You can make an infinity symbol out of a spaghetti noodle
Tuesday journal, 10/7/25
The conspiracy theory I’m most bullish on is that there is a cure for every ailment of the human body. I won’t say much more on that because I don’t want to offend anyone, especially having lost the most important people in my life to cancer. But this bitterness surfaces whenever I catch a cold, for which I know the cure sits on ice somewhere deep underground at Area 51.
My last Google search: “Will drinking my own breast milk help me recover from a cold?” Results overwhelmingly lean no. Little do They know, I am dying and need the sycophantic caress of artificial intelligence, encouraging my maternal self-reliance. A cheeky “results may vary ;)” and I would’ve winked back at the machine.
People often ask me if I’ve tasted my own breast milk. The answer is, perhaps shockingly, no. But I have done strange things with it. You can probably guess some of them. And I was fully prepared to add some to my coffee if it meant healing faster from my cold. Instead, I’ve been placeboing myself with homeopathic snake oil.
Speaking of breast milk… I credit my pump for recent developments in bodily awareness. Holding the flange in one hand and my boob in the other, I realized I was white-knuckling both—so tightly that my boob was sore after pumping, my hands wooden. Funny how the tender act of breastfeeding, when augmented by machinery, becomes a source of tension. Funny.
Something has my body in a death grip. I imagine unzipping my skin to find an elaborate tubing system: What should be open for blood flow and oxygen is packed with metal. Between my shoulders. Along the arches of my feet. The entire stretch of my face, most notably behind the eyes and in the jaw. I won’t notice how tense I am and then, with an unconscious slither, my back crunches like a bag of Lays. I sound like I need WD-40.
Still, I am most concerned with my hands. Those things that unlock the door. Why am I holding onto everything for dear life? Especially in moments that don’t call for squeezing, that might even benefit from loosening up? The “laid-back” breastfeeding position—which is exactly what it sounds like—is, after all, said to stimulate milk production; meanwhile, I am hunched over the pump, breath synced to its lifeless vibration, choking my tit out for gambling debt.
Say I am white-knuckling reality these days. Say my trust issues, once entirely private affairs, have gone global. What scale! It’s only natural to present in the body. No wonder I’m the fucking tin man.
Consider our various containers for lies, most of which I’ve deliberately mentioned to remind you that your entire life has led you to this moment: Conspiracy theories. The placebo effect. Snake oil. Propaganda. The uncanny valley. None of us know the extent to which we’re being lied to at any given moment. But we know the boxes they arrive in. We know the delivery drivers. In some remote way, this is fun; if baseball isn’t America’s pastime, it’s pontificating on our psychic malaise. It just happens to suck the other 99% of the time.
Deception might be the only universal truth. That doesn’t ring as farfetched as it should. I even think about it in the context of being sick right now: I assume my coworkers all think I’m lying, and that makes me feel bad about working remotely. I don’t know. Not to quote Jesse Lacey but I just wanna BELIEVE. Let me move on before frustration descends into nonsense.
When I’m not contemplating the economy of lies, I am, of late, eating spaghetti.