Tao Lin

I felt a premonition of the rest of my life gradually worsening but, due to tolerance/acceptance/resignation, me actually feeling the same, until I died.

You need to be in June.

“After you read this sentence look around and calmly gather 5 things at random and (without thinking about what you’re doing) leisurely stack those 5 things on top of each other and photograph it with a smartphone.”

A man who’s played Warcraft the entire trip just asked me to “turn down the brightness” on my computer screen. He is sitting in front of me.

[Sand dunes] bear a resemblance to the force that created them, wind. It is as if each grain of sand were a bit inside the memory of a natural computer.

I’d planned to die at thirty, and then I’d push it on ten years, forty, and then fifty. You always push it on. And then you go on and on and on. It’s difficult.

12:19am: Someone said Gatsby is ‘richer than God,’ now the Marilyn Manson guy is dancing to electronic (?) dance music

liveblogging being on mushrooms for the first time in ~1.5 (?) yrs

Sitting on floor struggling to get the energy to move across my room to get/ingest Adderall so that I’ll have thoughts during The Hobbit

i cant feel wetness

Your eyes are already focused on, or near, the words and symbols comprising it, for example “for example” and “.”

I think the existence of the word “nice” allows people who think “there is no good or bad in art” to say things about art while still feeling like “there is no good or bad in art.”

TC: How has shyness affected your life?
SC: It’s led to a lot of depression & paranoia. It’s a massive driving force for any creativity that I’ve had. Social anxiety can benefit art in extreme ways.

The next day you will work on a novel about a lonely woman in New York City. I will work on a novel about depressed movie stars who don’t read books or look at blogs or have pets. We will meet in the living room at 3:30PM and eat watermelon by the window and watch small children walk home from school.

Because I was deceived (by the initially abundant flora of memes) to believe, on some level—with increasing desperation and then actually a kind of fatalism bordering on nihilism—that there would be “more memes ahead” many powerful, potentially viral memes were left in the wild. These 5 memes are presented as an inaccurate—a weaker, ersatz—sampling of Toronto’s visual memes.

Everything seems vaguely normal, in that things seem predictably surreal, as you read sentences about Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning Gmail chatting about hamsters, until, after maybe two minutes, you realize you’ve been ignoring that there are tribal-tattoo patterns near the margins and in other places and that the text is glowing reddish-black and sometimes has a slightly 3D nature, like it’s projecting a holograph of itself an inch above the page.

[T]he maintenance of Koko’s brand is at once evolutionarily, existentially, and morally/politically appealing in a way that one could imagine earnestly saying things about how if Sartre were alive today he might consider Koko, not Che, to be “the most complete [entity] of our age.”

Half an hour later in a booth in Whole Foods, seated side-by-side, stare at your respective MacBooks, multitasking (1) looking at the internet (2) eating pineapple chunks (3) drinking energy drinks (4) advancing each of your careers (5) searching the internet for how and where to get married. Say “I don’t get it” as your fiancé scrolls through photographs of Elvis standing between grinning couples.