Post-Mortem: The "Home" Duology

BEGAN WORK: 08/20/25

COMPLETED: 11/07/25

There is an astronomically small contingent of people who read these freaky little posts of mine. Thank you... You are my "muses" so to speak...

Immediate Diversion From the Topic at Hand

About halfway through college, I decided I wasn't being enough of a huge prick for no reason, so I devised a new way to lightly sabotage every social interaction I would have for the next few months. This scheme revolved around the pleasantry, "how are you?" I had gotten wise to a game at that school, a sort of "trauma olympics" wherein people fought tooth and nail to be the most suffering, imbalanced, miserable wretch of any room they were in. It was a bona-fide badge of honor to present as the most pitiful creature to ever crawl out of a studio apartment (rent supplemented by parents) and into the doldrums of their back-breaking hard-living lives (class at liberal arts college), and their reply to "how are you?" served as the catalyst.

I saw two main ways this was done. The first and most common was the pump-fake, a way designed to tell a story in itself. The eyes look wistfully up, a feeble smile takes shape, "It's...." a beat. A moment of duress, of struggle, of defeat... "It's, going...!" The other interlocutor is queued into a light chuckle, the one for whom it is going joins along... Yes, that was pretty funny. You see, they avoided answering the question, thereby begging MORE questions. Were they to have the strength, they would likely have said, "it's going... poorly." From there, the story unfolds. The annoying roommates, the friend who pissed them off, etc. etc. Other variants of this response include:

"How are you?"
".....Um.... [Raucous laughter, as if to say, sister, you don't know the half of it!]"

"How are you?"

"I'm fiiineeeee....." (Followed by a pleading look, call my bluff.... call my bluff!!!!!)

The other, the more respectfully direct means of response was the simple, "bad." or "terrible." "Horrible." Etc. In those cases, it seemed almost impossible to get the follow-up question out of your mouth before the tirade began.

Now, the real trouble I had was that I would feel coerced into these interactions from the jump. I would never outright ask "how are you?" Nobody in their right mind would. Unless they wanted to be asked themselves... And so I would be greeted, and spackled to the greeting would be that "how are you?" waiting to ensnare me. After all, nobody in their right mind would NOT ask "how are you?" after they themselves had been asked. No heart was that rotten...* 

And so, it would go,

"Cole! How are you [I've got you now, buster....]?"

"I'm good [I don't want to play this game, please don't make me play this game...], how are you [damn daniel...]?"

And it would begin. The trauma olympics, and I the loser by default.

So I spent a great deal of time mulling this over. How could I stop this from happening? I started by ideating on what kind of sob story could I weave into my initial response that would make any attempt of theirs DOA. But that was the game. To engage in it at all is the losing hand. You could look the average liberal arts student dead in the eyes and tell them your entire family (nuclear and extended) was kidnapped by the The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) and strapped to an experimental tomahawk missile blasted into your childhood dog's grave and they would look back at you and say, "Yeah, some dick ran into me on the CTA and I dropped my phone and now it's cracked" and genuine tears would well up in their eyes and you-- I swear to god-- could almost HEAR the sound of that once glistening iPhone X crashing onto the floor and the screen shattering into a million.... 

A moment, please, to compose myself.... 

A Million Little Pieces.

And what, did your dog's grave have a Retina display? Thought not.

So I flipped the whole thing around. What if, I thought, I initiated a new game, one the interlocutor was entirely unprepared for...? What if I were to express a genuine, honest-to-god jouissance, a lust for life that would knock their socks off?! And so it went.

"Cole, how are you?"

"I'm FANTASTIC!! How are you?"

And by god, it worked. They would immediately sense the new game, one of who is HAPPIEST, living their BEST LIFE, and be entirely unequipped to play ball. Now it was they who no longer wished to play, the rules had changed too rapidly. It was their turn to respond with a tepid, "I'm good..." 

And I did this for a while. It felt almost pleasant to put on the act and pretend I actually was doing fantastic for that fleeting moment. Of course I never once was. It felt even better to skip the trauma dumping on their end and move on to the meat of the interaction, hopefully another swiftly-ending exchange... 

I started doing this outside of a collegiate setting, to my restaurant coworkers, to people ringing me up at the store, people whose woes I was at a much lower risk of having to hear. Realistically, what impetus would the Target fella have to share his troubles with me? Almost none. Virtually none whatsoever. But why take the chance? I was content to nip it all in the bud. The desire to cut myself off from all of the emotional dumping took precedence over common civility. The simple civil notion not to ham it up in front of a cashier about how fantastic you were pretending to be doing, eschewed. Eschewed and spit right back out. Hah.

It was one fairly benign interaction that snapped me out of it. I had met with someone I knew only casually, a friend of a friend. And they said hello and I said hello, and they quite earnestly asked me how I was. And I inhaled sharply and let them have it: 

"I'm FANTASTIC!! How are you?" 

They looked mildly alarmed for a moment, then regained their composure, and quite softly said, 

"I'm doing, less well..."

And they promptly moved on, changed the subject, and dwelled upon it none at all.

My initial internal reaction was, as it had been, one of triumph, "I did it! I won!" And it was that particular I won that got me in the gut. The issue to begin with was never the object of the game, it was that there was a game at all. I was so averse to this "game" I had invented through the words of others, but in response, I myself had only managed to fabricate another "game" I was most certainly willfully playing with everyone else, and as innocuous as it probably seemed (I imagine most people thought I was just being eccentric or maybe a little hyperactive), I had been shutting people down for no reason at all, clamming them up so I wouldn't have to engage with them as people. 

And I guess I started asking myself some larger questions like, why do I pin this whole "trauma olympics" thing on liberal art students when I see it in almost everyone I talk to? Is this really done out of malice, or are people just so lonely that they'll talk to anyone who seems willing to listen, even if that willingness is only evidenced by the employment of the most common pleasantry on Earth? Aren't I lonely too, just more content in it? What do I really lose by allowing someone to share a piece of their life with me? Why have I made it my lifelong goal to interact with as few human beings as possible before I drop dead?

Since then, I've amended my reply. I use it now to find common ground at the onset of a conversation (I need any boost I can get socially...). If someone seems to be in a good mood, I tell them "I'm good," if they seem a little forlorn, I tell them "I'm alright," in a very neutral, "don't worry about me, what's up with you?" sort of tone. But most importantly, I ask first whenever I can. I suppose this could be a key indicator that I am no longer in my right mind.

And there is still some game attached, some form of social engineering at play, but the intent is not to one-up or "win" or anything with an impurity that shines through any concealment. I realized I was not so important, my time was not so valuable, that I couldn't spend a little of it allowing someone else to tell me how some dick ran into them on the CTA and they dropped their phone and now it's cracked. Because that does pretty much suck pretty bad when that happens. You have to admit... And with a Retina display? Just a dog-gone shame...

Erm. What was this supposed to be about (that's called lampshading, when you draw attention to an obvious flaw in your work. Just a little comedy term. Perhaps you've heard of it? Comedy?)

My YouTube upload schedule went to Hell after late June. As soon as I posted my seminal (nobody remembers this) AI Content Landfills video, I got on an airplane and went to Mexico City for a week.

It was swag. I was able to see a great deal and reflect more quietly on how things had been going in my life. The real bonus was that my video was gradually accumulating views, which my diseased mind equated to "passive success" of some kind, and didn't feel guilty for not working on my cringe channel.

This cringe blog is about my YouTube.com exploits, so I'm afraid I'll have to go without a rundown of all my escapades abroad. If I live to my mid-late 60s, maybe I'll get some autobiographical work going. This is a space for me to dream, disregard...

Anyway, went I return home in early July, I got straight to work on a piece about Gen Z and reading. I had made note of a series of articles that framed zoomers as borderline illiterate and now passing that on to the most benighted generation yet, Alpha. For example, this article: ‘It’s so boring’: gen Z parents don’t like reading to their kids – and educators are worried. This article cites a HarperCollins study from April 30th, 2025, and concludes:

“Fewer than half of gen Z parents called reading to their children “fun for me”, and almost one in three saw reading as “more of a subject to learn” than something to be enjoyed – significantly more than their gen X counterparts.”

This is all unwell and bad, but there is some quite frustrating journalistic trickery at play. These statistics, while alarming, are not exactly accurately framed in the article. But most notably in my mind was that That rather provocative ‘It’s so boring” in the title is not from the actual study the article is citing. It’s from some random Instagram post.

Last week, former elementary school teacher Spencer Russell posed a question to parents who follow his Instagram account, Toddlers Can Read: “Why aren’t you reading aloud to your kids?” The responses, which Russell shared with the Guardian, ranged from embarrassed to annoyed to angry. “It’s so boring,” said one parent. “I don’t have time,” said another. One mother wrote in: “I don’t enjoy reading myself.”

"Said one parent." AND WHO EXACTLY WOULD THIS "ONE PARENT" BE?! Do you know who could be hiding under the blanket of "one parent"? Lots of pretty nasty folk were parents. I knew one parent who instead of going through the rigamarole of me writing out something horribly graphic and tasteless, let's just accept I was going to say "OJ Simpson" and move on. Alright? And sorry. Sorry.  

On top of that? Definitely didn't read to their kids. Actually, that's unverifiable. Jury's out.

The point is that I found it a little slimy to pair a rando Instagram comment with cold hard facts. I found quite a few articles like this that had made a splash. I took it upon myself to read those thoroughly, then find material to the contrary (describing basic research like I invented it). The sad conclusion to this, after quite a few thousand wasted words, was an admission of defeat. I realized that I just didn't have any thesis in mind for this video. There was no clarity in what I was even trying to prove. Zoomers DO have a hard time finding time to read. I love to read more than anything, but I find my own self having trouble setting aside the time to do it in between work, YouTube working on, side projects, feeling sorry for myself, etc. So I full stop scrapped it. Late into the writing process too. Youch! 

So now it was mid-July and I had nothing in the way of YouTube Video. I had no choice but to use one of my "in the chamber" ideas. This resulted in a light three weeks of cringe video making to create my epic video where I read reddit posts from r/Dostoevsky. I am actually quite happy with the upload, to be honest. And I was surprised by how it performed.

Of course, this wasn't the sort of videos I was setting out to make. This year was the year of VIDEO ESSAY!! And I was essayless. It was time to scour the great internet for inspiration once more. 

Kismet. Four days prior to this video's upload, a tweet had arrived hot on the scene. @justinboldaji had just quoted one of those engagement farm "what's a song you hate" or whatever tweets with his own two cents on the
"Worst song ever made". My interest, piqued.

One interesting note on this infamous "Home" tweet (good thing I put this after a ton of complete bilge nobody cares about)

Here is something quite interesting to note about this tweet. This massive discourse spark, one strong enough to make the news, was a quote tweet. We all know this. But the actual tweet, the kindling, is completely lost to time. Gone. I believe it was deleted a few days after Justin's quote became viral. And interestingly, it was not preserved in any way. Every screenshot of Justin's tweet contains the "this post is unavailable" message, or is cropped to where the quoted tweet is invisible. I scoured the world wide web for this post, just for the sake of thoroughness, and this thing is gone. Wayback Machine didn't log it, knowyourmeme doesn't know a darned thing about it. All that I have to go off of is my own recollection of the tweet before it was deleted, which I did see with my own two peepers. It was some AI account tweet like, "what are the worst song ever made." Classic engagement farm fare. But boy howdy, this farm had one big ol' pumpkin to show off at the fall festival! Then a conflagration took it. Now it's gone. Gone.

Obviously, this doesn't matter at all. But I do find it interesting. A trivial detail, but important piece of the seminal August 2025 "Home" drama, irretrievable from the annals of Twitstory. 

Of course, this mattered not at all to my original purposes. I wanted to make a short, humorous video lyrically analyzing the song, a la my world famous stupid poetry video I regret making. That video is sitting at 458,493 views right now. Talk about suffering from success!!! Really though, it keeps getting shuffled back into the algorithm and curbstomping my latest videos. I have analytical precedent to the notion that every time the poetry video is starting to get more traction, it directly conflicts with how much YouTube will push my latest video to the algorithm. It sucks bad. But oh well. I'm the one who made it. My fault, really. Anyway. I wanted to analyze the song "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. Another "quick win" to get me back on the grind! Shouldn't take me but a few weeks...

hahahahhahaa hahaha haahahahahaha ahah ha

Idiot sets in motion the exact way in which he will waste the next THREE MONTHS of his life :)

So I go to the tweet, and I'm like. Alright. Before I get too far, let's take a gander at the discourse surrounding the song to make sure I didn't miss anything. Cultural context is important when analyzing a work of art!!

Well, what I saw is covered in the videos. I don't need to rehash. But on the note of research and development, I would like to posit: there is nothing more AGONIZING!!!! and PAINFUL!!! than collecting Tweets and Instagram and Tik Tok comments, then creating little collages of pure soulsucking hatred. This is the pitfall of researching a topic of this nature. You're basically inviting one billion demons into your skull and then task yourself to form a coherent thought based on their senseless incantations. 

All that said, the first video was rather straightforward. It just took forever. Part of the reason was that I developed the entire thing as one video initially. Then I saw myself staring down the barrel of an hour-long video at the end of September that was only half done, if even. 

I decided to split it. And I got the first one out October 3. 

Immaculate Thumbnail work. Great job, buddy!

The next one was already rough cut, so I was optimistic it would be breeze. "I was optimistic" is most certainly what did me in.

Sick as a dog and crying

I'm not going to get into the particulars of my October, but I was suffering from some debilitating ailment from the first to the last day of the month, and I'm still sick writing this darned thing. Still got a cough. I may very well never be very well again! But that's the game we play.

When your health is in peril, it becomes difficult to consider one's burgeoning YouTube video essay career. In fact, it seems like the most humiliating waste of time you could conceive of doing. But anything does in a state like that. Regret is the name of the sick man's game. Why didn't I gallop in the open air while I had the chance? Why didn't I eat that junk food when I could stomach it? Why didn't I inhale and exhale without hacking my lung out when my airways were clear as clear can be...?

The answer is because you weren't thinking of any of that. I think about this often as a possessor of disease. There are people in this world who live life entirely unconscious of their bodily functions unless they gots to pee pee poo poo or eat. On the flip, there are people who live every day constantly monitoring a part of themselves-- head, gut, joint, butt-- and never once able to let up. And I'm not bed-ridden or anything, so I recognize my own luck in this regard. But man. Sometimes it burns a fella up... Knowing that someone just ate McDonald's breakfast Chipotle lunch and Outback Steakhouse dinner and didn't so much as rupture a single organ. AND DON'T FORGET THE DAIRY QUEEN BLIZZARD FOR DESSERT!! Most of my thoughts have revolved around food as of late. I have an incurable sweet tooth that will lead me to ruin.

Anyway, the sad fact of the matter is that you have to pony up if you want to play the YouTube gambling machine. I got just well enough to not have to take any more sick days or go to the hospital and I trudged my way through the second part. Posted it on the 7th of November. And boy HOWDY, did it BOMB!!!

But that's the risk you run. Remember, remember, and never forget: you never do anything for the views of it. You make what you need to make because you were compelled, and you learned a heck of a hell of a lot from it, too... Even if it was about a terrible, terrible song. I genuinely can't stand to listen to that song.

Anyway, let me know if Digital Cole should become a recurring character in my video essay series.

My plan

I'm going to make more videos. I make these videos because I enjoy it, no matter all the accompanying blustering. How am I? Fantastic.

It's over.

Reading

Good heavens, well, I've been trying to read these past few months despite Playstation 5. My primary goal in life is to read read read, but I always seem to disappoint myself. Let me try to recap.

I read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers and thought it was quite good. I went to Leon Trotsky's house in Mexico so you know I had to pick up a copy of History of the Russian Revolution, but I'm only about 200 pages into it still. I took a break to read Stephen Mitchell's translation of Tao Te Ching. The man is off his rocker (thinks he has an umbilical connection to Lao Tzu, originally wrote this translation as a Force version narrated by Yoda) but I found it to be a quite lovely translation. I did of course go and research additional, perhaps more accurate, translations of the text. And so I guess I got pretty Tao'd in a short time. I'm Tao now!!!! Then I took another break from Trotsky to read the 100th Anniversary edition of The Great Gatsby that just came out with Fitzgerald's final revisions (allegedly). It was really a gift for someone else, but I mean. Come on. I HAD TO READ IT ONCE MORE!!! Only book I've ever read three times. So far! No, I don't believe in perpetual re-reads. I like to find new stuff. Anyway, after that I took ANOTHER break to read My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber, which I found quite charming. Then when I was getting real sick I started The Grapes of Wrath, which I just recently finished. Now THAT'S a a book that will get you some damned perspective... My life is swag enough as-is on account of having hot water. Well, after that I had to go back and hit up Of Mice and Men, which I had somehow never read. Professional Tip: Never read that in one sitting or you will be able to audibly hear your soul being crushed. Haha!! Right now I just finished Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan and loved it to DEATH. I read The Sarah Book at the start of this year and it instantly became one of my favorites. Love McClanahan. Thanks!!! Next, I'm eyeing something by Zora Neale Hurston. I read too many fellas in a row. Well, I have to finish that Trotsky too I guess. Then in January I have my own plans for a reading list... Video teaser!!! Okay, alright. That's a wrap.

Seriously, if you actually managed to read this, thank you. There is absolutely no incentive to expend your time doing that. I do hope it was enjoyable to any degree.

*I've never been to the UK, so I can't verify this.