A trout in a pail of milk, endlessly circling

You can have your mental dungeons and your emotional oubliettes, with dark impossible images of a stake passing through a metaphorical heart, and that can just be normal teenage drama that lasts for a week or two and resolves of its own accord or it can be a dearth of hope in a middle aged body at war with its psychologically disregulated mind. Even with trauma timing is everything.

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Does the idea that embodiment is a trick, that this is just a fleck of time running out on a recording, with no biological substrate to speak of, does that idea fill some with warm solace and becalming relief? What kind of life do we have to be living to fall in love with the notion that this is simulation?

If there is a trout in the milk, then what we deem milk isn’t, or what we deem a trout can’t be, or our perceptual apparatus stands in a scrambled relation to what actually is. In the same way that these 30 something street kids, tranqed out zombies with rotting skin, stand in scrambled relation to their kindergarten selves. You don’t need a ship from Theseus to trace the line of historical continuity and yet it’s not exactly intuitive to say the flotsam and jetsam on the streets are the same selves as their glue-eating starry eyed precursors.