2025: Year in books

Winter-Spring. The year started with a search for the "real". Found in the frantic, unscripted noise of improvisation. Followed by the disenchantment with the digital graveyard of "non-things". Non-images, non-ownership, non-presense. Looked for a pulse in 1920s Kyiv, watching a rural chameleon — climb the ruins of the city. Village messiah destined to reform the bourgeois, only to find himself in bed with their wives, wearing their suits, and drinking in their bars. Getting further and further fragmented with every rung climbed. The kind of "real" that gets traded away for a fancier fit.

Summer. Season of contradictions. A psychological tug-of-war. In one ear, Julia Cameron telling "You are a creative child of the universe! Just draw some circles!". In the other, Jacques Lacan: "The 'I' is a structural illusion; your desires are just echoes of a language you didn't invent." Watched these linguistic lies unravel in Kafka's letters. Falling for a phantom of a brave, non fickle woman ready to undertake a journey to Pakistan, only to recoil from the real one who couldn't face a flight of stairs alone. Resenting her failure to see him for who he truly was, even with provided 600 pages of evidence of his anything-but-divine self. Watch it all be written to waste. Our inability to actually see past the illusionary image of the other. Animals captured and tortured by language. Both in our heads and our morning pages.

Fall-Winter. Still keeping up with morning pages btw. Trying hard to think inside the box. The reductionist rules of game design (any design for that matter) are reinforcing improv ideas. The year ends with deliberate construction of the Imaginary, where the rules are mine to set. Complete and controllable version of a world that protects Me from the "fragmented" mess of the Real.