I had a memory yesterday of playing catch with my dad as a kid. More accurately, I laughed to myself remembering how, sometimes, he would throw a baseball at me as hard as he could. It wasn’t every time– part of the point of the exercise was to be unpredictable about it. I must have been six orContinue reading “october 29, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world”
Category Archives: performative journaling at the end of the world
october 22, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world
I’ve noticed a recurring tendency with these posts: I feel a strange allegiance to being negative. I’ll go to write something, anything, and it almost always feels too positive to be worth sharing. With everything going on in the world, and the title of this “project,” whatever that word “project” means, I often feel like I need to be excavatingContinue reading “october 22, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world”
october 15, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world
If it hasn’t been brought up before or if people have just met me, they tend to guess that I’m older than I really am. I think it’s a skincare thing: I’ve gotten a lot of sun and not enough sleep for years, and I boozed pretty hard in my early twenties, so my almost-twenty-six-year-old faceContinue reading “october 15, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world”
october 8, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world
Writing feels best when it’s surreptitious, a secret, the act of a child reading past bedtime with a flashlight under the covers. What is usually a leisurely, contemplative activity is, today, a combative rush, something done quietly in a found moment at work. It’s a busy day, is what I’m trying to say. Today, I’mContinue reading “october 8, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world”
october 2, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world
I’m a day late, according to an arbitrary schedule I came up with myself, but usually treat as absolute. Extremes are kind of my thing, and my tendency for the all-or-nothing has helped as much as harmed me. Roughly three years ago, I was in Denver with Stove. I wrote a few weeks ago about the time myContinue reading “october 2, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world”
september 24, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world
I wonder often about what I could be if I just got out of my own damn way. My bad habits have ranged over the years from innocuous to injurious, from seductive to sad. I’m going on two months of not biting my fingernails, for example. Aside from an extra cold now and then and the stigmaContinue reading “september 24, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world”
september 17, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world
These weekly entries have become a prison of my own making. Today’s entry is brought to you by my last vestige of discipline. It’s not that there’s nothing to say, and only boring people get bored; given the size and scope of the world’s most dominant problems, my petty inconveniences and half-baked thoughts on my relativelyContinue reading “september 17, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world”
september 10, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world
This week marks the three-year anniversary of the closest I’ve ever come to dying (as far as I know). Dying is a great reason to do things. It lends a sense of urgency where otherwise, were time unlimited, it would be easy to be complacent. Want to write songs? Stories? Do it—you could be deadContinue reading “september 10, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world”
september 3, 2024 – performative journaling at the end of the world
So far, I’ve tried to resist turning these into laundry lists of recent experiences. I don’t want them to become meta-explorations of my inability to think of anything to write about, either. There are pages and pages like that in my personal journals, but to put the “performative” in the performative journal, I feel aContinue reading “september 3, 2024 – performative journaling at the end of the world”
august 27, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world
The first thing I said this morning was “fuck you” to my alarm clock. It’s the kind of day when inanimate objects aren’t even safe from the scope of condemnation. But it might also be the kind of day when moods burn off like fog—I only need to find the sun. There’s nothing wrong, really,Continue reading “august 27, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world”
matt nilsen 