The energy must be created

Saturday 6/20/26

Yesterday was the latest in a series of days it was hard to survive. I don't know how else to put it. I think that's the best way of saying it. Like being chased by death and you run, and run, and run, find a spot to hide in until it's technically tomorrow. I have nothing to live for. It's not going to get better. There can be nothing good for me in this world. I haven't gone outside in three days. I hadn't showered in nearly that long until I made myself do so yesterday. This place falls apart around me. This horrible living space. I sit in it. I think mostly of death. It feels like I'm at my own funeral. I'm the only one who came. It's raining, this person was alone, their life was unlivable, there work was for nothing, and no one is at that funeral but themselves.

What I'm going to do now is try. To do something. Anything. Some things. Do things pertaining to art. That starts here at this early hour with this entry in this journal. Because this is art. I talk about things I've listened to or watched or found and downloaded, and it could seem to someone who didn't know better that this was happy talk. And cases of, "I sure enjoyed this" and "Here's this thing I have to look forward to partaking of."

It's not like that. There's no looking forward to anything. There's no pleasure. There's nothing I enjoy or that brings even a second of relief. There's just this. The hurt, the aloneness, the hopelessness, the awareness of how it is and could only ever be. The crushing pain of knowing what this world is and what I am.

But art is who I am. It's what goes into me and what comes out of me. So I'm talking about that. Sharing how that works. The specifics. I wanted to clear that up. If it needed clearing up.

I saw a comment from yesterday typical in that it was someone sharing something they got from somewhere else, because people don't really have things anymore that they get from within themselves or come up with on their own, though they make like that thing was their own. No one else knows, so they get plenty of people who would think that they came up with it. I'll see these shopworn trite-isms that are shared millions of times, and it's like no one else is aware when they see that shopworn trite-ism that that's what it is.

They think it's brand new. They could have encountered it dozens or hundreds of times, but they won't remember, because post-human brains can't retain anything. Whatever post-human brains encounter now isn't really "processed," or understood; it's gone within the same instant of it being encountered. That's how we read, too, without comprehending, without remembering, without those written words getting through to us, and I'm talking about reading through screens now, which means via social media and AI, because of course no one reads anything else. No one could if they wanted to, because it'd be too hard.

Anyway, this person remarked that energy is neither created or destroyed, it's just transferred. Original, right? Maybe you think it is. In which case...please get out more, because you're the problem. You're my problem, the world's problem, and your own problem. I wish you'd do something about it. You can, you know. You just have to decide to try and then have follow through.

I get that this is "science," but it's also inaccurate. Energy can be created. You have to create energy in order to create and have a great work of art. Fiction is the greatest art form of all. It isn't like being a great basketball player or concert pianist. Those things are finite. They involve a mastery of things that are finite. Great writing deals in the infinite. It is infinite. The variables and possibilities are infinite. There have been less than ten people who are truly great at the art of fiction in human history. It's too hard. I know this. I live this. (And yet, in this delusional, anti-truth, post-truth world, just about everyone slaps that label of "writer" on themselves, put it right there in the bio, without any shame, or a the barest fucking semblance of a clue. They have no idea what writing even is, let alone being someone who is a writer. But what's to stop or deter you in a world where nothing means anything and just say what you want to say about how you'd like things to be or who you are, and not a single goddamn person is any the wiser, or capable of being any the wiser, about anything.) It's really all I've ever been about, thought about, you could, for every second of the time I've been in this world. Maybe, for all I know, before I was in it.

You have to know too much and be able to do too much and you need to give your entire life over to it and getting better at it. After you were born, that is, with the prodigious ability. It asks too much of what anyone can do, save in that handful of cases, and I'm not even sure you can say there are that many people who have ever been truly great at it. Not what I would consider great, not what I know to be truly great, with all that I now know.

"Dead Thomas" talks about energy. It's a story of energy about energy and forms of energy. Its energy, as a work of art, didn't exist before that story existed. It didn't harness preexisting energy. The energy was created. That energy can be redistributed. That's what it's for as. work of art. As that particular work of art. I'm leaving out everything else I've ever written. Pretending as if I didn't. Because I don't want to unduly relegate other things I've done to a secondary position. "Dead Thomas" is the best thing a human has ever made. I know this. I know that I had to enter this world with what I have, I had to give every second of my life to getting better, knowing more. I had to know people like I do. I had to know everything like I do. The vast range of it. I had to endure what I endure. I had to have the strength I do. Or had, if it's going now. I had to understand like I do. I had to be the person I am.

People don't understand this at all, and they think something closer to the opposite is true, but only a very good person can create a great work of fiction. You'll say, "But what about..." And the answer is because it wasn't great. You just think it was, and that's usually about other things. So many other things. And limitations and inexperience. Because great fiction is created for others. It is giving everything you have to someone else so that they may live better and be better and know more and know themselves better and love better. The same people who wouldn't even read it. Or who'd hate you. Fear you. Shun you. It is an act of the greatest and most sacrificial love. It is truly selfless and unconditional. That doesn't mean you don't want to be compensate at a level befitting what you've created. But the main thing is what I just said.

Do I even need to ask if you think any of these publishing system people are that way? Of course I don't. But let's leave them out for now.

The truly great writer of truly great fiction which doesn't even resemble any other fiction ever written and really needs to be called its own thing, creates energy. They create the energy to make the work and then the work itself becomes energy. The energy forms are separate. The truly great writer of fiction never taps either of those energy forms again. Each undertaking and each finished new work of art are new forms of energy. The ability to create energy must be unlimited, stopped only by death, if that's how it works. As I said, maybe I was creating that energy before I got here, and maybe I'll be doing as much after I leave.

Right now, I am trying to create energy to live through another day.