7 july 2026
messy meaningless metaphors
this year, as part of its journey into self-exploration, self-awareness, and enjoyment of the body and self, this one has grown somewhat aware of its usage, identification, analysis, and handling of metaphors. there have been a lot of them identified over the past few months but some of the most prominent ones have been slowly chipping away at its temporal lobes. they're usually just Words, where the actions and thoughts attributed to them are the ones that are commonly the source of the metaphor, but isn't this just common cognitive linguistic knowledge though?
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the keilar as a whole is not unlike the intertropical convergence zone. normally stable and well-formed, any deviation in the jet streams of its mind causes stormy stress to come forth. when particularly stormy (unanimous and somehow consistent with the arrangement of landmasses being of a higher concentration in the northern hemisphere) the rain belt loves to take hold and soak everything under it. maybe our headmates are the converging trade winds too; this in particular isn't something it has gotten to thinking about though, with its busy life and complicated machinations. this metaphor however explains a lot about our headspace. actually, this idea of a metaphor has been so fleshed out in our mind that we typed out an entire 700-word yap at this text editor last week but never published it because it was borderline incoherent, probably like what the rest of this is going to be like. stars, it doesn't like talking about itself sometimes.
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mist nets are specialized nets that are sometimes used to trap birds or bats in flight. in part because of their ethical concerns, they require heavy training to deploy and consistent monitoring to ensure that the entrapped animal does not injure themselves. the bird flies into the practically invisible net, falls into a pouch, where it gets tangled by the net. despite the downsides of this practice, it is an arguably safe method that is sometimes extensively used for banding, tagging, mark-recapture, and population indexing (Spotswood, E. 2011) where mist netting is a preferable option as opposed to, say, ground snaring or stunning. as expected, jax finds meaning in this information; it has been catered to by loving paws when it has felt trapped and, unlike the frowned-upon usage of birdlime by those that it has spent its time around its entire life, has remained relatively unsticky.
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we have been writing poetry and fiction since the dawn of our time. not only is it a welcome route into the aforesaid self-exploration, it is an amazing vent for feelings, thoughts and psychosexual endeavors. if our thoughts are a messy amalgamation of words in many different voices, doesn't this mean that our writing is an extension of the mind? this isn't inherently a metaphor, perhaps, but it is food for thought that we have been trying to rationalize ever since it has started writing in a particularly eccentric plant-based shared setting of which it will not name. part of it wonders if its falling-offing has been incited by the very messy split we encountered several weeks ago? much to consider...
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blood-oxygen-level dependent contrast imaging is the way by which doctors are able to perform fMRIs. the core rationale for this method is that when neuronal activity in a region of the brain increases, blood flow increases; by measuring bloodflow, one can then see what regions of the brain are active. reading, praying, playing music, or engaging with movies may stimulate different lobes of the brain: reading and playing music engages with the temporal lobes, and praying and watching/talking about movies excercises the prefrontal cortex, among many other regions of the brain. neuroscience as a metaphor intrigues us... if specialized, highly-trained doctors are able to pick apart how this one's brain works, then can't this one also do the same thing to itself? isn't self-introspection practically the same thing without the funny heatmaps or intriguing electroencephalography? the metaphor here is left as an exercise to the reader. work that frontal lobe.
it wonders just how valid these metaphors, however extensible or static they may be, really are. to us they are pretty heavy but if it were to walk up to someone with little history in the mental health department then it'd probably be looked at like it's insane. not that it isn't, mind. the whispers like to find solidarity with the creatures in its head, and sometimes they tell it to do weird things too like write this while it is in the middle of a stressful phone call at work. full send