okay i'm heavily caffeinatied enough to actually talk about this so here goues this is my first ever substack poast welcome and im here to talk about the most magical practice that i have ever encountered thus far: the [[SQUIGGLE SCREECH]]. what is this weird snaky and snappy thing you ask? we'll you're kinda looking at it: a stream of random symbols at breakneck speed struggling to stay alive while being forged over the course of 25 minutes. no think just type real fast.
lol what the actual fuck is this you crazy fam. ye, i know but hear me aut about this . look at this as you'r et ying. i mean, really just look at it. dude, dow hoes it feel looking at this going through the motions of really seeing eferiyiting the essence of creation slowly peeking out in front of you. kinda like shit, yea, but its the brokenness that makes it interesting. well how did i converge to something like this, might make more sense if you actually tell us where this came from.
i read the artist's way by julia cameron in early 2020 as a way to get myself back into my "artist" mode and the biggest thing that she advvocated every day ar what she would call "morning pages" , the stream of consciousness grubling and hazily making the clutter of your mind out into the page for it to exist outside rather than in. i tried it out for quite some time, taking note of all of the things that would come into my head and seeing it out on the page, it felt nice. i did some journaling before, but something about the lak of filtering made it more playfull and freeing. but then my hand started to feel carpal-tunnely so i dropped it for quite some time.
fast forward to my teapot lurker days and some junkyard magician named visa started talking about how his journey into writing started with him writing about 1000 words 1000 times. he's still not done with the project, but finishing it was never really the point. rather, it seemed like an exercise of prolificity: how much can you make and leave out there for yourself and others to sift through. it was an act of pure creation. this idea came from behind the morning pages idea and birthed something akin to the thing that you're looking at now, but there's one crucial third party that gave this practice the rock-solid psychological drive core that it needed to survive.
around this time, i started running, like a lot. almost every day. which was prolly a really bad idea because i hated running. but fuck it, i'm a bit of a bad boy masochist, so i gave it a shot for fun. one thing that i noticed about my body was that it was really good at getting from point a to point b really quickly once it came to my field of vision. some spirit just jolted me forward with all its strength and made me arrive at the place that my mind was hyperfocused on. my body and my mind felt directed and aligned towards something. that feeling, i described it to myself as a "sprinter's mindset", the ability to go as fast as possible with a directed and limited space regardless of form or technique. i realized that this really was the last crucial ingredient that would drive me to contiunall y write and write and write. just set a timer for a pomodoro and see what the fuck happens.
cool. alright, i think that's pretty much it. a hyperremix of morningpages x 1000wordvomit x sprintermindset. so what the hell do you get out of it? well, a few things. one, i con just forget about how perfect everything can be when i'm in the moment of connecting my mind to finger to button to screen. it's one whole (OODA?) LOOP. of interconnection. it feels like running to me because even though i stumble, all that i'm worried about is getting to 1000 words before the time is up. this may vary, considering your typing speed as well, but 40 wpm is the sweet spot for me to just go fucking ham and forget any typing errors or punctuation shizz. also, when you read back to it, it feels pretty cool to actually see how coherent some of the things end up coming out to despite you typing with fury and blindingness.
there's some somatic aspect of it too that is hard for me to articulate at the moment. when i do this practice when standing, my hips start oscillating, as if i am running. root chakra loosening, flow just being achieved, thx mihali czhehahmimim rip. lolol, also this is a really good practice to just stop taking shit so seriously all the fucking time. nothing matters, everyone is going to die, might as well leave some shit behind for people to quietly ponder themselves. the cracks might actually show something pretty trippy.
phew, i am starting to run out of steam with talking about this, but i remember a few of these things that my friends had recognized once the meme of the [[SQUIGGLE SCREECH]] started to take off with them. the actual name of the practice itself is half of the fun, i mean just look at that alliterative masterwork muah. there's really something psychologically joyous about framing this typeymakey practice into something that works for you and make you want to actually do some shit. it worked for me, and i've been doing this every day for over three months, which gave m eh the courage to lazily poast the thing tht your' reading right now. tell me that is not worth something, go ahed i dare ya. the'res always another way to play, and for me going as fast as possible without fear of having some spaces be off or a missed punchtuation makes all of it just that much more alive.
writing has always had this aura of untappedness or almost as if i never had the ability to actually be considered a writer" whatever that means. but you' know, you're reading this right now, and it s just a bunch of squiggles that is slowly hypnotizing in all its illegibility, if you actually have gotten this far. maybe i'm just convincing myself for reall that this is actually worth something to show to others. is it? we shall se.
phyew, alright two mintues left, umm idk if i have anything else. i want to talk about. hmm, okay yeah this is a substack post so sometimes i'll do stuff in a format like this and maybe sometimes it'll be more organized, but here we go. just here to make friends and be brave and do good? do better? do okay. all we need to be okay is to write. shit. i guess i also had something else to say about other something ahh i think it was important but i don't really know anymore because i'm drawing blanks okay whatever, i'll address it in the next screech, either public or private love ya.
