not doing much, just casually being hooked to infinity

some logic and lunacy behind this place

After a spiralling series of repeated reconsiderations, I’ve decided to restart my Substack with fresh intentions, an empty subscriber list¹, and brand new wondrous vibes. The goal is to try to be a bit more social, hang out with my friends and other writers here², maintain the dopamine influx³, have more discussions about different ideas, meet new people, practice writing in English⁴ without doing much editing, make my English-thinking brain to work faster, and, perhaps, expose my main work to more curious eyes. What you’ve just read was an act of utmost transparency, by the way.

It’s going to be a more casual, improvisational blog where I rant about ideas that dwell in the highest echelons of my mind and psyche, but the main component, the moving force of it all is going to be freedom of expression, where “expression” is often art, and “art” is often literature.

What is “hooked to infinity”? It’s a phrase that brings me joy. I’m not sure there’s something behind it — its semantic value is obscure to me. Infinity has no borders. You can encounter anything and everything within infinity. Infinity itself can be everything and anything — infinite promises and hopes, endless optimism, possibilities, and dreams⁵, or the darkest void imaginable, chthonic horrors, emptiness, uncertainty, chaos. I’m not talking about mathematical infinity but infinity metaphorical. It’s like white, nay translucent, canvas on which nothing is painted because you have to paint it yourself and you can paint anything, whatever you want, whatever you see, whatever you can imagine. You can paint it alone or you can paint it with someone but it will always be unique, for if you dig infinity in yourself deep enough, you can find anything and everything, including nothing⁶. There’s an infinite number of future versions of self as well as there was an infinite number of past versions of self. Some might see in that the looming randomness and chaos of the future and the bottomless sea of regret and longing for the past, and they will be right. Repeating—in the infinity, there’s a slot for everything⁷: for good and bad, for joy and sadness, for victories and loses. There’s so much behind that would’ve never happened and so much ahead that never will but between them lies the beauty of the present self, a little dot sandwiched between two infinities, fluid and ever-changing yet at any given moment uniquely unique⁸. That’s kind of the vibe here.

But wait, what is “haha words go brrr”? It’s a meme, but I allocated it to my Substack description to emphasise that what I write here and how both have no real boundary or limit. It is hooked to infinity too like everything else here, totally hooked, if you ask me. There’s no set of rules. There’s no niche. There’s no trajectory. There’re only words, and they go brrr. The words must be liberated. They’ve lived to much under the weight of the past and the strain of the modernity. They shall be caged no more. They cannot live within the system, for within the system they, like a caged bird longing for free flight, die of sadness and misery.

I don’t know how often I’m going to publish and how long my posts are going to be. I would love it to be daily or perhaps weekly, but due to non-linearity of time and non-linearity of my habits, I can’t promise that either. The main goals are stated within the previous paragraphs and they are the only things to which I’ll commit, the rest… the rest I’ll let fly freely. I'm benevolent, oh I’m benevolent.

1. It’s not really empty. There’s Felix Futzbucker and

Jeanne S

who kindly agreed to be my first subscriber. Thanks, Jeanne!

2. Hello

Soaring Twenties

Social Club!

3. There’re no “likes” on my website and people rarely comment on fiction (which I also publish once a month), so my dopamine supply has been running thin lately.

4. I’ve been writing fiction in Russian and translating this year.

5. Just checking in if you’re reading footnotes.

6. It’s also there. But can everything include nothing? Would there be anything to include? What characteristics does nothing posesses? Can you even know that nothing exists if it’s nothing? If it exists and you can see it does it really exist truly as itself then given it’s nothing? How can you be sure in either?

7. This footnote exists to make use of Buzz Lightyear quote. I won’t use it, however, you still know that I used it in subtext. This is how our relationship with you, reader, will work, via subtexts, telepathy, winks, nodes, and cosmic wisdom hidden between the lines (or in footnotes [unfortunately, I cannot add a footnote to footnote so I have to use square brackets to indicate another level of nesting and importance of information provided on this page, in this sentence])

8. You can’t enter the same river twice, etm. I think you can, though, if you run fast enough.