About Me

Hello! Welcome to my corner of the internet. This is just a page with stuff about me and what I like. I'm pretty boring, so feel free so judge accordingly. I might make a page with more irl stuff later, we'll see. Check out my blog if you want to learn more about my daily goings-on, if you are some sort of freak who would be in to that sort of thing. This website is perpetually in a state of development, be warned!!! Also, I just want to say thank you to my friend Julian, who has been a massive help with setting up this website. If you want to know more about him, just head over to Julian's corner, where he will probably be talking about esoteric nonsense.

A View From Nowhere

I'm from the town of De Kalb, Kentucky. It's an itty bitty speck on the map in western Kentucky. On Google Maps if you want to see my town you have to keep scrolling until the street names pop up. Our Wikipedia page is four paragraphs long. The longest paragraph is about a tornado that ripped through De Kalb in 2005. It basically reduced us from a speck to a millimeter. It was so bad that Ernie Fletcher, the former governor of Kentucky, had to stand in front of our ruined city hall and talk about how resourceful my community is. My dad still whips out his "2005 De Kalb Strong" shirt whenever he needs to paint something. I was a round little baby in 2005, so I don't remember what all went down, but my mom says that the tornado raked across our neighbor's yard but left our house with only a few broken windows. Most people would consider that an act of God, but my mom has always been a bit of a religious skeptic. To her, this was an atheist miracle. The great power of random chance saved us that day, and she hasn't doubted it since.

The Five Thousand Dollar Machine

As of writing this, I am a sophomore in college. I attend Henry Clay University, which is mid-sized liberal arts college in Covington, Kentucky. I like it pretty well. People always talk about "ivy league," and HCU probably isn't ivy league, but I remember during COVID where all those Harvard professors were assigning their students the same YouTube lectures everyone else was watching. I feel good about HCU, we fit each other nicely. It was founded in the 70s, so all the architecture is in a really weird in between spot where it's trying to figure out if being communist is cool or not. It's a lot of brutalism, a lot of blacked out windows, a lot of slanted roofs. It's mostly a commuter college, so after 4 o'clock the campus becomes basically dead, and I get to walk around all these big concrete buildings and pretend I've stumbled on the remains of civilization after a nuclear war. They've even allowed vines to creep up the sides of a few of the older buildings, which really sells the illusion. My favorite places on campus is where the architecture is at its ugliest. There is a black unmarked doors in the exterior of the library that I always try to walk past. From the look of it, it's about four inches thick and made of solid steel. Rust has eaten away the hinges and it lacks a handle. Every time I walk by the door I imagine what's behind it. I like to imagine it is a great machine that burns all of our tuition payments. The heat from the machine is then used to power professors' coffee makers.

Everybody Say "Thank You Kierkegaard"

I have to admit that majoring in philosophy was one of my sillier decisions. In my defense, I was seventeen. So, why do I keep majoring in it? No one is stopping me from switching. Well, here is the thing, I actually really like philosophy. Unlike the other humanities majors, like anthropology or sociology or (God forbid) English, I feel like philosophy gets at the problems behind the problems. You can argue about concepts of humanity and knowledge all day, but until you define what makes something human or how something becomes knowledge, you might as well be making shadow puppets. This is, what I think, philosophy excels at. However, I have been growing rather exhausted with philosophy's constant need to pontificate and question everything. I don't really care what makes something a table and what makes me alive. Talking about it doesn't make a table less of a table or me less alive. I also have been getting a little burnt out on the philosophical need to write as boring as humanly possible. I like reading philosophy books, I like reading most philosophy books, but we are reading Kierkegaard in my Existentialism class right now, and oh my god, the man's writing is laced with molasses. I'm reading him in the library and my eyes feel like they are being brushed by a conveyer belt of caramel. Maybe my brain is broken after watching too many reaction videos as a kid. Maybe all this blue light that is projected into my corneas every day has made me incapable of understanding the great genius of the "Father of Existentialism." Or Kierkegaard is just really boring and all it took to realize that was the invention of 5g internet. I must admit though, reading him before bed has made it a lot easier to ignore Tyler's snoring for most of the night.

The Internet and I

The internet, am I right! It's hard to make observational comedy about something that is impossible to entirely observe. Maybe that's why Seinfeld has turned into a comedian chauffer, he can't keep up with the times. I’m in a sort of toxic situationship with the internet that is very codependent. The main issue is that I was introduced to it super young, which is always a messy start. The internet was all cool and acted like they knew everything and I really wanted to know who could win in a fight, a tiger or a bear, so I fell for it pretty hard. The internet showed me all sorts of stuff. Some of it was really cool, like Lego stop motion videos and Poptropica, and some it was less cool. But then, the internet convinced the world that it deserved to be the primary vector for my education and my only source of entertainment! The internet is a controlling lover. It doesn’t like when I spend my time on other things. It demands attention. It tracks my location and monitors who I talk to. It knows everything about me, but still that doesn’t seem to be enough. And I would be lying if I said that I didn’t fall for it. Though I couldn’t care less about my social perception or remaining conscious with the times. If the internet was just a big social box where everybody compares the price of their outfit and shows eachother beach selfies, I would happily move to Montana and collect canned goods for the rest of my life. But the internet is also an endless frontiers of information, and that is what I cannot get enough of. The internet is where humanity goes to interactive with the universe of our collective minds. I love shimmying through an internet archive to find gems of unbridled human weirdness. The purpose of the archive is to present the crème de la crème of the weird things I’ve found. I don’t have that much time anymore to look for stuff, so if you have anything that is strange enough for the archives, send me an email: silentinterlocutor064@gmail.com.

Book Recommendations (ignore if you can't read)

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
A Short History of Decay by E.M. Cioran
Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut
The Stranger by Albery Camus
Bartelby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville