I’ve been scratching the back of my head lately, and maybe it’s a new condition I’ve yet to ask a doctor about or maybe it’s old allergies coming back, or maybe it’s because I can’t recall the title of this piece I read, the one that says our bodies are mostly microbial, and I can’t remember what meaning I tried to get out of it, can’t even remember if it was an essay or a medical report, or if it even matters, so maybe it’s not that; maybe it’s because I’ve been worrying about the mistakes I need to make up for while wrestling with the possibility that I may have to move to another country while struggling with the fact that one day I would lose my cat to time. I’m thinking about how I’ve been stuck shifting between life and life-adjacent things, unable to make any decisions, the way I find myself shifting between style and substance, form and function, and questioning how, with everything I create, I’m conscious of the lines between them, so it’s either too much of one thing or not enough of either – all while vacillating between the peace this brings me and the shame of it, of writing about what I write, why I’m writing and writing it this way, when I know all this is is rambling, lips set loose upon nerves that seem to have found their way towards artifice, or, quite possibly and perhaps more accurately: made-up excuses spilling too generously towards art. I grab Margaret Atwood’s The Tent and Blind Assassin, hoping to feel the way I felt when I read them as a teenager (electrified, alive), but instead my mid-30s eyes dart towards Claudia Rankine’s Citizen sitting on my shelf. I flip it open and land on Mel Chin’s VOLUME X No. 5 Black Angel, a collage that leaves me wondering how to consider the things I make and consume lately, when these rare days of rest are characterized by the irresistible millennial binge we’ve been so privileged to have: ‘Have you seen the new season of Black Mirror / The Last of Us / Severance?’; ‘Have you heard about this latest meme / TikTok / reel?’ I’m surrounded by so much data (mysterious, important) and most days I love it, but other days my internal monologue interrupts itself to cry: ‘There is too much world.’ Czeslaw Milosz claimed it in The Separate Notebooks, an epigraph in the novel Station Eleven, and in researching this essay I followed this trail of muchness and discovered something called a florilegium: a medieval compilation of excerpts from other writings, multicolored threads spun around a spool of a theme: odds and ends of content bound by someone’s fixation: what could potentially be an algorithm manually made, its purpose being just being (and not, thankfully, to sell us anything). We know this: this combinatorial creativity¹: ideas interact to become other ideas, a map of minds strung from device to brain to brain to device. Viral comes from virus; all art is derived from something else: we can’t help it: we experience: we borrow: we remix: we create. Infections travel in a similar way, I think, but I’m no scientist. Weekends: I’m penciling in cut-up poetry on air-dry clay figures. I’m turning takeout labels into refrigerator magnets. I’m coloring in a stray earphone manual with bright acrylic pens, doodling demons that represent my endlessly intrusive, often self-destructive thoughts. At work, I’m made to answer: ‘What do you do outside of work?’ and almost always fumble the response:

• ‘Just hobbies’ to keep things SFW;
• ‘Not much, you?’ to deflect; or:
• ‘I make things?’ to clue people into what I think I’m doing, followed by a ha-ha to defuse the conversation because explaining myself feels like being caught in a lie. How do I tell them everything feels like running after one idea while sprinting through another? It’s this being perceived (and almost always perceiving myself) that’s stopping me from expressing the details of my creative interests out loud, even though I’m trying with these big blocks of text, asking you to take your time with me, to stay beyond small talk, but maybe it doesn’t really matter; maybe this is it: that in seeking to be creative you’re always stuck stumbling over these properly labeled genre boxes but end up floundering around and finding the labels mismatched: intent vs. execution; forms and definitions, why my praxis and lived experiences seem perpetually adrift in a cutting-and-pasting-and-tearing-apart, an in-between that I can only try to articulate by burying my voice in layers of literariness, until I arrive at this moment I’m faced with the question of making beyond making things for myself. I confess, sometimes I seek company in online gossip forums. Sometimes I Google solutions to new problems we’ve inflicted on the world. Lately I’m struck by these AI-generated summaries taken from the alleged wisdom of our collective human experience. I type ‘what’s going on these days,’ desperate to hear an honest reply, and I’m met with two results:

1. ‘The question ‘what’s going on these days?’ is a general inquiry about what’s happening currently in one’s life or the world around them.’ says AI; and
2. ‘It could be the rising cost of living, inflation, the elite geriatrics running the country no matter how much we wish they wouldn’t, climate …’, a snippet from someone I assume is an actual person on Reddit, accompanied by what I also assume is a heavy sigh.

There’s an episode of the ‘90s sitcom Clarissa Explains It All ² that’s been playing in my head. Clarissa Darling, the titular character, breaks the fourth wall to relay her latest dilemma: she needs to write a poem for school about what she sees outside her window. As expected, she’s hit with writers’ block, puts it off until the night before her deadline, and, after trying everything to place herself in a ‘poetic state of mind,’ she looks over to her computer, suddenly inspired. ‘I’ve seen the future of poetry and its name is PC-poem,’ she tells her friend Sam, typing words she knows her teacher would love, prompting the computer to generate a poem called Through My Window:

Of course things escalate from there: everyone heaps praise on the piece, it gets published in the school paper, and Clarissa is told to read it aloud at a national poetry banquet. But the audience is stunned when she finally comes clean about what she did, and despite her admission of guilt, her teacher still awards her with a golden quill, hailing her a pioneer of her generation for the idea behind this poetic experiment. In the end, Clarissa is unable to live with this. She hands the award to someone she thinks is a ‘true’ author: not her computer, but her classmate Hillary, who won 2nd place writing her own poem, a poem that we as the audience never actually see or hear, which feels to me like a missed opportunity. But while the show was set at a time when the Internet was shiny and new, built to connect and inspire us, we’ve come so far (way too far) since. Just two years ago, the Museum of Modern Art released a video called AI Art: How artists are using and confronting machine learning³, which explores AI as a tool in artmaking, from the implications of feeding it with our own history to discovering its limits. ‘One thing that artists have been very good at is taking a tool that exists in the world and making it do something it’s not supposed to do,’ says MoMA curator Michelle Kuo. But is it as simple as: dirt: pigment: ink: paint: MS Paint = art, or is it something more sinister, as in: our humanity superimposed into a void? I don’t know how much of this is cheating, but I watch it all unfold anyway, watch artist Refik Anadol’s AI machine produce ‘dreams’ out of MoMA’s 200-year art collection, and I can’t stop myself from saying it’s beautiful: the colors, the process, the possibility; so I sit there, watching, even if it hurts to look. Yesterday I dared to ask ChatGPT: ‘Do you feel pain?’ and it said No, but described it as:

A person with glowing red nerves or visible fractures under the skin. A heart wrapped in barbed wire: Emotional anguish. A heavy object pressing on a small figure: The crushing weight of suffering. A silent scream: The feeling of being unable to express pain.

and after evaluating most of this as cliché and chastising myself for criticizing a robot’s ‘feelings,’ I think about the flaws of words and pictures instead, how they’re used to train these generative AI models to respond to us when we can’t even say what we mean sometimes. I can’t always describe my experiences to other people: gestures feel inadequate, my words ill-matched to these often overwhelming, overlapping emotions that presume anger or admiration or awe, so I end up saying something like: Wow or worse: ? or worse: nothing at all, offering up silence for someone else to interpret instead of explaining myself. Is it just me? I still need help reacting to this reality. I still use emojis far too much. I still remember, years ago, Kenneth Goldsmith gushing over the impact of computers on literature: ‘Before digital language, words were almost always found imprisoned on a page. How different it is today when digitized language can be poured into any conceivable container. It’s typed into a Microsoft Word document, parsed into a database, visually morphed into Photoshop, animated into Flash, pumped into online text-mangling engines, spammed to thousands of email addresses, and imported into sound editing programs and spit out as music, the possibilities are endless.’⁴ This was uploaded to YouTube in 2013, when I was still just hearing about Uncreative Writing and learning postmodern theory for the first time, and so I felt like a child that had been given permission to play with their food, or in my case, to pick apart letters and forms and sounds and images and place them into vessels both physical and digital. I became more comfortable speaking in illustrations and short stories, in flash fiction and photography, later in TV references and webcomics, prose poems and hybrid work, vignettes, essays made up of vignettes, essays in the form of zines, zines in the form of grocery lists. Maybe I chased ambiguity through taxonomy as a way to deal with all this world; maybe I just wanted ways to say what I wanted to when I didn’t know how, which somehow meant I drifted towards zines: embedding my ideas into artifacts. Form as meaning. Meaning made-up. Which led me to accessibility and familiarity, which also led me closer to the growing DIY community in the Philippines, which made me feel like Goldsmith made me feel: like I could. In the early 2010s, friends started gathering for small press expos, renting cafes to share their latest staple-bound work on a makeshift stage. We even launched our own prose journal, Plural, to showcase works we considered progressive, an alternative to what we were seeing in mainstream publishing. Pretty soon I was attending comic conventions, tabling at art fairs, peddling these folded paper objects to anyone who would care, and later, I co-hosted a free share-and-swap zine event with my friend Liana Maris, because I was curious to see how others were expanding the medium and because ultimately, we were convinced zines thrived on community. There was something radical and kind about a process that shed the excess of the traditional: the personal and political making space for one another in an 8-page booklet that could easily fit in the palm of your hand. I found myself listing zine ideas, listing something like TEETH as a potential project. There’s a note in my Notes app entitled Things seen hanging on crypts (one, a stuffed dog; two, a necktie), while another just says: Am I looking for meaning in objects because my own life’s meaning is to be not the worst? Not bad. Not good. Not black. Not white. Not straight. Not quite. The body: microbial; the mind: perpetually sifting the world through these vessels with tiny holes in them, just to see what appears. Slippage. Temporality. Maybe I was looking for a version of literature I could live with while I made a living, treating these objects like pockets of time that gave me pause when my mind simply wouldn’t: in 2017, uncertain what to do after my MFA and hesitating between jobs: I gathered my thoughts on the inanimate as a method for meaning-making, set it against a confetti of strangers, folded and glued them into an accordion zine to bring these objects together as a subject. 2019: I collected antique prints from the Internet and collaged them into pink and blue household items, hoping to study sympathetic magic in relation to the levels of feminine rage I observed in women and girls and myself. In 2020, as a way to tackle the distance imposed on us during the pandemic, I took a stronger shift towards the digital with an interactive zine that invited readers to visit different rooms from the past/present/future, and still a WIP because I always feel like I’m shifting and/or stuck between past/present/future anyway. I paired images with words meant to convey a parallel narrative: an intentional breaking and borrowing of rules from genres and mediums to tell stories, referential texts like breadcrumbs just to convey some semblance of meaning (or meaninglessness) to those willing to listen. Have I just been passing the time?