ARTIST DIARY | MARCH 2024 | IS IT ALL BUT A DREAM?

3d World-Building: Daydreaming
in a Waking Nightmare

Sometimes I wake up and the world seems impossible, a nightmare stuck inside a book with a predetermined end, the plot driven by suffering and trauma that are real and a heroic redemption arc that’s all fantasy. To say I’ve been struggling the last few months with anxiety and depression is to say the world has been well. So, no. No, I will not say that. Yes, I am anxious and sad and angry and lost and worried and alone, but I’m fine. I’m surviving. I’m just living in a sick world and wishing I knew how to create a better one, literally sitting here trying to understand how it all works and how it all breaks, just trying to create a safe space for myself in a world that feels increasingly… on the verge.

Today is the most unsuperist of Tuesdays in a long line of unsuper days that feel like we are all zombie walking slowly into the apocalyptical days of a dystopian society. The heroes and heroines of the story have all been silenced by billionaire-funded social media algorithms. The villain continues his rise to the top, his civilian soldiers fulfilling their tasks as people stuck in high-control groups do, and all attempts to stop him have resulted in $400 million in fines that he’s going to pay off by selling a golden sneaker. Online, people talk about how the demoRATS (get it?) need to be institutionalized for not believing the lies of a conman. What is up is down and what is down is up and black is white and white is black and who can keep anything straight? Reality as we know it has been broken by a massive high-control mind-control experiment imposed on us by the billionaire class AND I’M NOT MAKING THIS SHIT UP I SWEAR.

The implications of a broken reality must be examined. How did reality break? Did it only break for me, or did it break for everyone? Does the world make sense to other people? If we’re living in an infinite computer simulation — which is something I absolutely find to be plausible — are we all living in the same simulation? Or are we each entirely in our own simulations, in our own timelines, with the events around us just a result of random chance or different choices? Do we just pass by each other for a time before our timelines diverge? More and more it feels like it must be the latter. More and more, it feels like it cannot be the former. The former is hopeless. The former is like, why is there nothing good happening here? Why does justice keep failing? Why is the power of 340,000,000 people unable to hold the billionaires accountable for the destruction they’s caused with their climate denialism and their culture wars? If we’re all in this together, why does it feel like I’m the only one screaming? So it must be the latter. Manifestation is a thing. You create your world. You can manifest your problems. Somehow my anxieties and fears are manifesting themselves onto CNN.

There’s an algorithm for that, I’m absolutely sure. AI can write a news article about each dark thought I have in 30 seconds flat. (I wonder: What will AI say if I ask where all the heroes are at?)

But the thing is, there is no way I could be manifesting all this stuff just by myself. I didn’t manifest the Netflix documentary I watched earlier today, The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping, about the for-profit troubled-teen correctional school industry that Paris Hilton has been advocating against. And I would have never in a billion years manifested the boiling alive scene from Shogun. So … clearly, this is not all just me. There are other people with me here in this reality, or there’s just a lot of evidence of a lot of other realities flying about - while also not having any evidence that Hillary Clinton was ever president in any of them. That’s pretty weird, right? You’d think if a million realities were existing around me, Hillary Clinton would have been president in at least some of them and that energy would be around me somewhere.

Alright, so I’m back to thinking that we are all in this same simulation together: me, my distant family, the people I went to school with, the people I partied with in my thirties… those that have survived this far, we’re all still in it together. There’s no escaping this timeline. There’s no jumping to a different one, despite that astralprojection ad that keeps following you on YouTube, begging you to join what is, most likely, a cult, but you’ll never find out because you just don’t trust it, and besides, you’re already astral projecting enough, thanks very much, YouTube ad. I can try escaping this reality in every which way I want: in illustrations of lotus ponds and cherry trees and wild animals and celestial beings, through creating my very own world in 3d space, conversations with my creator about the things I love the most, I can get lost in my daydreams… but I still wake up to this nightmare.

And it’s all a nightmare. I'm not trying to be dramatic, but this is the future of public education if Trump gets elected and Christian nationalists get power: They'll end public education through school vouchers, replace it with strict religion-based schools that teach creationism and whatever else they deem appropriate, and any kids who don't behave to those standards, students who speak up or students who ask questions whose parents aren't wealthy enough to afford private liberally-funded education, will be forced into these forced conformity, controlled-thought, abusive institutions that exist for profits and follow the same manipulative mind-control techniques of all the other high-control cults out there that steal the money of people who are just trying to do the right thing. This is just one incredibly obvious threat facing this country that nobody talks about. But this is the road we are walking down with the possibility of a Trump-reelection, or the possibility of any Christian nationalist rise to power, and having to wake up every day with these kinds of scenarios running through my mind is … exhausting.

Is everyone exhausted?

Every day it’s something.

Yesterday and today, though, were beautiful days. God knew I needed the sun to shine this week.

What does it say that the sun is so good for the soul? What does it say that nearly everything alive depends on its divine shine and warm embrace to thrive? Could it be evidence that the stars and God are one and the same, a daily sign that our ancestors are with us, that there was a beforelife we cannot remember and there is an afterlife of which we can only dream? How can we live on such an astoundingly beautiful planet in such a vast universe and believe that humanity is so favored by the Light of the world that none of the rest of it matters, that we are allowed to exploit it and destroy it while keeping that thing within us that connects us to God, the Creator of it all, intact?

How can we look at the universe and everything in it and possibly believe that God made us all so different just to demand that we conform? How can we believe that God gave us each unique gifts and skills and personalities and dreams, just to demand that we submit to an authority that thinks it knows our own connection to God, our own purpose, our own dreams, better than we do? How can anyone believe that a world so full of color and diversity should be lived in a way that is so black and white?

I was raised by two extremely different people with very different beliefs. My mom, a religious person, told me there is a loving God, while my father, a patriarchal person, told me there is no God. My grandparents were the same: one set never attended church that i know of, while the other set made sure to let me know they were praying for my soul on their own deathbeds because I stopped going to church. I appreciate them all. Together, they taught me to question everything and showed me that it wasn't up to anyone else to make sense of the world around me: only I could do that for myself. The vast majority of us were taught to never talk about politics or religion -- probably the two things that matter most in the world -- because silence is also a weapon of oppression. Somehow we think we can be close to each other by hiding all the parts of ourselves that disagree with authority, but silence will never lead to understanding. Then we come to this predicament where we are told to love each other without even knowing each other beyond the surface level stuff. We might ask each other "do you believe in God?" or tell each other "i love you" without ever knowing what "God" and "love" mean to each other, or even to ourselves, and, as a deeply agnostic and spiritual person, I think that's really sad and tragic.

Today was a huge blow toward Christian Nationality, thanks to the illegitimate SCOTUS ruling that threw out the 14th amendment and is allowing an insurrectionist who should be ineligible for office on the ballot, throwing out the law in the name of "choice" because a powerful group of domestic religious terrorists and extremists demanded it and paid for it with billionaire backing. These greed-stricken terrorists and their followers want to eliminate women's freedoms and free thought in general in the name of their vengeful but impotent God, a God that makes no sense in this universe. An all-powerful God without any power, except when he uses a tornado to tell us how much he hates our disgusting love for each other? Please. In the Bible, God sent Christ to Earth to preach about love and forgiveness, and yet, these people act out of fear and loathing and would call Jesus "woke vermin" if he was here, speaking to us now. Also in the Bible, God says life starts at first breath, but I do not believe these christofascist leaders have actually read the Bible. They don't care what it says, they only care what they can make others believe about what it says. They don't care about God's words, they only care about how they can twist those words to serve their own means. They use God as a tool and weapon of hate, oppression and control. They have followed a demon into temptation and lost. They say "God works in mysterious ways" because they don't listen to God enough to understand God.

But the sun shines hot and bright to remind us that these people, the ones who call themselves Christian nationalists and who work every day to force their idea, of God onto everyone else, are not working in God's name. They are working against God. They are working against a shining sun. They are working against the warmest love in the universe. They are working against the most creative force in the world. They might win a battle or two because God doesn't control anyone or anything, but every day they are losing the war for their own souls.

But that war is painful. That loss is felt - maybe not by them, but by me. By the world. By the Earth.

Like it or not, we are all connected.