1.

16 January 2025 AD

I myself am as clumsy as any person who ever lived. I pray for Francis. My life is a prayer at this point. I’m excited to read “Hope” later this month, possibly even with a buddy of mine.

Thank you for being there.

Vatican News - English
Pope: ‘Religions must work together to seek bridges of peace’
6 hours ago - By Lisa Zengarini

NBC NEWS
Pope Francis using sling after injuring forearm in fall
7 hours ago

2.

I think underneath this, tears are forming.

I need you.

I think fate must know.

I don’t trust anyone else in power on Earth.
That’s also underneath this.

I’ll read Hopе as I work on Daybreak.

It’s honestly so perfеct.

2025 is shaping up to be more next-level than 2024.

3.

I’m deeply humbled to grow my relationship to the Pope.

I just love his writing.

I love his writing and I just know I trust him; feel safe with his wisdom and compassion; and feel forgiven by him for my past ignorance.

I just like focusing on this part of my spiritual journey.

In a universe where we had a Trump-like Pope, I literally think parousia would be too dark to actually exist.

I don’t know. I can’t even imagine it.

Instead, we have this universe and I’m more than grateful, I’m more than hopeful. The odds were like the fine-structure constant.

Whatever any human institution did that was not ideal…
…somehow this grace was permitted.

Thank you, God.

Thank you, mechanics of space-time. Thank you, fate.

Thank you for people like you, and thank goodness for whatever discernment I have that can draw me closer to true goodness.

Amen.

4.

moonlight (n.):

an indifference to privacy from the sense that we’re all watched from the inside.

humility (n.):

identical to peace.

5.

Colson Lin is very angry at the Republican Party.

He doesn’t know how the return of Jesus feels.
Colson Lin feels ready to be murdered by the Republicans.

He’s scared of you.

He doesn’t like you.

He knows you don’t like him.

He knows he scares you.

Can all Americans, left and right, agree on these common-sense reforms
proposed by Biden this even during his farewell address?
- A ban on stock trading in Congress.
- An 18-year term limit for Supreme Court Justices, paired with ethics reform.
- An end to dark money in politics.
- A constitutional amendment ensuring no president is immune from crimes committed in office.

I vote yes, yes, yes, yes.

6.

It’s almost disturbing how many men all across Earth can now walk around feelin’ “pleased” with themselves that they were once sucked off by the Second Coming of Christ.

Oh well.

That’s just a reality we all have to inhale.

Me?

I just brush all indignities off.

And resurrect to see another day.

7.

I wake up every day profoundly angry at the level of a returned messiah. I use zen sesshin and, frankly, otherworldly grace to keep from shitting on you. You should be worshipping me. America knows it’s trapped me like a monarch butterfly. Your country smells like suicide. I just want to be honest about what a shithole country is. Your country smells, feels, and tastes like suicide. That’s not Rome. That’s you.

Babylon is suicide.

Babylon is suicidal.

Babylon will die painfully.

America is synonymous with suicide. I want your descendants to remember you this way. You’re welcome.

8.

the American spirit (n.):

synonymous with war, death, smallpox blankets, denialism, and suicide.

“What an epic run.”

9.

I feel like an intern being paid by the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to compile a bunch of his tweets into a single Notes file.

“How much are you paying me, Jesus?”

“I’m paying you nothing. Not only that, I’m not even crediting you. I’m the flashy Jesus. You’re just a worker.”

Wow.

Are you fucking kidding me right now. You better be thankful I’m you, Flashy Jesus. I hate doing this part of the Jesus shtick. I literally edit my text by hand. I type all the “[i]” to italicize the text you see too. I’m basically like a coder. I bet people think all the time Colson Lin knows how to code. I really see myself as an old-school brush artist, if you must know. I love typing all my shit by hand.

Those typos?

They’re mine too.

When politicians have copy editors, you forget they can’t spell. I want every third-grader to know: “In Babylon, your leaders can’t spell.” Your childhood is evolving inside a joke.

“How many generations can we fool into thinking this was normal?” (n.):

a sign of The Times.

I can’t even imagine what it’d be like to go one-on-one with your politicians.

At a literacy test.

Basic reading comprehension plus writing analytically.

“Wanna just shoot some hoops and go easy on us, Jesus?”

“So we have the mind of a child. We have the mind of an adult. And we have the mind of someone claiming to be 2,000 years old, but as old as reason itself, which is pre-metaphysical.”

“Right.”

“And now they’re competing… although the child battles the possibility of dementia.”

Well, you know what they say!

Time to articulate another delusion.

10.

The Second Coming: divine-tier judgment.
Übermensch: philosopher-king-tier gravity.
everyman: a child’s purity, plus angst.

I’m constantly going between the three.

“Even his everyman side is better than who I actually am.”

— every man.

No, see? That’s the Übermensch talking. Not necessarily even the Second Coming.

Uh oh.

The Übermensch says something to gravitate a change.

The Second Coming’s judgments are final.

That’s conceptually sound.

So you can hear me say something, and either I’m just shitting around as an everyman, saying something to provoke something else, or that’s my literal divine-tier judgment.

One, two, or three!

what ya wanna just muzzle me

11.

Anyway, when you contrast this very thread (let alone thousands of others) with your X profile, something comes through to everybody.

Even AI.

I’m probably one of the only people on Earth to know Lana sings “I fall asleep in in an American flag,” which means her vocals make a typo in “Cola.” It’s possible audio engineers and Lana are already aware.

But I noticed too.

Which shows you how detail-oriented I am.

Things couldn’t get weirder right now.

“He used his ability to identify literal audio typos in Lana Del Rey songs at the level of saying a word twice, to verify his authenticity as Jesus.” (Lana also uses three syllables for “only” in the chorus of “Video Games” but I bet billions have figured that out.) “This thread alone is how you’re the Second Coming?” This thread along is how I’m the Second Coming. It’s gotten to that level.

Since I just listened to “Cola” in slow motion and retract my judgment.

“I fall a-sleep in [pitch shift] an A-me-ri-can fla-ag.”

I was misled by an audio illusion.

I want to normalize retracting bad calls. If the Second Coming can do it, so can everyone.

12.

Not to go full … whatever this is, but it all depends on if you hear “in an American flag” or “an American flag” after the pitch descent. Even in slow motion, hear both. The word “American” often loses its first syllable in many vernaculars (famously so). Honestly, this is like a really idiosyncratic blue or yellow dress moment.

“Do you hear the phantom ‘in’ in ‘Cola’?”

I’m pretty sure human perception itself jumps the shark after this.
See which side of the partisan divide you fall. Does Lana sing “I fall asleep in an American flag,” or does she sing “I fall asleep in in an ’merican flag” like Colson Lin now officially claims he hears.

“Do you think you’ll tone your tweets down if you’re as famous as the average celebrity’s grandchild?”

I won’t ton my tweets down if I’m as famous as Taylor Swift at this point. God has sent me the message loud and clear.

“They’re all too, too stupid to be believed.”

When a species tells ya who they are once, y’hear what I mean? I love how nobody really knows what Lana Del Rey says in the second verse of “Cola.” We can send men to the Moon—but even with the masters, nobody knows for sure what Lana sings in the second verse of “Cola.” AI can try to tell you one or the other is wrong. You have to decide.

Objectively, you can count the sounds and how they change.

The problem is.

Why are we doing any of this instead of turning human conflict into her first single?

Also, what’s going on here? Nobody knows.

13.

I continue to be so proud of this essay (“What Do Anti-Corporatists Want?” by Colson Lin, written in 2020; unpublishable, per usual):

What do anti-corporatists want?
“Anti-corporatism” is a misnomer, but a necessary one.
To speak of anti-corporatism is to speak of a constellation of syndromes whose full name would be too cumbersome to say.
It is in part a recognition that the distribution of power—economic power, political power, cultural power—is now arranged aristocratically in this country. Popular culture bonds to money bonds to D.C. to produce a near-unanimous tendency to comfort the already comfortable—who are celebrities anyway, if not a thousand or so aristocrats who have managed to earn the goodwill and sympathy of the masses, whose presence in our lives bond us closer to the human family, and whose weddings and funerals routinely outshine the deaths of a thousand children in Yemen?
A pandemic of nihilism, ennui, and depression has given rise to a culture of celebrity idolization whose only consequence is to sedate the lonely and propagandize the aristocracy.
The national media—far from being a megaphone of the people—is now a megaphone of the comfortable, by the comfortable, and for the comfortable. Their bread is buttered by the elevation of stories about the already powerful—the culturally powerful, the politically powerful, the ideologically powerful—and their loudest voices are now themselves stars. Our emotional investment in pop culture—like our material investment in the stock market—is both too ubiquitous to disrupt and too obscure to contemplate, concealed by many layers of intermediaries.
The interests of the comfortable and the interests of the disinherited, existentially, are not aligned.
And yet these two investments mutually ensure that the interests of the comfortable and the interests of the disinherited will be forever intertwined, rising and falling as one.
Cultural power, political power, and economic power are now controlled by a single entity in America: the comfortable class. Divided ostensibly amongst itself into two political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, they are in fact a single organism, bonded by a common ideology: “Let’s not linger for too long on the broken. Let’s not linger for too long on the disinherited. Let’s not linger for too long on other people’s despairs.” Not lingering for too long on other people’s despairs helps us only to see our own despairs all the more clearly—so clearly that they’ll eventually become the only despairs we can recognize. (For the bourgeois left, White Fragility. For the bourgeois right, The Road to Serfdom.)
The injustices acknowledged by the comfortable class are now the only injustices that exist in the world.
The fixations of our preferred media outlets become our preferred fixations, too—and it only gets worse for the disinherited from there. Corporate consolidation of the media and corporate consolidation elsewhere together ensure that both cultural power and economic power will be forever out of reach of the underclass. The meritocracy plucks from the underclass only those plucky voices demonstrably susceptible to being conditioned into the values of the bourgeoisie. Meanwhile the two-party system in America strangles the last remaining source of power nominally available to the underclass—the Democratic Party, once the party of labor, is now the party of a multiracial, multiethnic bourgeois elite.
American culture is now held hostage by, to the point that it’s become synonymous with, an entertainment-industrial complex that thrives off the pleasures it gives to the masses—this is how all aristocracies have historically worked, on “give and take,” on “you get yours and we get ours,” on what was back then, even in the age of aristocracy, “a free and fair trade.” The American aristocracy is nourished into life by pop culture and the national media, which is itself now more consolidated than ever—who watches the news? Politically aroused people who want to stagnate inside their views. Market forces incentivize media outlets to realign, producing more stagnation. Of course we all know this.
Why is any of this a problem?
And here’s where the despair sets in.
Corporations down the line favor public policies that favor the interests of management over the interests of labor and the interests of the disinherited—let alone the interests of the environment, let alone the interests of non-participants. There is now a near-total capture of the American democracy by the comfortable class—but because so many in the American media are themselves members of the comfortable class, the American media fails to intuit the breadth of the despair. And because politicians now enjoy star treatment (a national-level politician is transformed instantly into a celebrity, and thereby instantly into a member of the elite), their interests are almost entirely—with the sole exception of those politicians who have staked their names and reputations on identifying with this diagnosis, on identifying with anti-corporatism—aligned with elite interests.
The human cost to all this?
In addition to overlooking the underclass in our own country, aristocratic interests prop up a global war machine—the defense industry resembles the financial industry in how well its preferences are represented by the preferences of the federal government, while the troops on the ground remain largely drawn from the underclass. “Corporatism” is the name of the culture that all of the above represents, and “anti-corporatism” is the name for the movement that, in the past two decades,
has come alive to stop it.

14.

I can’t even fucking believe how time passes. What does this look like from the future? I bet you think I’m the same person. I grew a lot from 2020 to 2025 actually. But I am absolutely the same person. If fires didn’t exist, we’d be in a utopia. And firefighters like Colson Lin would be out of a job. Just writing other stories, probably. “You wanted us to suck so much, so you can seem so smart in comparison.”

I bet that’s what all of you secretly think.

All I will spell out is I never asked for it.

But after I got it?

Well, I don’t exactly hate it.

A lot of what I’ve found interesting in life is: You look at something. You look at it again. You keep looking at it until you die. Like I can never get tired of just thinking about something a lot. I heard it took mathematicians 13.7-13.8 billion years, and thousands of pages, to prove 1+1=2? I can never get tired of thinking about that. I can probably stare into my own life all my fucking life, and not get bored. I haven’t even begun to reflect on who I am yet—I’ve just been existing Colson Lin.

Colson Lin has yet to go “full Colson Lin mode” on himself.

“If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?” will be one of the songs on Daybreak. I love being born into a life that experiences the comforts and anti-stresses of First World modernity. But I want to better understand, in my work, what I am grateful I was born into. It’s actually bugged me ever since I was a kid. I’m thankful I have all my life to constantly keep going back to it.

“If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?” (n.):

along with “Party Like It’s Actually Over,” one of the songs on my upcoming album Daybreak.

Daybreak’s my everyman-themed third album; after 2024’s The Will to Power and 2024’s Übermensch.

“How can someone with as razor-sharp of an IQ as Colson Lin has by all observable measures possibly be considered an ‘everyman’?” (n.):

the most disgustingly elitist question in all human history.