The Hermit Crab with a Painted Shell

It is true, I do feel a little bit like a husk. A spent casing, maybe, a cocoon with no caterpillar wrapped up inside. The more present and attentive I become towards the corporeal, the more loveless I feel. Loveless reminds me of lossless, a word that actually has more to do with headphone audio quality than poetic melancholy. Though—give me a second with it. To be lossless means that the sanctity of original data is preserved during compression. When have I felt compressed? What does it mean to perfectly reconstruct oneself from memory?

So, why the sudden shift in tone? Well, like an alcoholic with beer cans and shot glasses strewn across coffee tables, or a smoker with yellowed glass ashtrays, I realised something awful while sitting in my office. My iMac, cheery and pastel green, had Tumblr open, peering over my iPhone, which was studded with hours spent on subreddits and Instagram reels. My iPad was playing TikToks every hour of the day. I decided to crunch the data and see it for what it truly was: forty-four hours a week spent on my phone alone. I didn’t even want to check the stats for my other devices. I realised I was addicted to distracting myself, and probably for good reason.

It is a little painful to be alone with myself for many hours of the day. But I decided to propose something balanced. I’ve been tucking my phone away in a kitchen cabinet during the day and attending to notifications at night. (I relapsed today because work makes me use an authenticator app.) If I am to walk or exercise, I now take a regular MP3 player. Or, if I’m truly feeling frisky, I go deviceless and just lift until there are no more thoughts in my head.

The real disadvantage of this whole thing, to me, is that when you walk upright you end up looking at people. And they end up looking at you. And I can’t help but feel a little paralyzed with the knowledge that I am slightly strange looking. As much as I am a well-groomed red panda, I am also small, robust, and terribly androgynous. My DILF dreams are fleeting. Unless I forget to shave. Then the DILF dreams are back.

From Monday through to Wednesday, I thought I would read a bit more of Bill Hayes’ oeuvre and settled upon The Anatomist, a novel all about Henry Gray, Henry Vandyke Carter, and a book you may know about... Gray’s Anatomy. Or maybe you know of the TV show that has soiled said name. Oops, sorry. I forget that I have to let people enjoy things. Benevolence has never come very naturally to me. It was a great novel, and I especially liked the way Hayes interpolated his own experiences in cadaver labs with the historical aspects. It had me thinking about the visceral.

For a while I couldn’t help but imagine those I knew as miniaturised prosections, a cadaver visited over and over, probed at and understood. I feel this way about love. I feel like there comes a point where you unravel someone so neatly, and every time you revisit an old joke or quip, you feel as though the scalpel and forceps are coming down. How long does it last? How many times can I take you apart before you get bored of the whole thing? One of my biggest fears is boredom, in its many grotesque forms. Being bored of the world, of others, and of myself. Sometimes I assume myself on the other side and think about others becoming bored of me.

I see why it happens. I am a little bit like a hermit crab with a meticulously painted shell. Baroque, slightly cursed. Maybe with a constellation on one side and a biblical wound on the other. I do happen to retreat back inside sometimes. And stay there for hours, and hours, and hours. Long enough for the timestamp on my last message to start feeling like an obituary. And eventually I’m not really the talk of the town, but a weirdly specific memory, or a half-believed rumour, or the kind of name someone brings up at 1 a.m. with the lights off, like, “Do you remember him?” I become lore. A thumbnail in someone’s camera roll. A username someone hovers over but doesn’t click. I become the central figure of an anecdote retold for tone, not accuracy. They get my laugh wrong. My timing. My edges. But I let them. I’m busy redecorating the inside of the shell.

Speaking of anecdotes. Since stowing my phone away I have been dreaming more vividly. In one of the dreams, I am on a wide green oval watching my two parents yelling at each other. The air feels a little like 2020, maybe 2021. At the apex of the argument, my dad takes out a sharp silver metal ruler and severs my mother's ear. I am filled with a feeling of extreme contentment. Later that day, after having the dream, I took a long walk around my neighbourhood and noticed a man with a sharp gardening tool, much like the ruler, taking repose on a leaf-laden park bench. There was a bit of danger in it. Wake him up and you'll get slashed! I thought about the interconnection between the dream world and the real world. I get them confused often.

I have also been spending a bit of time this week getting into Stephen Fry’s classical history books, particularly in audiobook form. I am around two hours into Mythos and cannot imagine a better way to spend my time. I guess in all this thinking about my parents, and relationships, I have been imagining many striking images. Saturn devouring his son. The Cronos/Chronos overlap—transformation into Father Time and forced to face eternity. I have been thinking about the Muses and my own work. I feel most connected to Urania. I will have to visit the countryside this weekend and take in the gentle May sky. I will pack my bags and take to the Noble Hill and then the city centre. It takes about two to three hours to walk down from Noble Hills to town. I almost feel tempted to try.

I think one of the major issues that I get being away from tech, and posting, and all the lovely things you can do with a phone, is that I start to perceive myself as boring. Or as lacking some sort of substance. I find that I am rather inaccessible as a person unless you have a guidebook. Maybe one of my blogs, my photography, my art, my projects. I find that if you speak to me without any of that as background, I am a rather boring human being. It is a very hard feeling to verbalise. I feel like I have so much inside of me that nobody sees. I also fear that nobody really wants to see it anyway.

I hate to admit it but I don’t feel like I have even been seen. I feel like many people have come close, looking at me with wide and attentive eyes and running their hands up and down me like I'm a stray cat. I thought about this while re-reading some old letters. How difficult it is to be used as a projection screen for one's desires rather than being known as a person. I do sometimes wonder, though, if I know myself. Unfortunately I think I do, and all too well, to the point that it causes me to write thousands of words on SpaceHey.

This is also part of why I still continue to hate the physical, in relation to the body in particular. I feel more like a blur of light than a human-shaped person. I feel like I have been grounded in a form as a way to test me. If I have existed before now, I was surely never hyper-physical like a mammal or even a living, breathing being. I think once upon a time, I was an idea. Like a sort of alternate-universe Mnemosyne. Memory itself.

I really have lost my train of thought. Though, I don’t mind it too much. I think this is the longest I've been able to focus while writing an entry in a while. I can only hope my attention span improves while I get to work on this thesis.

I hope everyone is well. I hope I become accustomed to the silence and the presence of my body in the same room as me. Being alone with myself is a strange thing.