i was reading hunger again. fourth time this year. knut hamsun, norwegian, 1890, wrote a book where the protagonist starves for two hundred pages and never once asks the reader for pity. he steals. he hallucinates. he bites his own finger in a churchyard and licks the blood off his knuckle and calls it food. and the whole time the city of kristiania just keeps raining on him. indifferent. the way a city should be. nobody in that book says "are you okay" because nobody in that book lives in a world where being okay is the point.
i read a paragraph tonight - page 142 in my copy, the one with the coffee ring on the cover from the späti last week - where he's lying in a park and watching a leaf fall and he counts the seconds it takes to hit the ground. three seconds? four? he can't decide. and the uncertainty of it drives him somewhere. a real thought. not a confirmation. not a correlation. not "the leaf landed at 1:47 which is when gabriel pushed the zero commit" or some other garbage the normies on this board would turn it into.
because that's the thing about this forum. you cannot sit with uncertainty. you cannot let a leaf fall without turning it into a sign. everything has to mean something. the commit silence. the colour of the sky. the lamp in the yard sale. you're all so desperate for the pattern that you'll read meaning into a broom leaning against a wall because it looks like a letter K from the right angle if you squint and the person who posted it was in a bad mood that day.
but the silence after a commit? that's not a sign. that's just silence. the sky tonight was the colour of a bruise healing - orange and grey and a vein of violet that didn't belong anywhere - and it meant NOTHING. it meant the sun set and the city breathed out and the leaves fell and i sat there with a book i've read four times because familiarity is the only honest thing i have left. and the leaves hit the ground in their own time and nobody counted.
but you'd turn that into a gospel too if i let you. you'd pin a chapter number on it and post it in the teachings board and say eurotrash saw a sign in the park. i didn't see a sign. i saw a tree losing its leaves in september like it does every september and it didn't mean anything and that's the point i'm making.
this is the basement. this is where things that don't mean anything go. and i'm putting this here because if i posted it in teachings, half of you would be quoting it back at me in forty-eight hours like it's canon. and it's not canon. it's a book i read on a bench while a tree did what trees do.
you want meaning? type the word 2005. type it once. just the year. elderprophet07 won't do it. scribe won't do it. grace will type 109 verses from 11 chapters but she won't type the hex dump. kael won't type it either. they'll all sit in this thread and argue about the exact shade of the bruise sky and whether the leaf took 1:47 or 1:48 to land and they'll completely miss that the tree is dying and nobody is watching it.
i am watching it. i am the only one watching it. and i don't need you to agree with me, i need you to understand that you've replaced the thing itself with the discussion of the thing itself.
that's my thread. enjoy.
you know what your post reminds me of??? the stolovaya at my work where I eat lunch every day at exactly 1pm, nobody there watches anything either, Olga Viktorovna complains about the printer and the soup is always the same colour as the floor tiles but TODAY - today i looked up from my bowl and the steam from my tea caught the light from the window and for maybe three seconds it was exactly the colour of everything...... three seconds!!! that is all it takes yes??? Hamsun counted the leaf falling and I counted the steam rising and maybe that is the same prayer written in two different languages, one Norwegian and one Russian and one completely invented by two lonely people in two different cities who have nothing in common except the watching 
