Reptilian Wounds

Stains in a notebook

Faust und Mephisto (1900), Anton Kaulbach

What follows was written by hand and then typed up and edited to the degree that I saw fit. If I keep wanting to do this sort of thing, I’ll make it a series. If I don’t, I won’t. In either case, thanks for riding the waves with me. —Maximilian

Saturday, February 7, 2026

Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind. Now is one of those times. I’ve been feeling somewhat manic for a couple weeks now. At the same time, I feel myself slipping more and more into a depressed state. It’s not a clean split. It’s both things on most days, with the manic feelings slowly giving way to the depressive ones, culminating so far in the rotten state I’m in today.

The primary cause of that state seems to be my incessant thoughts about my recently heightened online activity—rushes of thoughts shared with coworkers; heavily caffeinated ramblings, bordering on the delusional, shared in comment sections and misplaced in other dreary realms; a lengthy essay I penned in a frenzy across the better part of two days for possible publication with my employer. None of this is all that bad on its own. I think what’s getting me is the fact that it followed months of relative inactivity online, and only essential activity at work—that is to say, months of self-containment—and now it is suddenly as though I’ve cut myself open to reveal the full magnitude of what lurks inside. It has now—or rather, it has once again—been observed by others and is in that sense—now and once again—irreversible. These are extremely self-absorbed thoughts, the ghosts of oversocialization, perhaps, and I don’t actually think that anyone but me has given a moment of thought to any of my actions. None of that, I’m afraid, makes me feel less like I’m on a kind of chemical bender. And none of it has so far allowed me to simply move past it.

This is not a self-diagnosis of any sort. I have been here many times before and emerged unscathed. I have never been to see anyone about it, and though I do sometimes wonder if I ought to, I have always gotten through it and remained mostly functional throughout it. Living in the country that I do, it should be said, the idea of actually going to see someone about it is kind of a non-starter for me. That statement demands its own dedicated elaboration, I know, but I don’t have one in me today.

Several times already since I started writing this, the thought has crossed my mind that I should type it up and publish it to my Substack. Pathetic. Disgusting. On the other hand, it is somewhat of a testament to the fact that writing in this manner is therapeutic. It feels so good to do it that it deceives me into believing that it is good, and that maybe I am not so far gone after all, and that maybe there is some value in sharing what was meant to be private. Thankfully, my judgment is still intact enough to observe the many flaws in that thought.

I just sat thinking for a while about how we separate the real from the fictional, and I guess also about the ultimate futility in that. About how the fictional always finds its way into the real. It fills all the gaps in our knowledge. Religion does it. Science does it. History does it. You do it. I do it. In a thousand different ways, we all do it. We fill all the gaps in our knowledge with fictions. It’s like a caulk we use to seal our conceptions of the world from complicating elements.

The other day, I read a heavily annotated copy of Euripides’ Hippolytus. Many of the annotations were brief notes about the corrupt or otherwise suspect nature of the text. I have thoughts and feelings about this extant work written some 400 years before Christ, and not only about Hippolytus as a piece of art but also about Euripides as a man, and they remain largely unaffected by the fact that the words I read were presented to me again and again with explicit suspicion. Never mind that the few other translations I looked at had an altogether different gait to them, so to speak, than the one I’d read. And yet, knowing what I know, and knowing that a good deal of what I know is merely made up, I have this sense that I’ve read Euripides, and even that I know Euripides somehow.

We are full of fictions that we think are truths because they contain facts. But facts aren’t truths. Facts are just bugs bouncing on the surface of truths. I’m being entirely sincere when I say that I would probably spill more truths in these pages if I were to commit to writing only in fictions.

Sunday, February 8, 2026

I feel so much better today than I did yesterday. The air is no less polluted, but it feels good to breathe it again. There are a handful of things that I think I can attribute the turn of events to.

Exercise: Despite a poor night of sleep on Friday, I woke up well before the sun on Saturday to go to the park and run. I’ve not been able to run as much as I’d prefer lately, due to a knee injury, but I am slowly recovering. The injury announced itself in late November. I did my best to manage it at the time, but I didn’t want to stop running completely, as I’d also made up my mind to still run and finish the December marathon I’d been training for. My knee held up okay for the first seven kilometers. It deteriorated progressively across the remaining 35. The final 15 or so were especially brutal, which was a big bummer because I’d done a 35k run two months earlier without much trouble. I was ready to rip in October, and all but limping my way to the finish line in December. Don’t ever let anyone tell you—or at least don’t ever let me tell you—that running is not an addiction. It is. And if you’re doing much more of it than you should because you can’t bear to stop, it will eventually break you. Yesterday’s run, a little over a month on from the marathon, was only around 7k. Not enough to subdue the day’s psychic pain entirely, but enough to subdue it considerably.

Journaling: Writing what I did here yesterday gave much-needed vent to the fumes rising off the dark sludge that had taken root inside me. It needed pen and paper, the damn-near athleticism of pitting pen against paper, to find its proper release. Fingertips on plastic or glass simply can’t open the same windows and doors.

Reading: I recently finished the fourth novel in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Morning Star series, The School of Night. The title is a reference to a 16th-century group that included among its members the playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe and his Elizabethan tragedy Doctor Faustus feature prominently in the novel. I’ve been thinking for a while now about the Faustian bargain as it relates to us moderns and all that we seem intent on sacrificing in exchange for knowledge, power, wealth, and so on. If you don’t see signs of such a devil’s bargain in the internet and its various Mephistophelean agents, then I would encourage you to look again and to look more deeply. Having finished the Knausgaard novel along with a few of Euripides’ plays, I felt inspired to read both Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Goethe’s Faust, which I’ve not actually read before. So I spent some time yesterday securing the texts of both and reading through various introductory writings. I’m going to start reading them in order today, beginning with Marlowe’s 1604 quarto.

Music: While spilling my loathsome guts into these pages yesterday, for the first time in a long time, I did something else that I hadn’t done in quite some time: I listened to a streamed broadcast of a radio show that I used to sit with regularly. There was so much good music aired across the show’s two hours, but one song in particular—”Mae Kha Som Tam” by Onuma Singsiri—caught my ear enough to motivate me to seek it out. I am now in digital possession of a compilation album that the song is included on: The Sound of Siam - Leftfield Luk Thung, Jazz & Molam in Thailand 1964–1975. I’m sitting immersed in it as I write this, and though its language is not my own, I must say that it sounds like home.

Sleep: After a recent string of nocturnal failures, I slept like an absolute champion last night.

Time: Very much related to the supernatural event of sleep, the kind of punishing thoughts and feelings I was having yesterday have been known to starve to death when deprived of energy and attention for long enough. It’s very hard to do, sometimes seemingly impossibly so, but there is something encouraging and redemptive in the fact that it does not usually require much time. To not focus on such thoughts for even a minute can seem like an unimaginable eternity. But to manage an hour away from them can turn the tide entirely. Uninterrupted sleep helps greatly.

Human contact (in limited dosage): My wife’s warm embrace on my cool reptilian wounds. Full stop.