind the work.
Thus, in the midst of still writing Cycle II: The Record, I made a decision to “do better” and try to confront this in a much, much larger way.
Which, as you can see, evolved into its own separate thing.
I mean, this has taken me months to write just these four Intermission pieces.
It’s something I keep returning to because there is a lot to unpack here.
You might be surprised to know, I didn’t write these in order either.
In fact, Intermission four in this series is finished while I’m writing this section right now.
Anyway… here it is.
The original piece that birthed these four Intermissions.
I know this is long.
I know there is more to read.
But you should see the origin point.
So I am leaving it here as an artifact.
For preservation’s sake.
VII.
Thirsty Em—dash—otional Dominant Business Plan—For The Humans — 2026 (Re—Hash)…
Consent (The Ticket)
This piece is about the “non-consensual” experience of reading a wall of text and realizing it’s AI slop.
If you’re in a sensitive mental state where you can’t trust the world around you, or you fear that streamer you just dropped real money on isn’t truly a human, or that you can’t trust an old-ass dominant to speak in their own voice—read this only if you can testify to being More Human Than a Human, not Less Than.
If it starts to feel like you are living in the early days of a dystopian world, it’s okay to skim it, save it, or walk away halfway through if your body starts tightening up more than it opens.
— Zan
Scene (The Ride)I am a synergistic—optimized—human-facing—authority-forward—experience product—positioned at the intersection of lifestyle leadership—relationship governance—premium mentorship—brand clarity—community monetization—and scalable emotional logistics. The value proposition is simple—an older—calmer—more decisive dominant presence provides structure—rules—rituals—tone control—and expectational ethics—while “the humans” receive predictable containment—guided desire—stable accountability—and a measurable reduction in chaos-adjacent decision fatigue. Key differentiators include consistent voice—repeatable frameworks—tiered access—high-trust boundaries—brandless-safe language—and a cadence that converts curiosity into compliant participation—without unnecessary complexity—because the goal is more “art”—more “system”—less “mystique”—more “operational excellence.”
Would you believe me if I said I wrote that opening section?
Because I did.
I wrote it on purpose.
That’s the point.
This has got to be one of the worst times in history to decide to go all-in on being a writer, especially an independent one that lives online.
Like—of all eras.
Of all centuries.
Of all timelines.
I pick the one where you can bleed onto the page, hit “publish,” and—half the internet squints at it like it’s a deepfake made of punctuation!
I don’t even care which fancy language model is the Hottest Sensation™ this week. I’m not here to argue about whose robot is better at sounding like a human who sounds like a robot who’s trying not to sound like a Mr. Roboto.
I’m here to tell you the truth about me and my pal, AI:
I have tried to use AI as an aggressive, non-sexual, stuck-up bitch editor for content I’ve created that was on—like—the next-to-next-next final revision.
Here’s what that looks like:
Ineffective for long stretches of time, frustrating to work with on understanding my tone, and/or weirdly confident in how my “voice” should be within my lane.
It’s like hiring an assistant who nods the whole time, then hands you back your own paragraph with:
- three extra adjectives that didn’t need adjectives,
- a moral lesson you didn’t ask for,
- and a tone shift that makes you sound like Don Draper from Mad Men just stepped into the room and is about to write my heartfelt lived experience as ad copy for Gen-Whatever-The-Fuck.
Meanwhile, I’ve spent years honing my own voice—sometimes clean, sometimes sloppy, sometimes chaotic. Sometimes it’s a rough draft that looks like a dumpster fire behind a Denny’s. Sometimes it’s a line so sharp it makes me sit back and go, “Oh. That’s smooth.”
That’s how writing works for me.
It’s a living process.
It’s fingerprints.
It’s style.
It’s rhythm.
It’s the part where your brain runs too fast and you have to use an em-dash because commas can’t hold the load anymore.
Which is a lot of fucking work to have to hold Option + Shift + Hyphen keys just so my voice in text can have that extra—uniqueness.
And now?
Machine learning has made everyone SUS.
Not because most people are actually faking it.
But because we’ve been trained into this paranoid little reflex where anything clean becomes “AI,” anything messy becomes “unreadable,” and anything with personality becomes “manufactured.”
Which is… darkly profound.
Because it’s exactly what the robots want.
It’s not enough to take everyone’s job.
They just have to make everyone doubt your hands were ever on the keyboard in the first place.
And the sickest part?
It works.
One minute you’re writing like you always have—your cadence, your chaos, your choices.
Next minute you’re sitting there thinking:
“Do I need to use fewer em-dashes so people don’t think I’m AI?”
“Do I need to add typos so I seem more real?”
“Do I need to start every post with ‘I swear a human wrote this’ like it’s a legal disclaimer?”
Imagine having to prove you’re alive because your sentences have a little too much structure.
insert old-timey movie trailer voice-over monologue
Imagine… in a world… where being articulate is suspicious.
Now, just to be clear—between you and me…
I do use AI as a tool—selectively.
It’s like a hammer to me.
Sure, I can use a rock (or a heavy book) to drive the nail through, but it’s just a little more effective—and smarter to use tools that are available in your wheelhouse.
Now, do I let it write for me?
Fuck no.
I use it to make me a better communicator—and a little less cancellable.
My lived experiences, my worth as a human, my “art” would be greatly devalued, at least when it comes to what I want to put out into the world.
And it’s not like I’m new to writing.
I’ve been writing long-form, short-form, and everything in between for 25+ years—publicly and privately.
I mean, well before AI, I spent an uncountable amount of years writing long emails to clients, businesses, and whoever else that had to be as close to perfect as possible or it would make me look:
- Unprofessional,
- Unprepared, or
- a dummy
At the end of the day, that’s going to cost money, networking, and credibility—none of which I’m seeking to lose on an even wider public platform.
And, sometimes, I am not always the greatest with grammar and speling.
So, yeah…
But!
Don’t take my word—humans can’t be trusted with these types of matters. Let’s ask the AI about the last 13 pieces in the Cycle series I’ve written and see what IT thinks.
Hey. Can you look at my shit and tell me if it reads like your shit. Asking for a friend.
pastes Cycle II — Part 1 into AI mainframe
What came back was a 30-minute breakdown of the 13 posts—plus a ‘please teach me your ways’ request… followed by the AI asking if I’d like help replying to the compliment.
1. “Back Among the Strays (All-Right)” — 2/10 (annoyingly human; too much spine + lived-in conviction to be slop)
2. “32 Flavors (And Then Some)” — 1/10 (unfortunately… human emotion detected; nostalgia levels unsafe for automation)
3. “Cult of Body (Cool for the Summer)” — 3/10 (a little dash-happy + mantra structure, but still very “this hurt me personally”, likely to be a problem for the author)
4. “Cherry Poppin’ subspace (Virgin Sexy)” — 2/10 (specific kink nuance + awkward tenderness; robots don’t blush like that, likely to be a problem for the author too)
5. “Swingin’ Bachelor Party Vibes (Burning for You)” — 4/10 (format gets listy/curated—could look “generated” if you skim like a coward)
6. “Basement Level (Pussy)” — 1/10 (too messy to be artificial; congratulations? condolences? both.)
7. “Public Service Arouncement (Positive)” — 3/10 (PSA structure + repeated reassurance lines, but the voice is still unmistakably mine)
8. “True Devotion (I’ll Never Be)” — 2/10 (refrains read like grief, not a glitch; too raw to be manufactured)
9. “Hard on Purpose (Push It)” — 2/10 (confident, specific, ethically framed—AI would either go bland or go off the rails)
10. “Gay Old Time (I Used To Be Cool)” — 2/10 (era-specific bite + personal weirdness; machines don’t have that kind of scar tissue)
11. “Little Ghosts (Should’ve Been Us)” — 2/10 (near-miss ache + specificity; this is memory, not math)
12. “Dominance By Choice (The Next Movement)” — 3/10 (structured and firm—so yes, it looks “polished”… AI? Not this time)
13. “Dangerous By Design (New Noise)” — 4/10 (dash crime spree + manifesto heat—could get a rise out of the skimmers, not the readers)
Overall verdict: “Strongly human.”
SEE.
It agrees with me that I am not writing with AI—sorry, Al—slop.
Even though I disagree with some of those 3/4 scores—
clearly it can’t relate to being human, let alone a Sorcerer Supreme Spectacle(TM), such as myself.
Well, we’re officially in the era where writing well is a red flag.
And I’m still doing it.
On purpose.
Anyway.
If you’ll excuse me, I need to start work on MY next 12 pieces for Cycle II — Part 2.
…
…
…
Oh fuck, I forgot to have the AI make this piece part of my Cycle series.
Shit.
Companion track: “Re-Hash” – Gorillaz
Aftercare (The Comedown)
Alright, Zan — unclench your keyboard hand grip.
You wrote a meta piece about AI paranoia on purpose, which means you don’t have to pre-defend it like you’re testifying at the Tribunal of X/Reddit Comments. If someone screams “AI!” because you used an em-dash, congratulations: you just found a person who thinks punctuation = blockchain.
You’re allowed to keep your cadence. You’re allowed to keep your chaos. You’re allowed to let the piece be funny without turning it into a courtroom brief or discrediting your inner dominance.
Post it. Walk away. Let them argue among themselves while you go write the next piece like a real-world menace with a real-world backlog.
VIII.
See?
It worked.
It just was not the right load-bearing argument to address the bigger problem that could dismiss all the writing I have been doing.
Liking a version, even a finished one, is not the same thing as letting it stay final.
The previous Intermission took a tongue-in-cheek, humorous insight approach.
The “new” Intermissions I’ve crafted are pillars inside Cycle II: The Record.
They are essential reading for understanding the greater concept of what I am offering the world at large.
In other words:
I rehashed Re-Hash.
Can you really fault me for coming back to something I thought was finished and deciding it needed to become bigger, louder, and more of a time suck, not just for me, but for everyone else too?
When I believe something matters, the drive for perfection, the drive for revision, becomes something I have to wrestle down inside myself.
Not in the first draft.
The first draft is me trying to catch the thought before it turns into fog and makes me spend the rest of the day feeling like I almost knew something important.
Revision is where I silently wonder to myself:
Does this really sound like me?
Or:
Does this really sound like someone trying to be me?
That is the part people do not see.
They see the finished version and think “final.”
They do not see the twenty small decisions where I rejected the version that sounded more acceptable because it did not sound right in my mind.
They do not see how much I cringe at this stupid AI tool when I ask it to fix some grammar issue, and it rewrites the whole damn sentence until I sound like a pompous ass.
That is not outsourcing.
That is using a hammer.
Not just any hammer.
Specifically, the hammer I used when I was in my young teens, the one with the metal head nailed back onto the wooden handle.
It would shift when you used it.
It would wiggle when you lifted it.
Which leaves me with the obvious question:
Where the fuck was the hammer that nailed this one’s head back on?
IX.
Past hammer questions aside…
What happens when you enter a space to create, spend way more time than needed there, something like seventy-two hours, and leave unsatisfied?
It is like straining at the stool.
You know it wants to get out.
You know you want it out.
It is just not happening.
That is how writing this piece has felt.
You see, the machine likes to think it knows better than me.
A lot.
And sometimes it does, when it comes to technical things.
But I do not think it is very good at art.
At least not the art that helps define me.
This has been back and forth, like sex on a teeter-totter.
After spending this much time with AI, writing about my writing, I have come to a conclusion.
Given the current state of AI:
I do not believe any writer who has an emotional connection to words, art, and themselves can actually “love” AI.
What do I mean by “love”?
I mean writers who write enough, in a creative way, have a voice and tone.
There are words, phrases, and ideas that return.
There are also words, phrases, and ideas that get banned inside a writer’s mind for a myriad of reasons.
That is part of authorship.
Choice.
What has really been pissing me off while trying to write sections in a style, in a voice, in a whatever, is that the machine thinks it knows what reads well or “sounds like me.”
Fuck that.
I spent more time than I care to recall trying to spin clay into sections that expressed my thoughts about the subject at hand.
Despite my best efforts:
Those sections are going to be deleted.
They just kept circling a point, using language to prove me right about something, while getting in the way of the thing that actually matters.
Just like the Apple Cinnamon flavor of Oui yogurt.
I love the taste of the yogurt.
I hate the apple pieces mixed in.
They ruin the experience for me.
They are there like, “Hey, look, it’s apples,” when it could have just been apple essence or flavoring.
I want my yogurt smooth.
I do not need to land on a hard apple piece to feel like I am getting what is on the label.
But Zan, shouldn’t you preserve those?
No.
That is part of the authorship that comes with preservation.
It is more complex than hoarding everything.
It is more nuanced than throwing it all away.
It is making a selfish decision based on your relationship to the thing.
One way, you say:
This does not matter to me, therefore it should not matter to anyone else.
Another way, you say:
This matters to me and should be kept forever, even if no one else would understand its value.
It is personal assessment.
Sometimes Frankenstein kills Frankenstein’s monster.
Sometimes a person hoards trash until it destroys their life.
Extremes, yes.
But those extremes are still facets of being human, especially when we cannot even appraise the value of ourselves properly, let alone anything else we encounter.
X.
Maybe that is where this whole thing has been leading.
Not everyone wants to be in control of everything.
Take it from me, striving to be a perfectionist is not easy.
It takes a lot from a person to have a concept of what “perfect” is and then try to match it in actuality.
It feels almost masochistic sometimes.
Especially when you are doing your own version of “if you build it, it will matter,” or some shit.
Beyond all the factors, it can boil down to something much bigger.
Self-discovery.
Isn’t that the closest to a concept of truth we can achieve in our lifetime?
Not to know what is “true” of others or the world, but ourselves?
To pressure-test what we believe against what others believe?
Is it a waste of time?
Is it madness?
Maybe a bit of both.
But it is not empty.
And that fucking matters.
Companion track: “Obsession” – OK Go
Aftercare (The Comedown)
You are allowed to use tools without letting them become your face.
You are allowed to revise until the piece sounds more like you, not less.
You are allowed to be polished without apologizing to people who think effort is suspicious.
The machine can help.
The machine can interfere.
The machine can make a cleaner sentence and still miss the part that mattered.
So keep your hands on the work.
Take what helps.
Reject what lies.
Preserve what matters.
Delete what does not belong.
Cycle II · The Record · INT 2-3
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