the first half of this year was quite miserable, and i gained nothing from it. in late january my grandmother died, and of everybody in my family she was the one i connected with the most before her mental state entirely crumbled in the last few years of her life. this loss hit me especially hard, kicking off the steep decline in my well-being which i might recover from in a few years' time. in the month of february i listened to GKMC several dozen times, finally learning to love that album after first listening to it a year prior and not really feeling it as i did TPAB when i first listened to it in 2023. all in all, GKMC has become a very important album to me because of this, as well as Tyler the Creator's I hope you find your way home, which i listened to on the way to the funeral.
i don't know when exactly, whether after the funeral or before, but i formed a dependency on weed, and spent most of my time awake in a perpetual high for what feels like the first four months of the year. i don't remember this period of my life well at all, just that i was a general piece of shit for a while, and i sincerely apologize to all the people i was a dick to in that time. i'm being reductive, but given what little i can actually recall, i can't really say more than that. i'm sorry.
in either march or april, i finished playing a game that kicked me in the teeth with tremendous force, as its main takaway was that "the world hasn't ended yet". the phrase wormed its way into my heart because i knew that it wasn't true, and that anybody who wasn't me deserved to hear those words instead. my final obligation in life would be going to see vulfpeck at red rocks on july 5th. i had a complete breakdown, so i went upstairs to my room to get really high and cry for the rest of the day. less than an hour later, my dad finally tells me he's divorcing his now ex-wife. i am met with relief, because i knew this was coming for the past 3 years. i went back to my room and finished out the day by crying, all was going to plan.
some time after this, i took a relatively small dose of psilocybin mushrooms and listened to DAMN. by kendrick lamar, and it made me feel terrible enough to want to be a better person on my way out. i quit smoking a short while after, and i tried to right as many wrongs as i could. i think. this might be wrong, i'm stabbing into the dark to be quite honest. regardless, time kept passing and eventually i graduated.
graduation was one of the 3 worst days in my life. i was crying and screaming in my car in the monsoon of traffic which followed me home. i was a complete mess when i got there, my family absent for they went out for lunch to celebrate my accomplishments. i didn't show up because i couldn't show up like this. i tried to better it by going to freddy's, ordering the double cheeseburger with fries and a shake, which i payed for with a 20 dollar bill. i ate it in the parking lot, and then i went home and i think i played some death stranding. i think my dad's ex-wife was mad at me for being sad at some point that day.
may was ending, and i was getting ready for my last month on earth. on the 28th of the month (i think) i got jimmy john's with a friend of mine, and we ate the sandwiches under a tree at the park. somehow we started talking about a little indie game that was getting its first big non-demo release in june. i expressed a minimal amount of interest, because i was still half-heartedly pretending to not like it very much after liking it and its predecessor way too much several years prior. still, i planned out my replay of the demo's content so i could play the new stuff the second it launched. looking back i can't express enough gratitude to that friend for talking about that game.
4 june 2025 at 9:08am changed the rest of my life. i'm aware of the reputation this game has, i know how its fans are seen, i know i seem insane for now loving it as much as i do, and it's something i debated omitting from this post because it's just some dumb game to most people. i realized though that not only did it define the rest of my year, it gave me the rest of that year to begin with. half of the game is still yet to release, which gives me a good enough excuse to not die.
i won't explain why the game affected me how it did because last time i tried that it took 6 thousand words and got really weird towards the end because i finished it at like 6am. still, the extraordinarily long story short of it all is that i felt the writing of this game understood me more than any person i'd met in my entire life. it was scary, i didn't really ask for it to happen, but i'm glad that it did.
the rest of the summer was weird to say the least. nothing felt real, i felt like i was living past my point of expiration, a feeling that i still can't escape today. nothing felt real in the daylight hours, partially due to the temperature, partially due to the unreal number of times i had to visit the dentist, partially due to the odd financial choices i made, partially due to how weird it felt going to physical therapy to make it so i wasn't bedridden when i went back to work in the fall. most of my accomplishments in the summer came down to staying alive, and not missing my pt appointments. it was extraordinarily hard to leave the house when the world didn't feel real when the sky was blue. i made it anyway though, as shit as it was. i started drinking a lot of tea and stopped eating a lot of food. and i remember vomiting into the toilet while listening to don't tap the glass for the first time. needless to say i can't really listen to most songs on that album anymore. june was weird, i was stuck in my own head. making music with other people felt impossible, i was still coming to terms with my experience with deltarune, i felt like i was finally living for myself but i couldn't do anything with that, because i was met with such shock upon living for the very first time. i made a lot of hot chocolate in the nights too.
i'm sure i already mentioned it in the instagram post (which i have yet to write) but i'm mostly getting into these details to explain why i haven't kept in touch with all the people i knew in high school beyond the occasional instagram story. it's probably not a surprise because you guys knew me, but it really wasn't for a very happy reason. the whole summer was my absolute worst depressive episode, or maybe second worst, we will see, but i'm still kicking even when my legs are broken and the skin's falling off a little bit.
summer started drawing to an end, and my mom moved out, and things looked like they were getting better, but then i had to stop talking to my mom, and i've said maybe only a few dozen words to her in the past 5 months. i wasn't surprised.
with most of my friends going to college i knew i was going to lose touch with them for a while, mostly cause i didn't want to be a total downer while they were out doing things with their lives. not to mention it was too much work that i couldn't accomplish in my state
sometime that summer i met a handful of new friends, and they've done a lot to help me. i'd be in a much worse spot if not for them, so i'm very grateful for that. sorry you didn't meet me in one of the times where i was happy.
from sometime in october to the end of thanksgiving break, i was actually pretty happy overall. i was able to do things, i was able to escape the guilt i felt whenever i did something that was fun and not necessarily productive (which was most of the time). past thanksgiving break, i was back down again. it wasn't snowing. it wasn't snowing and it was supposed to snow. i thought it was going to snow today. why isn't it snowing today, why did it only snow twice in this part of the year?
i felt betrayed by the earth itself, and i spent a lot of time crying because i get really sentimental when it comes to snow
i started dreading christmas because it would be really weird with only one parent in the house, and two kids who didn't really say many words lately.
it was better than i thought, but it was still sad because it was especially clear that the holiday season wouldn't really recover, and it's a time i get really sentimental about because it's when i listened to the first vulfpeck madison square garden concert, which was instrumental in how i played the bass, and it carried me through high school.
i also get really sentimental about how i used to walk through my neighborhood in the cold months when the snow was melting and the sky was blue and it was cold, and the snow on the ground was dirty because of all the cars driving by, and i'd have to stand on the ice on the side of the road when a car had to drive by.
what i'm getting at is that this season is always really emotional for me in a particular way, and it's been making me sad that it hasn't been snowing.
i guess for reorienting me on the state of affairs, i started hrt. i don't really feel any particular way about it because it's been an inevitability for the past 4 years, which would seem to contradict how i thought the time itself wouldn't come to pass 4 years ago. i was going to go to school at ppsc, but i missed the window to start going in the 2026 spring semester i think. i'll try to go sometime that year though, it's not like i have anything better to do. i'll probably go for web development, cause ever since i started making my webpage with very minimal understanding of html, and literally none of css, i'd wanted to learn. i also played a game that is at the moment made entirely in both languages called corru.observer. please click that link if you are on desktop, it's one of the most fascinating narrative experiences ever. if you like 17776 you'll like corru.observer.
back on subject, looking at the present and the future is a little scary, and i can only really describe it with weird metaphors that sound a little worrying, so bear with me. since the summer it feels like there's a film covering the world which has grown dirtier and dirtier. after july 12th or so, when i just kept on living it's as if the film started falling away, the performance was over. it was clear that most things were just fraudulant or for the sake of show. the film rots like skin, it turns yellow and bruised in some places, and it falls away in shreds.
in more pragmatic terms i think i've been dealing with derealization or something for the past while, and i should probably see a therapist about it because it makes living even harder than it already is with the other shit i got going on internal and external.
i hope the next year's better for me and i hope that no matter how your 2025 was it's better for you too! i'm hanging on, i'm managing despite everything. i'll still be here, making music when i can, working on other projects when i can. i wish you all the very best, see yall next year or maybe even before then! and of course as always
STAY VIGILANT
I LOVE YOU ALL
sorry this was such a downer and was so long and stuff. i've been through the shit as of late and felt it necessary to share it. it's lame and whatever but here's a link back to the main page, i'll post stuff here sometimes, mostly updating the weird webcomic thing i'm working on and also linking my music page that's about it really. i wasn't really gonna share it with people i know personally because it is, as established, lame. this gave me an excuse to though i guess, and it doesn't really matter anyway who cares man
i forget if i mentioned it in the post itself but i deleted instagram so if that's what you use to message me typically and you wanna reach out or w/e just text me or msg on discord. if not it's all good, have a lovely rest of your day and a happy new year.