Ephemera 1.11.25

FREE POST: Health, Beauty and Knowledge systems

crazy ox moon

typing at the keyboard on a saturday

waiting for the beginning

waiting for the end

all signs pointing everywhere

and the blood marches on towards the sea

My Teeth are Breaking

Yes, it’s finally time to try and do something about my teeth. They are strong and have weathered my life against all odds. Only one cavity filled fifteen years ago, but i never got the braces i needed and so the crowded lower front teeth are starting to… petrify? There is now a cave my tongue can feel, though they are not loose, the body’s neurology is freaking out a bit causing an increased threat bucket and thus neurological hallucinated referral pain that is not directly related to any one thing but is a state of being of the mouth in general.

my teeth started to slide around starting a few years ago, now there are some gaps where the gums are more exposed to food and air. I’m not sure what any of this means or what has caused this, other than how stressful the last few years have been, and my increasing age.

The struggle to regain bodily stability after being waylaid post covid vaccine has really changed me. Thousands upon thousands of dollars later, in January 2025, i feel more stable than i’ve felt in years, yet still very fragile, precarious.

The body is like an expression of karma, it unfolds.

Reveals.

When certain thresholds are met, new phenomena appear.

Time is never “done”, and so the body is like an infinite list of maintenance tasks until it finally breaks down and shows life as death.

God is a plumber you might say. The angels scrubbing grime from the pipes. When the job is done (and its never done) the shifts just rotate. The stewardship of nature tumbles on.

In some weird mix of events, I had to go on food stamps last august, and with that came some version of health care, which i never used because my threat-plate was too full and the boat was sinking, and you can’t worry about fixing the sails if the hull is leaking. But yesterday, as i spit out tiny bits of dead bone, i had the wherewithal to find the health care card that i had stored away, make a few calls and start the process of getting a new appointment at the dentist. None of this could have been conceived last year, the process too overwhelming, and yet now, in this moment, it felt easy to move forward and see what happens step-by-step. Easy and immediately pertinent. The way things fall is the way they fall, no prediction required. No expectations either.

art by… Jack Howl aka beachghost

Personal Knowledge Management Systems & The Art That Won’t Get Made

Somewhere around October I began to feel extremely exhausted with how i was supposed to keep going under death-stage capitalism. I was building out this substack and working with an indigenous business mentor and I couldn’t see the next steps. I still can’t see them, because that’s how this works, but since then some aspects have become clearer.

As I worked through various thought/writing prompts, and looked at my natal chart, I could see that in 2024 i was somehow “revisiting” my childhood in ways that were indirect and fractal. Following the threads of (constructed) memory I could see how i started and how i changed to deal with the then-impenetrable obstacles of my youth.

When i was young i drew a lot. I wanted to be an illustrator but I had no real wisdom supports. All throughout public school i tried my best but i was locked i to a karmic struggle that was socio-economic, relational and neurological. When i would draw i would go into trances that got increasingly more intense as i got older. Voices and voices, dreams upon dreams, that i could not manage, articulate or understand. This was one of my fundamental personality events, it shaped me for better and for worse for decades to come.

In my late twenties i made the shift to writing after a long drought of not making any art for years. This began my ability to use language to eat itself and change neurologically. I began to reconnect with the essence of artmaking: storytelling, and the barest inklings of how my grandfather had helped me before he died.

Adding to this linguistic process, I started exercising and practicing various theatrical and physical/verbal improvisation methods. Together, this produced a long and fruitful period of trance experimentation that was novel and less problematic than the trances i experienced as a child making visual art.

In these trances i could actually digest and integrate because I was using the body and the voice as an active landscape. This was my first real understanding of what animism was and is. It could ground the imaginal and nondual in ways that allowed multiple experiences and “truths” to happen and co-exist simultaneously without opposition.

Of course, it would take me years more to be able to describe this fluently, which is why the process was so useful. It fed back on itself elegantly. The systems i had been unconsciously drawn toward worked together as they were meant to.

Using writing, language and poetry to be with and from the body/land allowed me to supercharge various latent capacities inside me that had been stunted and malnourished during childhood. The growing pains were immense but at this point everything was working together, even my illnesses, disease, fate and “bad luck”, even if i still believed at times that i was in a battle against an opposing force.

All i really had to do was persevere and continue practicing and collecting data.

As the years went on i began to see behind the veil of dualistic narratives and how those undermined and influenced states of being and thus behaviors. I began to really feel like i was participating with, rather than a pawn of or a victim against.

All the while I kept working on being a more generous and helpful person, sharing everything i’d learned even if it went against the popular ideologies and agendas of cultures. I would continually refine my mental modelling and my communication of the relationships and practices. I wanted to live honestly and with no artifice except for when deliberate artifice was naturally beneficial to the whole process.

So, coming back to present time, I began to suspect that I was working on some unfinished business within my own fate trajectory and that it wasn’t about an end-result in terms of “business”, but an internal unfolding that required of me to apply everything i’d learned previously towards an unpredictable area of my life.

I came to a semi-conclusion that art, aesthetics and beauty making was all i was ever really trying to be an agent of, and every modality I had learned or experimented with was just a means to that end. I also realized that part of what was so frustrating about theater and improvisational play was that it required getting a group of people on the same page, which had proven to be almost impossible with the principles i was pointing at. The mainstream cult-ure just wasn’t/isn’t really ready to combine the things i was/am combining. It was “too much” and thus my own path became blocked. So, i had to reframe.

In visual arts, the process is largely solitary. This allows for the artist to not be as impeded by others in the process of world-making. However, for me, there is an added process of managing a very intense neural state as I mentioned above. This high intensity state creates in the system a severe apprehension (procrastination as a defensive mechanism) and a high adrenaline state that is unsustainable. Even though i now have so many more skills with which to manage it, the main stage i am in now is reducing the “starting costs” of the process.

So, the last few months i have been organizing my space to better reduce those starting and maintenance costs. This means the physical as well as digital spaces. My short-term goal is to be able to have a daily practice that is easy and possible, and I have not managed that yet, but i have been able to have a string of days, as well as around 50% of the week doing something. Writing is still easier neurologically, but i am working on transferring that state into the visual arts state. Finding ways that i can “move between” these states into a new third state that combines the best attributes of each.

And of course, all of this is to embody the behaviors of aesthetics. Keeping this in mind is important to not get “lost” in the high intensity tangles of the process itself.

One thing I’ve been researching lately are the advent of PKM systems, personal knowledge systems. These are cutting edge digital apps that are designed to help artists and creators organize material and data for the purposes of relating to a better artistic process.

This article is one i’ve been really enjoying dissecting: https://every.to/thesis/the-end-of-productivity

Are there aspects of this journey I haven’t mentioned in this small essay?

Absolutely. Some of those aspects are still too hard to talk about directly. Relationships between humans on this planet at this time are fraught with a kind of inherent psychosis, especially across digital chasms. It doesn’t take hardly any effort at all to lose coherence and integrity when we interact non-locally. What I continue seeing are the reality tunnels that people produce when interacting with text and short-form videos.

In my own life this leads to anger and frustration about Wrong Story and how rampant it is, how addictive and pervasive. Everyone developing their own religions, saying it’s not a religion. And with that, the myriad of Vibes that, in my sensing, do not pass the vibe check.

If we are all struggling to comprehend the complete failures of our institutions, then the last thing we should be doing is fracturing and niching down into our own personal echo chambers, but that appears to be exactly what is happening, and I partially blame the ignorance of popular neurological management narratives such as the “Trauma identity industry”.

But if i let that consume me, then i won’t be able to engage with beauty-making.

So, i have to carve a path through these high intensity social knots without thinking i can fix, heal or solve them. Everyone has karma and it appears like in this lifetime, the addictive, compelling nature of certain narratives and emotions is too great. I have glimpsed a version of this in my own life so i have sympathy for how real it all feels, how certain bullshit strategies seem so true and so perfect that one cannot imagine any other possibilities of behavior or attention.

But that’s enough of all that right now.

May these words meet you wherever you are.

Art by Maggie Carr aka roshambaux

Siderealm FX

Music:

I listened to this artist, GRIFF, on repeat for much of December

& currently listening to a randomly generated playlist that i don’t know how to name… it’s basically modern synth-wave produced to sound like it was created in an alternate 1980’s. Its simultaneously nostalgic and novel, soothing and stimulating. I will make a playlist of some of the songs and post it in the future.

Media worth mentioning:

• Shmigadoon! season 2 on appleTV: unbelievably crafted fun musical comedy homage. Watch this if you need good feelings. season 1 is also great so watch that first if you haven’t.

• Silo season 2 appleTV: amazing and terrifying allegory about our humanity. still have the last 2 episodes to go (not released yet). Do not watch this if you are on the brink of despair LOL. otherwise, a home run of dark sci-fi.

• Dragon Prince 7 seasons on netflix: a very wholesome tween animated fantasy series that actually does something very unique relationally and emotionally. i recommend as a palate cleanser every so often, just watching 2-3 episodes in between high intensity media.

• Arcane season 2: well, the animation is just beyond. the soundtrack, art direction, etc is in a league of its own. The story is fine, above average but that’s really not the reason to watch it imo. See what happens when animators get paid what they’re worth and are able to push the limits of the medium.

• Dark Matter seasons 1-3 2015-2017: ok this is an odd one. it was syfy original series, like a cross between firefly & the expanse, kind of…? It grew on me! I’m still in season 2. I started playing in a sci-fi TTRPG game and wanted to watch some genre shows for research. I came across this and, yeah, I really like it and would never have watched it if not for the TTRPG reason. On that note:

• Cowboy Bebop The OAS plus the movie which takes place between episode 22 & 23: Okay, so this was watchable but it’s really the music that makes it. Without the music i would barely care. Still one of the best anime ever… but also kind of fluff. The music is literally beyond critique. and some of the graphic design choices are also wonderful to see in a “cartoon”.

Housekeeping

If you’re ready to start working on your fate in the style i embody, natal sessions are available to book now, with sessions happening after February 3rd. When you book, you are showing the ancestors what to get ready for and greasing the wheels of fate resolution in advance.

donations are always helpful to keep this work going: venmo @dare-sohei and paypal.me/daresohei

PROTECT YOUR PEACE

catch you later, dare