life is a garden ➿ and the roots are all touching
10/01/2025
i’ve been getting pretty pissed off lately each time i look at content like i actually don’t fucking care about matcha fuckin’ lattes or people making jokes about performatively drinking said matcha latte or how long you stood in line to buy a fucking labubu or whatever and my friend says labubus are spiritually israeli in which i fucking agree and i don’t blame the individual for this predicament like i don’t hate people who have labubus but i hate what they stand for which is fucking nothing this shit is so fucking bleak sometimes like what the fuck do people even like anymore what do people even value anymore like there are genocides happening on the same planet we are spending money on stupid shit that we get tired of in a few months and it ends up in landfill and then what we are in the rubble of unloved objects that were empty signifiers of status we never even had in the first place like how truly humiliating and why do we do the same with people? why are we drinking ceremonial matcha every day and why are there so many music festivals like is nothing fucking sacred anymore and what are we even celebrating? i don’t wanna sound like a jackass but people are so divorced from ritual and cycles and meaningful things that are actually tangible so what is the fucking point if we’re swimming in a void, a soup of emptiness, a sludge goop fuckin’ slop of useless shit
★
So, here is my return to longform. My beautiful wife and life partner, Longform. I once was distracted, in the throes of passion with shortform, holding onto more than I could ever digest in a lifetime. I am wiser now from the grief of all I’ve lost. I am tired of empty promises, of quick sugar highs. Give me deep, sustained attention. Give me pause, time for silence. Give me tease and build. Let things linger, Longform.
Shortform: temporarily alluring, sweet. Ultimately, she leaves me with empty calories unnourishing. I am famished.
Guide me to a sustaining nectar and I’ll journey towards it, for as long as it takes. Life is about dancing to our destinations. It is my god given right to shake ass towards becoming.
Longform, an aperitivo that trails into dinner, an afternoon that leads us into the dark of night. The sun goes down, the candles are lit. Faces in amber light, barely visible and entirely lovable. We have an amaro, an espresso for a nightcap, we can’t help but to squeeze out each moment of togetherness this evening. Eyes soften and we begrudgingly call it: walking down the hall with the last of the wine in hand, passing the bottle back and forth until our arrival to rest. We do not need to speak of the future, of pros and cons. We are just here, now, flesh pressed on flesh. A candle still burns for us somewhere.
Eros is holding on to dear life. Everyone knows exactly how to look sexy, and somehow, no one is erotic. No one is having sex anyway, in the truest sense. Everything is porn. Everyone knows the right thing to say, how to act, and it all means nothing. We are actors playing a role we don’t believe in.
I literally don’t understand the point in most things. War? Killing people for resources that we just hoard? Denying others their right to water, food, land, and their humanity, just so you can get a hair transplant and drive a fugly car, to get a hot wife you don’t even know how to talk to? Going to a party just to be seen, but not engaging in a single conversation that actually fills your cup? I don’t get it. Walk with me to Cringe Mountain. Let us climb it. Let me simmer.
Give me something real. Give me something uncomfortable. Give me something I have to sit in, parse through. Give me something worth working out, and don’t give me an out. Who needs an escape room when life is full of puzzles?
I know I sound dramatic but we are in a true decline of humanity. No one is living. I walk through the streets and feel an urgent panic about the way we are. Have we forgotten the finality of our lives, that your shit could get rocked at any time?
★
I have been challenging myself to not look at my phone during my subway commute. Sometimes I even go to extremes and prohibit myself from listening to music. Music is okay if I am in deep attention with it, same with books. Otherwise, I push myself to sit, to hear the world around me, to feel the things people around me are feeling. This shit can be uncomfortable. I become acutely aware of how many people are surrounding me at any given moment. I scan to see who is having a good day, a bad day. Try to guess how long each person has lived in this city. I am confronted with their realness. This is scary. This is beautiful.
Shortform manufactures zombies. My roommate tells me about a guy she saw on the subway, tablet and phone in hand. On one screen there is a TV show, and on the other, Tetris. He frantically goes back and forth between the two screens. He was practically licking them. I don’t know if this manufactured urgency is even necessary. We worked so hard to evolve into a species that could ponder, and now, we’re back to digging our noses and asses at the same time, on some monkey shit.
I see people like this on the subway all the time, infinitely scrolling through social media or playing their mobile games with screens barely a foot away from their face. What do we lose in reality when we engross ourselves in the digital? Why do we seek nourishment in empty calories?
I forgot who said it, but I once heard that the ruling class will increasingly have the means and education to value things like time in nature, slowness, to know how to put the damn phone down. On the other end, working class people will have their attention robbed by “free” media through social networking sites. What you exchange in this “free” exchange is, well, your attention and data. Which is actually a fucking lot. This creates an even larger disparity in wealth, not only in financial capital, but on all fronts: wealth of social wellbeing and attention are being compromised in ways damaging for generations to come. I see this damage directly in our relationships. It’s the damn phones.
The discourse is trite so I’ll only touch upon it briefly: the Friend AI ads circulating on the MTA are pissing me off. Loneliness is humanity’s built in signal to reach out to others. This is an evolutionary necessity. To retreat to the self and artificiality is devastating. AI should be a vehicle to give us time for the things that really matter, like spending time with one another. The machine should do my admin work so I can make my aperitivo date with friends, so that I can have a long and nourishing dinner with them. To think an imperfectly beautiful flesh and blood person could be replaced by a machine is moronic.
We are attracted to AI friendships because you don’t have to work for them. You can remain a dopamine-addicted self who has no regard for others. The machine will give you attention. It is easy! You don’t have to address the mess of life! How fucking boring!
Contemporary culture prioritizes safety and comfort over the confrontation of self. This is how Eros dies in a horribly morbid, rotten decay. My best moments emerge from times I leaped into abysses too deep to see their shape. Trust fall into life. You know yourself better than you think. It's all the other bullshit that makes you feel like you don’t. Don’t listen to the opinions of people that don’t care about you. Who fucking cares.
Self care this, self care that. What happened to the total annihilation of the self in order to cross the bridge towards sincerity, towards actualization?
I know it is humiliating to reach out to people, but you just gotta do it. Eventually, it gets easier. It is a muscle we have to exercise. Practice by being a good friend, by embodying the kind of person you’d like to spend time with. Be yourself, but also remember: the self has room to grow. This is a note to self.
Dominic Pettman states that “the self is a collaboration with others”. We are all the sum of each other. We become reified through the reflections of ourselves through those we love. We should live with this understanding burned, branded onto ourselves. I am me because you are you. I am me because we live amongst each other.
I make rules for myself that I break all the time. You kind of have to. It’d be weird if you always stayed the same. You have never been you-er than the you that is you now. The you of the future relies on you that trusts the present.
I fuck up all the time. I make a ton of mistakes. I wrong others, and in this same life, I have loved with a warmth of a thousand suns. I have multiplied the blessings bestowed on me. Everyone says it, but it's true: we contain multitudes. We have to be gracious towards each other in being imperfect. We cannot build a future using only the systems we know. Have courage to dream.
I felt so sad last night. I let myself be. I fell asleep feeling so pitiful and sorry for myself. Wah wah wah. Sad-ass notes app reflections. I woke up with gratitude that the sun came up. I was glad to have slept on it, that I simmered.
There is no right or wrong way to be. I cannot demonize negative emotion. I just follow my heart. I will probably feel sad again tonight, and that is okay. I will let myself be, because there will eventually come a day where I can let this particular thing go. I will not rush the process.
More than anything, I want to emphasize that life is gross and imperfect. It should be this way. I firmly believe in all the things you learn while fumbling through with an earnest heart.
Capitalism has failed you. There is no linear path. I am sorry if you are finding out this way. If there is a conviction in your soul that you have silenced through work or relationships, you are actively killing yourself. Failing in capitalism is not failing at life.
Succeeding on other people’s terms are surrogates for the desires we have within ourselves. I don’t have any specific empirical evidence to back it, but I have a strong conviction: within each person lies a desire and mission unshakable, embedded into our psyche, and everything we do against it causes deep pain and suffering. You become aware of this mission early on, and we have our whole lives for these dreams to take shape.
I know girls who should be painting all day, but instead, date chronically and use all their passionate energy intended for the studio on problems they have (frankly) made for themselves. Men do this just as often. At times, I too can microdose this behavior. I distract myself with bullshit when I should be making something with my hands, when I should be sitting on a rock, when I’d benefit from watching a river. That is why my ass is back in the studio. I am married to the game. I must walk my path with energetic intentionality. A big hop and skip in my own direction, if you will.
My big disclaimer is that I don’t think romance is inherently a distraction, but I do believe that people treat romance as a surrogate for passion that should be felt through other means. We can’t help but want to be moved by something, and what is more moving than love? Yet, who could we be if we were moved by things outside of ourselves, that we did not have to be a subject in the beautiful thing we are observing? What if the time spent stressing about a guy not texting you back was spent dreaming and collaborating with your closest friends and coconspirators instead? What if we built that sculpture like we said we wanted to? What is holding us back, and why do you look at your phone instead when compelled towards acting on these desires?
What does all of this have to do with longform vs. shortform? Why do I hate Labubus? Why am I always talking about Eros? What does capitalism and AI have to do with all of this? What the hell am I trying to say? Rather, why should anyone care what I have to say at all?
There are a ton of grifers out there, trying to extract money and time from you to get what they want. I don’t necessarily think that anyone should even listen to what I have to say. I am just stating my convictions and what I am working towards. I share this because I deeply care about humanity, about repairing our broken fuckin’ brains. My website doesn’t have a paywall for a reason. I (mostly) left substack because it felt so noisy. I also didn’t like asking you for money. I don’t want anything from you, aside from you living a life in alignment.
Life is long form, like, literally. Life is a commitment to a long term practice. Things don’t manifest overnight. The family you’d like, the friends you want, the skills you are interested in, these are all commitments to make. I am good at drawing because I have been doing it consistently since I had the motor skills for, which is roughly three years old: drawing has literally been a lifelong practice. I’ve been doing ceramics consistently since I was twelve, as with many other art things. I have been in active practices of thinking and reflection for most of my life. A lot of shit I’ve made sucks, and I am still writing terribly. Regardless, I do it, because I know that mastery takes time. This all didn’t happen in a vacuum. Nothing does. Commit to Longform.
Like the title of this larger project, life is a garden. Life is a garden and the roots are touching. Life is a garden that you must nurture, care for. A tree does not grow to be big and strong overnight. It takes decades, centuries even. Why are we rushing? I want my life to feel like a lovingly prepared candlelit dinner, amongst all the possibilities of fastness and convenience. I want to be the spiritual antithesis to whatever a Labubu represents. I want to commit with passion to my lifelong lover, my forever companion, my dearest Longform.
i’ve been getting pretty pissed off lately each time i look at content like i actually don’t fucking care about matcha fuckin’ lattes or people making jokes about performatively drinking said matcha latte or how long you stood in line to buy a fucking labubu or whatever and my friend says labubus are spiritually israeli in which i fucking agree and i don’t blame the individual for this predicament like i don’t hate people who have labubus but i hate what they stand for which is fucking nothing this shit is so fucking bleak sometimes like what the fuck do people even like anymore what do people even value anymore like there are genocides happening on the same planet we are spending money on stupid shit that we get tired of in a few months and it ends up in landfill and then what we are in the rubble of unloved objects that were empty signifiers of status we never even had in the first place like how truly humiliating and why do we do the same with people? why are we drinking ceremonial matcha every day and why are there so many music festivals like is nothing fucking sacred anymore and what are we even celebrating? i don’t wanna sound like a jackass but people are so divorced from ritual and cycles and meaningful things that are actually tangible so what is the fucking point if we’re swimming in a void, a soup of emptiness, a sludge goop fuckin’ slop of useless shit
★
So, here is my return to longform. My beautiful wife and life partner, Longform. I once was distracted, in the throes of passion with shortform, holding onto more than I could ever digest in a lifetime. I am wiser now from the grief of all I’ve lost. I am tired of empty promises, of quick sugar highs. Give me deep, sustained attention. Give me pause, time for silence. Give me tease and build. Let things linger, Longform.
Shortform: temporarily alluring, sweet. Ultimately, she leaves me with empty calories unnourishing. I am famished.
Guide me to a sustaining nectar and I’ll journey towards it, for as long as it takes. Life is about dancing to our destinations. It is my god given right to shake ass towards becoming.
Longform, an aperitivo that trails into dinner, an afternoon that leads us into the dark of night. The sun goes down, the candles are lit. Faces in amber light, barely visible and entirely lovable. We have an amaro, an espresso for a nightcap, we can’t help but to squeeze out each moment of togetherness this evening. Eyes soften and we begrudgingly call it: walking down the hall with the last of the wine in hand, passing the bottle back and forth until our arrival to rest. We do not need to speak of the future, of pros and cons. We are just here, now, flesh pressed on flesh. A candle still burns for us somewhere.
Eros is holding on to dear life. Everyone knows exactly how to look sexy, and somehow, no one is erotic. No one is having sex anyway, in the truest sense. Everything is porn. Everyone knows the right thing to say, how to act, and it all means nothing. We are actors playing a role we don’t believe in.
I literally don’t understand the point in most things. War? Killing people for resources that we just hoard? Denying others their right to water, food, land, and their humanity, just so you can get a hair transplant and drive a fugly car, to get a hot wife you don’t even know how to talk to? Going to a party just to be seen, but not engaging in a single conversation that actually fills your cup? I don’t get it. Walk with me to Cringe Mountain. Let us climb it. Let me simmer.
Give me something real. Give me something uncomfortable. Give me something I have to sit in, parse through. Give me something worth working out, and don’t give me an out. Who needs an escape room when life is full of puzzles?
I know I sound dramatic but we are in a true decline of humanity. No one is living. I walk through the streets and feel an urgent panic about the way we are. Have we forgotten the finality of our lives, that your shit could get rocked at any time?
★
I have been challenging myself to not look at my phone during my subway commute. Sometimes I even go to extremes and prohibit myself from listening to music. Music is okay if I am in deep attention with it, same with books. Otherwise, I push myself to sit, to hear the world around me, to feel the things people around me are feeling. This shit can be uncomfortable. I become acutely aware of how many people are surrounding me at any given moment. I scan to see who is having a good day, a bad day. Try to guess how long each person has lived in this city. I am confronted with their realness. This is scary. This is beautiful.
Shortform manufactures zombies. My roommate tells me about a guy she saw on the subway, tablet and phone in hand. On one screen there is a TV show, and on the other, Tetris. He frantically goes back and forth between the two screens. He was practically licking them. I don’t know if this manufactured urgency is even necessary. We worked so hard to evolve into a species that could ponder, and now, we’re back to digging our noses and asses at the same time, on some monkey shit.
I see people like this on the subway all the time, infinitely scrolling through social media or playing their mobile games with screens barely a foot away from their face. What do we lose in reality when we engross ourselves in the digital? Why do we seek nourishment in empty calories?
I forgot who said it, but I once heard that the ruling class will increasingly have the means and education to value things like time in nature, slowness, to know how to put the damn phone down. On the other end, working class people will have their attention robbed by “free” media through social networking sites. What you exchange in this “free” exchange is, well, your attention and data. Which is actually a fucking lot. This creates an even larger disparity in wealth, not only in financial capital, but on all fronts: wealth of social wellbeing and attention are being compromised in ways damaging for generations to come. I see this damage directly in our relationships. It’s the damn phones.
The discourse is trite so I’ll only touch upon it briefly: the Friend AI ads circulating on the MTA are pissing me off. Loneliness is humanity’s built in signal to reach out to others. This is an evolutionary necessity. To retreat to the self and artificiality is devastating. AI should be a vehicle to give us time for the things that really matter, like spending time with one another. The machine should do my admin work so I can make my aperitivo date with friends, so that I can have a long and nourishing dinner with them. To think an imperfectly beautiful flesh and blood person could be replaced by a machine is moronic.
We are attracted to AI friendships because you don’t have to work for them. You can remain a dopamine-addicted self who has no regard for others. The machine will give you attention. It is easy! You don’t have to address the mess of life! How fucking boring!
Contemporary culture prioritizes safety and comfort over the confrontation of self. This is how Eros dies in a horribly morbid, rotten decay. My best moments emerge from times I leaped into abysses too deep to see their shape. Trust fall into life. You know yourself better than you think. It's all the other bullshit that makes you feel like you don’t. Don’t listen to the opinions of people that don’t care about you. Who fucking cares.
Self care this, self care that. What happened to the total annihilation of the self in order to cross the bridge towards sincerity, towards actualization?
I know it is humiliating to reach out to people, but you just gotta do it. Eventually, it gets easier. It is a muscle we have to exercise. Practice by being a good friend, by embodying the kind of person you’d like to spend time with. Be yourself, but also remember: the self has room to grow. This is a note to self.
Dominic Pettman states that “the self is a collaboration with others”. We are all the sum of each other. We become reified through the reflections of ourselves through those we love. We should live with this understanding burned, branded onto ourselves. I am me because you are you. I am me because we live amongst each other.
I make rules for myself that I break all the time. You kind of have to. It’d be weird if you always stayed the same. You have never been you-er than the you that is you now. The you of the future relies on you that trusts the present.
I fuck up all the time. I make a ton of mistakes. I wrong others, and in this same life, I have loved with a warmth of a thousand suns. I have multiplied the blessings bestowed on me. Everyone says it, but it's true: we contain multitudes. We have to be gracious towards each other in being imperfect. We cannot build a future using only the systems we know. Have courage to dream.
I felt so sad last night. I let myself be. I fell asleep feeling so pitiful and sorry for myself. Wah wah wah. Sad-ass notes app reflections. I woke up with gratitude that the sun came up. I was glad to have slept on it, that I simmered.
There is no right or wrong way to be. I cannot demonize negative emotion. I just follow my heart. I will probably feel sad again tonight, and that is okay. I will let myself be, because there will eventually come a day where I can let this particular thing go. I will not rush the process.
More than anything, I want to emphasize that life is gross and imperfect. It should be this way. I firmly believe in all the things you learn while fumbling through with an earnest heart.
Capitalism has failed you. There is no linear path. I am sorry if you are finding out this way. If there is a conviction in your soul that you have silenced through work or relationships, you are actively killing yourself. Failing in capitalism is not failing at life.
Succeeding on other people’s terms are surrogates for the desires we have within ourselves. I don’t have any specific empirical evidence to back it, but I have a strong conviction: within each person lies a desire and mission unshakable, embedded into our psyche, and everything we do against it causes deep pain and suffering. You become aware of this mission early on, and we have our whole lives for these dreams to take shape.
I know girls who should be painting all day, but instead, date chronically and use all their passionate energy intended for the studio on problems they have (frankly) made for themselves. Men do this just as often. At times, I too can microdose this behavior. I distract myself with bullshit when I should be making something with my hands, when I should be sitting on a rock, when I’d benefit from watching a river. That is why my ass is back in the studio. I am married to the game. I must walk my path with energetic intentionality. A big hop and skip in my own direction, if you will.
My big disclaimer is that I don’t think romance is inherently a distraction, but I do believe that people treat romance as a surrogate for passion that should be felt through other means. We can’t help but want to be moved by something, and what is more moving than love? Yet, who could we be if we were moved by things outside of ourselves, that we did not have to be a subject in the beautiful thing we are observing? What if the time spent stressing about a guy not texting you back was spent dreaming and collaborating with your closest friends and coconspirators instead? What if we built that sculpture like we said we wanted to? What is holding us back, and why do you look at your phone instead when compelled towards acting on these desires?
What does all of this have to do with longform vs. shortform? Why do I hate Labubus? Why am I always talking about Eros? What does capitalism and AI have to do with all of this? What the hell am I trying to say? Rather, why should anyone care what I have to say at all?
There are a ton of grifers out there, trying to extract money and time from you to get what they want. I don’t necessarily think that anyone should even listen to what I have to say. I am just stating my convictions and what I am working towards. I share this because I deeply care about humanity, about repairing our broken fuckin’ brains. My website doesn’t have a paywall for a reason. I (mostly) left substack because it felt so noisy. I also didn’t like asking you for money. I don’t want anything from you, aside from you living a life in alignment.
Life is long form, like, literally. Life is a commitment to a long term practice. Things don’t manifest overnight. The family you’d like, the friends you want, the skills you are interested in, these are all commitments to make. I am good at drawing because I have been doing it consistently since I had the motor skills for, which is roughly three years old: drawing has literally been a lifelong practice. I’ve been doing ceramics consistently since I was twelve, as with many other art things. I have been in active practices of thinking and reflection for most of my life. A lot of shit I’ve made sucks, and I am still writing terribly. Regardless, I do it, because I know that mastery takes time. This all didn’t happen in a vacuum. Nothing does. Commit to Longform.
Like the title of this larger project, life is a garden. Life is a garden and the roots are touching. Life is a garden that you must nurture, care for. A tree does not grow to be big and strong overnight. It takes decades, centuries even. Why are we rushing? I want my life to feel like a lovingly prepared candlelit dinner, amongst all the possibilities of fastness and convenience. I want to be the spiritual antithesis to whatever a Labubu represents. I want to commit with passion to my lifelong lover, my forever companion, my dearest Longform.
last edited 10/4/25