in shin megami tensei v there’s this whole concept of the ‘shekinah glory’, that the world was actually destroyed twenty years ago and god recreated tokyo in a little bubble while the rest of the world slipped into the underworld and fell to demons, but it was a sort of a false tokyo, a temporary simulacra to keep everything moving, and now that god’s dead his miracle is dying with him, and your teachers and your school and your city are just beginning to fade into the ether. but the throne is vacant, anyone that can become a god by finding their demon partner, becoming one being again, and fight it out to reshape the universe for both humans and demons alike

trite to say but it gave me some real 2008 vibes — but the honest evaluation is probably that the seed of disruption came even before that, these are just shocks, death pangs toward the next thing

i’ve been carrying this with me for a few years — there’s a million ways to navigate a world coming apart, and most of them are cowardly, they forfeit the difficulty of having to decide. i suppose this is the existentialist argument from the mid-20c (and before that, the stoic argument from the 2c), but the best i ended up coming up with was talking to god in my own way, finding the way of understanding and being understood so long as i believe there is such a thing as a true good, a better way of living, a way of cultivating the fruit of peace. if there is a good, i must have been shaped to see it?; and insofar as i tried to stay on that path, it led me toward a happier life more or less, so i kept on it.

but this is the decisive difference between being some chump playing by old rules as they get swept up in the tide onto the next world and actually trying to understand autonomy, actual autonomy, something secured for a sect, right? that you can cultivate a life like a garden toward an end that either leads to ongoing misery for you and others, or increasing the amount of potential amongst your peers. this is all ultimately bound by love, an understanding of love anyway ...

i suppose i feel i should defect more, i should disregard the morality of an irrelevant world, but i find myself adhering to notions of pride in the state, or of what produced me, that are no longer serving me. i think this is what deleuze meant by becoming nomadic. aesthetic assemblage self is the only way forward? is that really it?