WRESTLEMANIA COMES TO METACRAMBISM

My inner Hulk Hogan helps me figure out where this place is going

January 26, 2021

I woke up at 6:30 this morning with steady motivation. After a meditation session and a cup of maté, I was feeling really good and ready for the day.

I hit the morning checklist with vigor and I'm feeling great now AND OHHHH YEAH HERE WE GO BROTHER! HERE WE GO! THERE’S THE ANXIETY AND UNCERTAINTY AND SELF-DOUBT! IT’S TIME TO FACE YOUR DEMONS BROTHER LET’S GET GOING!

My inner Hulk Hogan

Meet my inner Hulk Hogan. I never watched wrestling before but somehow this maniac has made it into my subconscious and he’s getting me so ready to take down these motherfuckers.

Ever since my subscriber base spiked, uncertainty and doubt have been lurking around my neighborhood with baseball bats.

On the surface, I’m all cool and ready to rebrand this place with a new title and a new about page and everything. A very real part of me is swole and roided out and ready to bite my destiny’s head off.

But my arch-rival, Ineadequacy Alligator, has been doing squat-thrusts in my belly getting ready to rumble with my inner Hulk Hogan.

Inadequacy Alligator

I’m so fucking ready to step into the public arena to fight it right here right now.

LET’S BODYSLAM THIS JABRONI FROM THE TOP ROPES!

It’s time to figure out where this place is going.

My doubts started as I began to ask myself why all these strangers would want to show up at my Substack and read my journals. It’s not that I doubt my abilities to keep up with the striving and seeking and improving, but I want to keep these new subscribers around and maybe even gain some more.

It’s very intuitive that my mother and my girlfriend will stick around to read these week after week, but what if I’ve never even met you?

My rocket ship of self-actualization is slamming nose-first into the limits of my ability to be confident producing work just for a wider audience. The doubts come marching like ants from beneath a crack-head’s skin:

I mean who would want to read some random guy's journal? It works for Peter, sure. But am I just derivative of him? NO WAY BROTHER YOU’VE GOT YOUR OWN THING GOING FUCK THESE DOUBTS! Oh man, dude, I'm don’t know. What the fuck am I supposed to write about for these people?

I take a deep breath and the Hulk Hogan in my heart huffs a big huff of amyl nitrate:

ALRIGHT JABRONI, WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE? TELL THESE PEOPLE WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND BE STRAIGHT ABOUT IT! I KNOW IT’S IN YOU! I CAN SMELL IIIIIIIITTTTTT!!!!

OK, OK. I know what’s missing. So far this drama has been between players that know each other. It’s a story about me, my family, and my friends that subscribe to this journal to watch their loved one write in public.

Now that there are strangers in the arena, I can feel their eyes peering into the ring at me. I feel your eyes on me right now.

A change is here. You are not a stranger anymore even if I don’t know you at all. You are a part of my life and my journals. You are characters in the show, now. I write to you, about you, with you in my mind and on my heart. Your presence in my life changes things about the way this life is lived.

This is also not just “a place I journal.” I am building a gym (HELL YEAH BROTHER, LIFT IT!) to muscularize my writing skills and instigate self-actualization. It’s a squat-rack in which I can bust out self-knowledge reps.

Peter Limberg once wrote in his journal that a friend of his would show his journals to anyone looking for an intuitive understanding of what it’s like to be at stage five Kegan.

In that journal, he quotes his friend:

“Reading Peter’s journals is like looking through a kaleidoscope. You rotate it, and sometimes the patterns look marvelous. In other times, they engender one, a few, or a constellation of impressions.”

Well said, internet stranger. Reading Peter’s journals helped me see myself through a kaleidoscope, it helped me see marvelous patterns surrounding all the contradictions and paradoxes within myself and motivated me to participate vigorously in my own inner universe and meld it with the universes of others. With you!

That’s why I make them public. I began to see something in my own voice that might be of interest and inspiration to others the same way Peter’s journals acquainted me with my own potent thumos.

I make these journals to remake myself and share them so that you too can be remade by the journals and in turn remake me while I write the journals for you.

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU SAYING, JABRONI?

We’re all collaborating on each other’s experience of life via this journal. It’s a vehicle to connect to myself, to you, and for you to connect with me just by the very act of your readership.

I notice the feeling that I’m not good enough on and the thought that I have to sell myself to you.

Thanks to my internalized Hulkamania, I can see that I really don't have to sell my journals to you at all.

You can sell them to yourselves if you'd like. I'm so very grateful to have you here, but I know I’d be doing this without you. I’d be doing this if my own mother wouldn’t even subscribe. But she does. And so do you. And that delights me.

It doesn't matter what happens here because it's just "a place I journal." Whatever I want gets to happens here. In doing whatever I want I must contend with my parallel desire to have spectators and viewers looking at my art.

I want to create beauty freely and I want that beauty to be valued by others.

So maybe it’s not just, “a place I journal," but really, "a place I get my fundamental needs met."

That sounds accurate. I need to be creative. I need to practice my art. I need to be appreciated by my community. I need to feel progress in my life.

Oh here’s Hulk Hogan again. Let me pass him the keyboard:

BUT THIS AIN’T JUST A DONATION BUCKET FOR THEIR ATTENTION! YOU AIN’T A SALVATION ARMY SANTA CLAUSE RINGING A BELL OUTSIDE THE WALMART! THIS IS THE PLACE YOU JOURNAL GOD DAMN IIIIIIIIIITTTTT!!!!!

Yeah. That’s true, Hulk.

Until the day comes that I start asking you to support me on Patreon, there are no donations involved.

I celebrate your ability to un-the-fuck-subscribe from here or close the tab and look away. And remember, Campbell, if they keep reading it's not out of pity.

I will not “skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper in the world which exists for [me]!” Thanks, inner Emerson.

This machine was made for killing the spiritual fascist within. This machine is substack and this is a place I journal.

I've written in the past about snorting the idea coke of other people’s writing, insufflating that psychoactive literature, filling my capillaries with thumos, and literally jumping from my chair to dance with joy about what I’ve just read.

SO WHAT ABOUT SYNTHESIZING YOUR OWN IDEA COKE, DR. BROTHER!

That’s right, Hulk. I’ve got all the materials, the raw plant, the ethers, the bunson burners and beakers—that’s just what I do.

Every morning I synthesize my own idea coke whether I publish it here or not. It’s my own private supply.

Sometimes, like today, I make batches of idea coke for free and deliver it into your inbox. Perhaps it is strong enough to enliven your spirit, inspire your own kaleidoscopic self-image, or just give you a cheap, ten-minute thrill.

Maybe I can make an idea-coke-head out of you; a repeat customer. There's plenty more where this came from if you’re hungry for it.

In the meantime, there is a rebranding coming to Metacrambism. You will see it someday soon. A new title for the publication and a new description welcoming subscribers. No matter what, with the spirit of truth, vigor, clarity, and skill in my words, this will always be, “a place I journal.”

SEE YOU IN THE RING, BROTHER!