Hello? Can anyone read this?
It's been a while since I logged on here but I figured it was worth a shot. I mean, somebody must be reading this. I think about that a lot, how web traffic is distributed, which percentage of people is likely to follow a given link. It's interesting if you get into it. But I digress.
I guess I should explain how I got access to this website. I was walking near Bear Creek the other night-I usually stop by for the turtle pond in particular- and I noticed something sticking out from a row of bushes on the north shore. Nobody was around, so I bent down and picked it up. I got this picture, if memory serves it was about 7:30 P.M. on June 20, a week before I made my first post.
It was a thumb drive, had some kind of mold or spores on it. You can make them out in the above photo- they're all over the front of the thing, I've tried getting them off with rubbing alcohol but they refuse to go. Anyway, I didn't have the type cable that would hook up to a computer- this is a 2 terabyte thumb drive and its port isn't the usual port for added security, it's a special proprietary port. The only way to get one is to order it directly from the company or to get one along with the thumb drive itself. In the end I decided it was worth shelling out for a new thumb drive, you can never have enough storage.
The contents of this drive are massive- I haven't even begun to start exploring them. At the top of the folder there was a .txt file, and when I clicked that it came up with the login credentials to this site and the e-mail, and a few other weird little notes. I guess it was created specifically so whoever owned the drive could remember their passwords.
I don't know why anyone would carry this drive around with them, it's not like it's a little portable one. And even less what they were doing by Bear Creek with it, it could easily get wet around here. And I especially don't know what this site is. There's nothing on it. I learned basic HTML when I first logged in, how to upload images and write paragraphs, but this website was completely blank. What's a "Hypnagogic Archive?" Sounds like a noise band or something.
Anyway, I was thinking I'll probably start uploading the contents of the thumb drive onto here, whenever time permits. I have a pretty busy schedule lately but I'd like to share what's on the drive with you. I guess I'm bored. I'll also try and update this little blog section I've created with stuff about my life. Hopefully if I start uploading these files, it'll also mean that whoever's drive it is will see this and ask for it back. If you think you know whose it is, send an e-mail my way at hypnagogicarchive@protonmail.com and I'll try and respond to whatever you have to say. I don't want to get in trouble or anything- and if the owner asks for it, I'll gladly return it.
Anyway, yeah- that's all I really had to say for now.
Getting lots of e-mails. I can't say I really look forward to opening up the inbox every morning- I have enough to deal with on conference calls and zoom meetings and a million other things that slowly eat up my time. But I promise you guys, I look at it regularly. And some of the e-mails I've recieved are a little confusing.
Like for instance, some of you talk like you've visited this website before, or have some sort of past experience with it. How would so many people know about a shitty Neocities domain with nothing on it? I mean, I've uploaded a couple files, but surely that's not enough to incentivize people to care this much. And before I found it, it was just a blank page. Is it a novelty site, something you prank your friends with? I thought those died off a long time ago. I've never heard of a novelty site with such an inexplicably long name. I don't know what I've gotten myself into here, and your e-mails are only adding to all this mental clutter.
I was over at my friend's house the other night- she's a Wiccan, which should explain why she said this next bit- and she was like, "Well, Julian, you should clean your energy out. If something's pressing on you, don't just stand by. Act on it. Discover yourself." And then she leans up from her incense-soaked futon and pulls out a deck of tarot cards and starts idly laying them out. I guess that's better advice than I'd get from the Internet, but being around her doesn't tend to relax me. It sort of puts me on edge. Maybe I just have a repressed prejudice against that sort of thing.
Anyway, I'll try and upload more files soon whenever I've got some spare time, but converting everything to HTML takes effort and I still don't know what any of you see in it. But as long as you want it, I'll try to deliver. Hopefully I'm not overworked to death first.
Hi. How's it going? Hope your day is going as well as my days- which are all sort of blurring into each other at this unpredictable rate. I'm starting to feel the lag of summer, which seems too short and too long at the same time. I'm going to start a new shift at Tami's Burger Haven soon, so that should be fun. Looking forward to staring into the deep fryer, hours at a time. Honestly, I don't know what to do with my life or what I want to do. Maybe I'm just really good at making hamburgers. Didn't have any complaints last year when I was at Griff's on Broadway.
Writing this blog has got me thinking a lot, about what a blog really is, which I feel these days nobody considers the inherent purpose of, because blogs aren't very easy to come across anymore. I've tried to parse the name "Hypnagogic Archive" etymologically, because there's no information about it online. I assume it's an Archive, a repository of information. Like the Internet Archive. I sometimes go on there, look up "Yahoo.com" and head back to 1997, because it's one of the only sites with many captures around that time. And then, because you can't use the "search" function on Internet Archive, I just aimlessly click around the various directories until I find a particular site that catches my eye. Usually, these sites are only accessible if you click through a LOT of directories, however back in the day you could get your personal blog listed on Yahoo if it had enough traffic. And sometimes these personal blogs will link to their friend's personal blogs. And so on.
There's something really unsettling about this little hobby of mine. Because it feels wrong. Some people probably consider it fun, or useful, or informative, but I feel weird, snooping around these deeply personal diary entries that they didn't know would still be available for viewing decades down the line. Voyeuristic, a little ashamed. Because some of these people are dead, and the only record that they ever existed- because they weren't celebrities or anything, they were just normal people like you and I who wouldn't be known at all if it weren't for these webpages, which are barely even visited- the only record they were ever here are these blogs. And their photos are just staring out at you. A world that's vanished.
I feel like I do this just because my own life doesn't seem to possess any meaning, and maybe if I keep flipping through I'll uncover some insights or advice, or stumble upon some role model who I can model my own personality around. Put on their flesh suit and start walking around in it. Every so often, I find something weird. Like a slang term I didn't know existed back then, or a pop culture reference that seems weirdly prescient. I don't know. You can learn a lot about history- and yourself- just by doing that, by acknowledging the existence of historical documents.
Maybe I don't want to learn.
I've noticed something. Sickness arrives in waves. You notice that, once you get sick enough times, once your body fails you enough. Not all immune systems are built equal. I've been reminded of that for my entire life, never had the best frame, metabolism was way off, never seemed able to retain calories. I forget exactly what. Some kind of medical explanation was given. "Gotta eat, Jules," they would say. Doctor and everyone, prescribing diet supplements and formulas, pastes from a tube, designed to adequately nourish my frail insides.
So I'm going to assume that's what it was, when I felt like crud yesterday. Just the old ailments rearing their head, shivers throughout my soft tissue, unable to stand, really, just shaking all over. High fever, measured 105. I'm considering going to the clinic tomorrow. I hate being alive, hate the burden of living, the way I'm always aware of my body and its physical limitations.
Walked around Downtown today, get my mind off everything happening recently. I got laid off, said I was cooking the patties too long or something. So now it's back to the endless search, looking into directories for some way to make everything fall into place. Feeling aimless. I walked past the Paramount Theater and saw the massive crowd lined up outside the massive blue sign, under some construction corridor where they have those mining lamps strung up along the celing and you feel like you're walking into a cave. It's too warm. Shouldn't be warm in Denver this time of year, should be freezing cold, should need to bundle up and slip on ice. But no. it's warm and dry and everything just goes on, no harsh transitions, a smooth long slope of nothing.
My Wiccan friend- her name is Amethyst- she told me the other night that I needed sleep, that there were bags under my eyes and they were all bloodshot, she lit some incense and laid out some pillows and let me crash at her place with new age ambient music playing on her tape deck. Spokes rotating around and around, one ribbon being led in uniformity from one spool onto the other. Feels nice.
In the morning, she gave me a Tarot reading, which she's really good at- she recommends it all the time, but usually I'm too busy. She has multiple guides on the major and minor arcana, some of them with conflicting explanations, and over 25 decks. She's not big into astrology, though, for whatever reason. Says it's fake. I wonder how she can be so convinced of one sort of fictive construct and so dismissive of another, how she aligns those two possibilities in her head. Wish I could do that, but all I see in life are incoherent, conflicting messages. Go this way, go the other. Anyway, she pulled Death at one point, and told me that I don't need to worry about it.
Whoever's calling me- stop. Please just stop. Find something better to do.
You've been down this path, many times. All you need is to remember, to plumb the depths and then it'll hit you, right there, without warning, like a bullet lodging itself inside you. You seem so naive, yet I know you're capable of so much more if you try. I've seen it with the rest, they pretend as if they don't know for so long, and then they rush out in a torrent. Give it time, we have patience and confidence.
Trace the median to its origin point, the amygdala to its source. He asked if you knew amygdalic thoughts. Of course you do, you have control over those and all other thoughts, you can go anywhere if you determine the origin point. You have no idea.
Why do you think your name is Julian?
Well, fuck me. I don't know how technology works, I'm pretty illiterate and I only took one html programming course in high school. The color is all wrong. I go to the "index" page and try to change it, from blue to red, but it stays blue, even though the page clearly specifies red. I don't know what to do about this. I don't know who keeps spamming the guestbook. Stop. Please stop, it's too much for me to handle. I don't know what's happening and I don't know what this site even is or why so many people seem to visit it, and I never asked for it.
This text is beyond words, it's unwieldy and hard to paste- I don't even know HOW text can be hard to paste in, but it's as if every time I hit the mouse there's this sensation of pain in my hand, runs along my carpal tunnel and into my forearm. A sharp sting of pain, my brain flares up. Something is unhealthy about this. I went to urgent care about a week ago to ask what was up, they can't find anything wrong and ended up billing me for it anyway. My plan isn't that great and I don't know what to do. I get migraines, I get nosebleeds. Big fat drops rolling inexplicably onto my sternum and into the sink. I don't think this amount of blood loss is healthy, and I don't know what causes capillaries in the nostrils to burst. But something is doing it. Something is doing it, and I don't understand it.
And you... who are you? A gallery of quiet spectators, in your seats you lean back all silent, eyes like diamonds in the abyss, each one a form in a constellation, each set of lips slightly parsed in anticipation of something- but you don't say anything, you don't intervene, you don't tell me what's wrong with me. Why not...? Am I unworthy?
They keep deleting anything I upload, don't mind any of it
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