iSpy
Observations, Little Scratch by Rebecca Watson, Overstimulated, Doom Scrolling, and little moments of reprieve
Notes and Comments
I was thinking about dermatillomania or excoration, the skin-picking disorder because I am 99% sure I have it. And not in a way when you google something you automatically think you have it. I have had it for years, people comment on it, it can consume me, and I have tried to look for other people who do it too. What I read online said it was a form of OCD which scared me. Though I’m not sure if it is or is in conjunction with it. So I started to think about tics and compulsions. Which is why I picked up the book Little Scratch by Rebecca Watson. She scratches compulsively, I gathered, and the book is formatted in the fragmentary, anxiety-riddled way of thinking in a day. It’s a commentary on a lot of things, one being how our current world has changed our thought patterns and attention. I always feel like I have to give a back story to my reasons for doing things. The other day I was telling a friend a story and I had to give her ten minutes of back story which made the actual story part lose its climax and I realized I was not very good at storytelling, I often give too many details that are hyper-focused on what I have perceived and analyzed and not really necessary to the story, though they are necessary to my conclusions. I don’t even know if I’m telling the truth anymore or if I’m just telling all my internal thoughts about a situation. It feels like too many thoughts are bouncing in my head and I am maybe trying to paint what I see, and not what is. I came across a video on TikTok of a girl telling a story about why her nose is the way it is (broken?) She was so bad at telling the story I had to have it on 2x speed and it was still slow and going nowhere but I could tell she was telling the story in her head and I thought, damn is this what I sound like too when I tell a story? I found comfort in the zigzag way Little Scratch was written. I follow the lines from left to right only to realize some of the lines are meant to be followed as columns. It feels like iSpy. I pick through the maze of words and find meaning.
Everything is on a loop in my head, I cannot grab a single thought and I feel stuck. My brain is empty, how can that be? A product of overstimulation. I am on a loop picking my skin, and doom scrolling, and the only time I break free is when I’m outside, or completely immersed in some craft (reading, writing, shooting, rearranging the house, looking through old books). On impulse, Hayden and I rearranged the house one night. We move the dining room into the living room and vice versa and I move my library around. Why not? Everything gets turned on its head and isn’t it we who decide what works and what doesn’t? Who decided what each room is anyway? It felt strange at first but only because we had pre-labeled the rooms of this house when we first moved in, but now I am getting used to it. I decide I want to take all the art and photos off the walls and start over. I decide I want to repaint the home. I decided I wanted to strip myself of these things I bought on impulse. I start to focus on the word impulse. I wonder if most things I do are on impulse and if that’s a bad thing.
Doom Scrolling
Fear of self-perception = fear of loss of control. You cannot control how others perceive you. Self-expression = freedom. Ruby Franke journals came out. Can’t look, stomach turns, scroll past scroll past. Rain in movies is actually oil sizzling on a frying pan. Buying dishes helps you manifest what you want, believing in the thing to be true before it is = manifestation. The Nora Smith debacle, is she a trad wife or is she just a model who likes to cook? Rising sign this, rising sign that, lunar eclipse, new moon in libra, misunderstood astrological placements—god I’m so sick of astrology. Jojo Siwa? Somatic healing, what is somatic healing? How do I regulate my nervous system? Don’t fall into the Diddy rabbit hole, don’t fall into the diddy rabbit hole, shit I fell in. Resurface a few hours later. Keep scrolling. Women holding things. Wait, replay that again, women holding things. Find the audio source, listen to her speak about women holding things.
Storage
I have no storage left on my phone which is really annoying. I have 28,000 photos and 2,569 videos. Apparently, I have 1,091 selfies but I think that’s wrong (surely I have more). Live photos are at 96. I hate live photos they take up so much space, but these are old and I can’t seem to delete them. I have 6 photos for Portrait mode and 12 for Slo-Mo, 122 for cinematic (I should go back to using that, why’d I stop?) 3 Bursts, 3 Animated, and 1,463 screenshots of god knows what, that I again can’t seem to delete because amongst the screenshots of memes and books I want to read and random things, there are texts from Hayden that say, “i miss u so bad my heart could break” and how can I throw away a letter like that? If I am a hoarder of anything it’s memories. I have so many hard drives filled up with old phones and memories, and those hurt to look back on. I hate how it’s called storage because there never is any. “Think of it like space, not storage,” Hayden tells me. Sometimes it feels like we will spend our lives carrying all our memories from one hard drive to the next, from one house to the next house. We put them into containers that we never look at again and soon my home will overflow with hard drives and maybe if we have a kid we will pass it down to them, but what the hell will they want to do with this many niche photos and screenshots? Anyway, storage is an illusion, there is none. We sleep on top of our memories. I think of the lady from TikTok who talks about women holding things. I wonder how much we all end up holding throughout our lives.
Tempo
Four years ago I made a video to a song from Hayden’s album, Heaven Soon. It’s the song with Chase on it, called “Isn’t It Something”. It has always made me emotional, and the only thing I could ever think of while listening to this was driving down the beach, looking out of the window, and watching the ocean waves turn into a blur. I don’t know what it means now other than four years have passed since then and my life has changed so much. Doesn’t it always? I am sometimes tired of talking about time. I notice I talk so much about it, but how could I not? It’s the thing that makes everything turn, the thing that doesn’t make sense, the thing we cannot hold but wish we could, the thing that always runs out.
I get curious because I haven’t seen the video in a long time. I look back critically at all the things I would do differently. I see my influences so clearly, I see my rushing so clearly. I didn’t allow the idea to develop fully because I was in a fear-based frame of thinking then. It felt like if I didn’t get this out right now it would die inside of me. Which is sometimes fine and true, but it can live outside of me and still be sculpted. Time can still exist outside of my head. The impulse of an idea can still be sustained if I slow down but my mind tries to trick me and tell me otherwise or maybe it’s rushing to the finished product versus enjoying the journey.
Hotspot
Why are most coffee shops so overstimulating and uncomfortable? My friend and I have a ritual on Thursdays where we go to a new coffee shop to study/write. This week was grey, concrete, and industrial-looking with bad sound quality, meaning I could hear everything from a fork dropping to a million conversations to the coffee machine whirring to the busboy clanging dishes—even with my noise-canceling headphones it was too much. All I could see was the person sitting on the second floor above us— her designer bag thrown on the stool in front of her, an inch away from falling off and pouring the contents onto my friend’s head. Then an older man with a beer belly took her spot when she left and he would do one of those deep guttural coughs every few minutes. I turn around, the giant windows face underneath the freeway where a lot of homeless people live. I am sad and conflicted. I watch a homeless woman play with a blonde doll while I pay $25.71 for my sandwich and coffee.
Salento
It’s 7 PM. Hayden and the guitarist are playing on the patio of Salento. I sit at a 2 seater round table right in front. A colleague walked by and we told him to stay and watch. He grabbed a glass of rosé at the bar and sat next to me. We began talking about MadMen and the future of writing with AI (he’s a writer too.) He swirled his glass of rosé around and called out all the standards Hayden and the guitarist were playing. (He plays jazz trumpet.) Straight no Chaser, In a sentimental mood… I zoned out of the conversation and into Hayden playing. It was still light out at 7:15 PM. Cars were revving by, and people next to me erupted in laughter. The colleague asked me a question and brought me back into the conversation. I realize I missed everything he said and he was waiting for a response from me. “Sorry, what did you say?” I asked. I was busy noticing the way people ate and drank and talked while Hayden was playing the brushes on the drums. I watched him switch from brushes to sticks like I have a million times, how he held the sticks in different ways to achieve different sounds, and how second nature it all is to him—muscle memory. I watched how the volume of conversations followed the volume of his drums, he controlled everyone’s experience with his drums. I watched a B-list celebrity walk up to Hayden and talk to him while they played. I could see Hayden trying to keep time while talking to this guy. My colleague finished his rosé and ordered another. I watched him tap his fingers along and enjoy the music. He told me his wife told him she actually hated jazz 15 years after they got married. He told me she also said she actually hated the trumpet. I told him he should write a script about it. It was funny, we laughed, but I also felt a little sad for him. I can’t imagine not liking what Hayden plays. He told me one of his son’s names is Hayden. I almost didn’t believe him. He showed me a picture of him and told me he’s 13 now and growing facial hair. He said that he would bring his son here to this restaurant when he was a baby, and sit him on his lap as he drank a coffee, “and now he says he doesn’t want to hang out with me.” he tells me. I sympathized with him. I told him he would come back to him eventually. I do not know what it feels like to watch your children grow up, but I can imagine it must be hard to let them go, to let them exist outside of yourself—the necessary cycle of life.
Pore (over)
Landing
I keep browsing through different old books I have, like encyclopedias. I walk past a book I am using for decoration in the dining room titled, The Theory of Play by Mitchell and Mason. Huh. I walk backward and pick it up to go through it. I am familiar with play in psychology terms, but I am curious about what this holds. I open to a random page, “classification: interests”, and I end up reading the whole chapter. My mind is finally calm, my thoughts are cohesive, and I am stimulated and reinspired. I have found a landing for the time being.
♥️