various thoughts/ideas

october 16,2023 [2:07pm]

promise me this, that no matter what, one day before the end of this year, i will go somewhere and create something meaningful. something substantial on a spiritual level, that i can look back on in a few years and have memories flooded back to me, something i can show someone and say "this is me. this is what i think, what i am, this is what i do." and they’d look at it, look at me, and understand a bit more about the world i see.

because what i’m doing now, if you were to feel it, you’d think that i’d be better off doing nothing.

just a little bit longer…

october 1,2023 [9:45pm]

going in and out of countless games, applications, distractions of the mind. all to "relax", all to get away from the stresses of the world. what have i done so far today? nothing of importance.

september 29,2023 [7:53pm]

close reading is important, and in most cases essential, because baked into every single phrase and sentence we construct is thousands of years of implied knowledge that, when distilled, reveals generations worth of insights.

for example, if i have a phrase like "when i wish upon a star", there’s so much baked into that mentally. wishing, for one, is a concept that societally now etches this idea of wistful longing, a sense of some dissatisfaction, that there is something lacking to where you require a necessary change in how things are. that could go on for even longer, but let’s leave it at that. now for star, the thing which is taking our action of longing wistful desires for change, can be taken literally as just a star in the night sky. but that notion in itself brings with it so many different connotations and meanings. for one, we describe model citizens of our culture and society as "stars". we consider celebrities stars, these celestial beings that paint our night sky (the night, which for almost all of history, has carried with it the unknown and dangers that could spell our death). so clearly there’s something that exists within the idea of what these celestial stars are that map onto something more fundamentally experienced within humans, so much so that we call other humans stars. all of this, all of these preconceived notions and baked in ideas, adds to why you would even begin to conjure up a phrase so enigmatic yet straightforward as "when i wish upon a star"; and to ignore the mentally subconscious context that is brought up when this phrase is uttered is to ignore a large piece of meaning that the statement carries.

i wish someone would’ve told me this when i was doing close reading assignments for pre-requisite english courses in university.

september 29,2023 [9:58am]

part of the endeavor into creating art in the modern age is being able to decide what boundaries you set to the scope of your work that will maximize the most useful creativity.

it’s a level of balance between ease of access and hard set limitations on what you can do. in the past the ease of access and what you can’t do was very unequal, low ease of access and large amounts of what you can’t do. now it’s the opposite, and while it would seem that the difficulties come in the limitless possibilities of what you can do (and a lot of it does stem from that, don’t get me wrong), there’s also incredible difficulty in terms of the ease of access in jumping into the total unknown. before you’d have to learn in depth the ins and outs of how things worked before you could jump off the cliff; now it’s never been easier to jump off, and a lot of the difficulty comes in attributing the scary depths with the hole itself, but really it’s more to do with your ability to dive head first into that hole.

(try to see how plausible this is)

september 13,2023 [7:10pm]

out of everything in the world i could be doing, i chose to do this.

sitting alone inside a kitchen, it sounds less romantic and edgy to say i’ve setup everything inside my kitchen so that i can talk to myself without anyone else hearing. i’m alone by this window that can’t close, the hum of the refrigerator setting the ambience, not even a chirping bird or a reflection from the sun. nothing. it’s 7:12pm, the sun hasn’t even set yet, but the clouds are grey. and horrible. and nothing will ever make them better today. maybe they can begone tomorrow, maybe they can move aside to let through the prettiest of sunshine, a white and blue room shaded by leaves from the trees. maybe. maybe it can. but it never will today. and it never will forever, so long as time remains still on this day. september 13, 2023. 7:13pm. if time were to sit still at this moment, the world would look, from my eyes, as if nothing could ever happen, and nothing ever will.

march 30,2023 [11:57pm]

last night i was watching some of my older videos i made; these dumb vlogs i’d record as an excuse to go outside and feel like i was doing something. my acne riddled face, the first pair of glasses i got that made me feel cool, the hair that i was starting to grow out since i wasn’t in school that summer, looking at the video i could see it was me but i couldn’t recognize whoever that was at all.

i had an exuberance back then, an undercurrent of joy that flowed through everything i saw. roadblocks on sidewalks weren’t an inconvenience, they were a fun excuse to take a different path. just watching the video i could feel those emotions coming back, for a brief moment in time i was back to being that hopeless romantic who would imagine what it would be like if i wasn’t walking around alone but instead walking with someone who i loved. "wouldn’t it be so sick if i was in europe walking around with someone, we found a cool little restaurant, had dinner, and enjoyed the sunset together". the me now would just be walking around with a slightly faster than average pace as if i constantly had somewhere to be, thinking about how expensive the food was, looking at the sunset while thinking about 20 different unrelated things at once, and immediately forget about it all the next day. something’s different now. something happened between all that time, and whatever it was, it made me worse.

by the world’s standards i’m objectively better off now. i’ve got a way more successful career, i mean back then i was in a no name highschool doing extracurricular clubs because i’d get picked up at 4pm either way, watching youtube videos all day and fiddling around with making art that was "deep and meaningful". now i’m at a great university studying physics with nothing but good things on the horizon. but i’ve lost that exuberance i had, that need to make everything mean something, that desire to record every moment of my life to try to preserve them in time. i take the bus for an hour and a half goddamnit, i’m surrounded everyday with the real world. fantastical idealizations can only go so far when almost every day you see a crackhead screaming on the sidewalk or have to scoot by someone’s vomit on the floor. life fucking sucks; people settle for meaningless work so they can have some place to sleep, they loose all interest in fun hobbies and activities because who the fuck has the energy for that after work, they stop thinking about the "meaning" in everything because what’s the meaning in the life they’re living now, one day they’ll die and either be forgotten or imprint their kids with some trauma that hopefully makes them better enough to not repeat the cycle. learning that takes the luster out of life, it makes the endless pontification of life seem fucking dumb and pathetic, all the things a 17 year old me would jump on at any opportunity, and all the things a 20 year old me now finds so hopelessly useless.

i say this not to put down my younger self, more so i’m putting down whatever i’ve become now. when i look at what i’ve done in the past it’s sad to think about how much i’ve let go. i constantly think about wanting to start up making those silly vlogs again, but what could i even record now? "hey guys, check out my life where i do the same thing pretty much every single day, but actually on the weekends i take a break by dissociating and looking at a screen for hours just to repeat it all again!" i still make music, but i have no time to dedicate to it anymore, and the brief moments i do get to work on it i’m hopelessly critical of every aspect of it, and the time i spent not practicing weighs down like a snowball that grows exponentially in size with each week that passes. writing this right now, i’m putting back reading a book for a paper i have to write for a class, and i haven’t even begun studying for an exam i have four days from now. and what do i have to show for it? two songs, one of which i now hate, and this musing i’m writing at 11:50pm on a thursday.

whatever i’m doing now clearly isn’t working for me. something has to change, and i think writing this was the first step.

february 1,2023 [9:17pm]

one of my favorite songs i’ve written isn’t because it’s the most technical or took me the longest to write. it’s a song i wrote at 10pm in my bathroom; nothing but me, a guitar and mixed emotions being stirred up from all the work piling up that week. i played like 2 chords, got out my phone, and immediately wrote the lyrics, and it’s my favorite song because of one verse i wrote.

"i used to talk about dreams like they were literally me. that’s the me you know, i don’t know if i could ever see you now, if i could read all your thoughts. well, i’m reading them now, so you know."

i used to, or still do, keep a notes folder of all my dreams. my first entry was on september 22, 2017. 

"Dream about me in the wild west where I was trying to download a game called mortal fallout combat racing but I needed red dead redemption for the ps4 to get it. I was talking to an old lady in some shack about it."

even reading it now, i still remember it so vividly. the shocking contrast between the straight road that separated this forest with a shack and the mountains covered with snow, how cold the snow was, the game, everything. even though my brain came up with it randomly one night in 2017, i can still bring it back to memory so vividly. somehow, that dream and whatever i dreamed still exists in my mind, and all it takes is a few words to bring it back to reality.

my last entry was on december 13, 2022. it’s february 1, 2023. i stopped writing about my dreams. i still have dreams, but i don’t have the drive to write them down anymore. i don’t have time to spend 10 minutes lying in bed recalling in a hazy daze what i just saw, barely seeing through my squinting eyes and trying to make as little typos on my phone as possible. i’m gonna be late for my bus, it’s 5:20, i have about 20 minutes to cook and eat food, maybe 20 minutes to get ready, and i have to rush out the door to catch the bus to transit for 2 hours to make it to my 8am class.

i sacrificed a fundamental part of me and what i loved just for this, just to sit down at 9pm on a wednesday night, confused staring at my homework, my soul drained of every bit of what i loved so much about myself a few years ago.

-

a lot of successful people say that the key to their success was visualizing where they would be in the future. humans are really good at abstract visualization, and dreaming about ourselves in some place later on makes the path to being there seem almost natural. for me, i never could do this. i’d lie to my friends in high school, say "yeah, when i’m older i want to be a scientist, do physics research, make a name for myself." here i am, actually taking the classes, struggling to land a research position, and i still can’t visualize myself doing this for a living. i’m not just a liar, i’m worse, i’m a sellout.

i’ve never been great at anything in my life. yeah, i’m good at writing, i’m decent at math, i’m alright at physics, but i’m not great in any of these. i’m not even that good at creating art, but for me that doesn’t matter because art is the *only* thing i genuinely enjoy, no matter how it turns out. the only reason i’m in school now, why i’m even suffering through these shitty classes isn’t because i see myself genuinely living a happy life doing these things, it’s because i don’t know what else i could reasonably do.

-

sometimes if i have trouble going to sleep i’ll think about something that makes me happy, that brings me some sort of peace and calms me down. almost every night it’s the same thing, me as an artist, a musician playing random gigs and showing the "real" part of himself to people hoping that it resonates with them; a creator capturing scenes with a camera and imagining what film he could make to get across this feeling he’s had for the past few months; someone who forms meaningful connections with people that he can call at any time, even at night, and talk with; a guy who is happy and loves every part of what he’s doing, where even the restless nights lead to him busting out notes and writing something that captures — however indirectly or obtuse it may be — the feeling of the moment he’s in. but as much as i may try to hold onto it, eventually i wake up.

november 17,2022 [10:28am]

the problem with thinking about what you’re going to do is that eventually you’re actually going to have to do it. 

you can’t live in the grey area of life, where you find comfort in the fact that you of the future will be the you that is pragmatic, hardworking, and can put pedal to the metal and get it all done. future you gets closer with every second that passes, and something has to change between now and then.

i am not future me, i am the me of the here and now. i don’t find any comfort in being this, the me that will avoid studying to write an essay, the me that will avoid writing an essay to organize documents, the me that will avoid organizing documents to open up notes, the me that will surrender in defeat, staring at the blank notepad, and write about how much he’s given up in an effort to bridge the gap between the me back then and the me of now. i haven’t changed a bit, no matter how many times i say it’ll be different, no matter how many times i hype myself up with words of positive affirmation, i know as soon as i get home it’s back to slowly digging myself a hole into the pits of hell.

maybe there’s something of meaning when i write something like this. maybe i need these other distractions in life to draw me to my true calling in life, to write circular excuses in Notes that lull me into a sense of false comfort, giving the impression that i’m a misunderstood artist whose 123 musings will be found by historians years later and be lauded as the greatest work of post-post-post-ironic art in the world. “no, you don’t understand, he simply takes on the perspective of a confused 20 year old with failing aspirations and no real purpose to get the reader to think about when they were also that same person, but not nearly as hopeless, and try to push us in a direction better than the one he’s going in. he simply brings up the worst possible solutions to his problems as an ironic jest, you’re supposed to see how stupid it all is. he simply is genius.” and i’ll look at the world in that moment, from everywhere at once, and decide, with all the other billions of minds that surround me, that they are right, and the me in the now can take comfort in knowing that later on it all actually does work out.

october 18,2022 [10:42pm]

something about suffering, something about losing hope in the beauty and art of the world, something about hating pseudo-intellectuals, something about not being able to finish this reading assignment for class tomorrow.

i feel like i’ll never be able to enjoy the feeling of spending a late night in a bar on a rainy day, listening to the live jazz band play until 2am, taking requests in the afternoon and eventually losing pieces of themselves—the trumpet got tired, the bass player needs to get back to his wife, the saxophonist has another gig tomorrow at 9—all that’s left is the piano player and drummer, and they play all night, leading and guiding one another, improvising over their favorite compositions, spending the night chattering away while saying absolutely nothing; the time will fly by too quickly, “2am is just four hours away, that’s like one really long movie.” “2am is just two hours away, that’s barely enough time to get a workout in.” “2am is just half an hour away, that’s how long it took to get out of bed this morning.” no matter what, the time’s almost up, and it never comes back again. sitting in that bar, maybe i’m reading a book. i’ll not even get past one chapter, i’ll read a paragraph about suffering. suffering isn’t deserved in a world where there is a righteous and good god. i’ll spend the whole night thinking about this one paragraph, reading it over and over again. something about jesus, something about a kiss, something about love, something about the innocent. it doesn’t matter, what does any of it matter. i’d think about it some more. i’ve suffered once before. and it was a real suffering, it wasn’t what these people complain about, feeling lost in life, feeling without purpose, not having sex, none of these things, although they are painful. it was real suffering. at least with those things you can live off the hope that you’ll eventually find it. it’s probably better you never get it. if you get it, that’s where you feel real suffering. real suffering is where you get it and lose it. real suffering is where you never get it back. that’s what suffering means. forget about jesus, forget about divine retributive justice, none of it means a thing when you’re actually suffering. there’s no point to it, that’s exactly the point. why are you even thinking about it, why, when there’s something so much better right in front of you? you used to love music, you used to be obsessed with jazz even though you couldn’t recreate the circle of fifths if someone put a knife to your throat. you used to spend every day listening to music and finding some profound meaning in the sound; every note, every chord, every pause, every word, they all came together beautifully in a chaotic harmony, forming something that could be considered art. that’s what it was, art. you loved art. obsessed over it. you thought there was nothing more human than art, that thing that serves as the medium through which we express our consciousness. even science was art in your eyes, because after all wasn’t it just the search for truth under the framework of the human mind? everything was art, you really used to believe that. you never thought that nobody gives a damn what art is, nobody who’s built the first computer, won the nobel prize, raised their own kid, got cancer, saved someone’s life with surgery, none of these people gave a damn that all of it was “art”. and none of it is art to them. to them, its what they do. all their life, they grew up with the same lofty ideas, the same belief that things have so much more meaning than they do. but eventually, they have to move out, they have to graduate, they have to get a job, they have to pay rent, they have to live. they think to themselves “i didn’t live a goddamn day in my life”, and they’d be right. they’d say to their friends “you can only think these things about art if you continue to live in this delusion you invent in your mind. all you do is talk about how everything is art to all your colleagues who’s job it is to teach others about how everything is actually art.” they’d laugh to the world, “they don’t know a goddamn thing about life.” all the more, i’d sit there wandering about, wondering about what i felt at that moment that made me genuinely believe that the world was so much more than it was. i had so many thoughts, so many great ideas, and they’ve all been beaten out of me. i’ve been stripped away of all that made me who i am, all my ideas, all my accolades, all my reasonings, gone, and never coming back. dumb did i come into this world, and dumb i’ll go out, i suppose. but i wasn’t supposed to be this dumb already. i’ll hear someone across the bar talking about how good the music sounds. “you know, in a lot of jazz songs they kind of reflect the structure of classical music. classical music used to have room for a lot of improvisation, but overtime the structure has been kept rigid, almost in attempts to preserve the true nature of the song, almost like a museum. that’s why a lot of jazz songs have so many different renditions, because really they are all one composition, but it’s what the artist puts into it, it’s how the artist interprets it where all the beauty really shines.” “you have no idea what you’re talking about”, i’d think. explain what you mean by any of these trite words you throw in to make yourself sound holier than thou, like god’s gift to sound. do you even know a blues scale? you don’t truly understand how any of this stuff works, you just think you do and have tricked yourself into thinking you know enough to even call these notes “improvisation”. you’re a master at nothing of what you talk about, and you’re understanding of everything goes knee deep. no one will call on you to save their drowning child, nor will they call on you to go on the next expedition to find the kraken. the most you can do is roll around in the shallow, like a pig, hoping to not be swallowed by a rolling tide, by a crashing wave, by anything else than the still knee deep waters that you so “effortlessly” squat in. you know nothing about anything, and the worst part is that you don’t even know it. go back to sipping your black coffee at night, talking about how the bitter taste brings out the flavor of the himalayans. accept reality, get some cream, it’s better that way and you know it, and no one’s in awe of you purposefully living this hellish life of yours for the sake of possibly being able to be seen as slightly more learned than the sad sap that has the displeasure of sitting across from you on a late night like this. by then, i would’ve only just realized that the piano stopped half an hour ago. the drummer’s taking apart his kit, the bartenders sending off the last drunkard with a wry but somewhat warm smile, the piano man’s having a piss, the rain’s slowly letting up, and i still haven’t finished reading one chapter.

august 11,2022 [2:40am]

i just made my first website. would you look at that, next up, the big leagues. im gonna perform with the biggest names in underground contemporary indie alternative online music you've ever seen.

or maybe not.

plans going forward:

• update this website to be the hub of all my stuff (goodbye loser linktree... this is so much doper. gilopaolo.com. that's MY website. that's crazy, all for just $12/yr (thank you google domains [not sponsored]).

• start getting the equipment necessary for making CDs and distribute them either irl or online through bandcamp or gumroad.

• strengthen the parts of being an artist that i like to see from others (some way to dive into their thoughts, see behind the scenes on music going on, something like that.

• get money LOL

that's about it for now. godspeed.

-paul