Mario Villalobos

Memento Mori

A dark fog on a dark morning taken inside a dark car

Fog

  • Journal

A fog has descended over the valley, and it’s driving all of us insane. I’ve felt like a daredevil driving to work in the mornings, pointing my car forward and hoping I don’t hit another car, tumble down a ditch, or miss my turn. It’s kept me young.

I had to remind myself how to do this. How to publish something online again. I had been thinking about this space, about what I wanted from it, but I’ve been focused on living, on trying to enjoy each day as it comes, to focus on now, on this breath, because in the end, ‌I will only have one last breath before I leave this world breathless. I want to exhaust my life force completely and leave Death nothing but a bag of bones.

How’s that going? It’s going. There are times, small moments throughout my day, where I catch myself and become aware of the mask I’m wearing, the mask that transforms me into a robot, a machine following a prewritten set of instructions, without thought, without awareness, and I think, what am I doing? I’m playing a part, playacting for some audience I will never see. Why? What for? I don’t know. But I catch myself and I feel this deep and hollow and foreboding hole in my chest, and it scares me, so to feel better, I put on my mask and I let myself forget. I distract myself with all the distractions we’ve created for ourselves, and I tell myself I’ll try again tomorrow.

One day, there will be no more tomorrows, and on that day, I think I will finally feel peace. But until then, I have a life I want to live, feelings I want to feel, people I want to be with, places I want to see, art I want to create. As much as I’ve been writing in my notebooks, the essays I write on this site just feel different. There’s something about them that I can’t quite reproduce in my notebooks, and so I’m here, on this first post of 2024, and I don’t know I want to keep coming back here, writing my words, living my life without my mask. And I think that’s what I’ve been missing, to an extent. A chance where I can just be me, honest and true and fucked up like everyone else.

Or maybe this fog has driven me insane, and I don’t know who I am anymore.

Random Thoughts for a Saturday Morning

  • Notes
  • I want to learn bookbinding because I want to make my own notebooks. I want to scour the world for a specific type of paper that fits me and use that to make my notebooks with. Imagining this search for the perfect paper excites the hell out of me.
  • Technology is exhausting me, and I just want to spend all my time holding paper, writing on paper, drawing on paper.
Drawing of circles with cross hatching
  • Drawing these circles in my notebook was one of the most therapeutic things I’ve done in a long time.
  • I want to buy more books but I’m running out of space in my apartment.
  • How much does LASIK eye surgery cost? I don’t want to wear glasses or contacts anymore.
  • I don’t have any tattoos but I kinda want some tattoos. No idea of what, though.
  • I want to buy a record player and build a vinyl collection of all my favorite albums. Then I want to sit and listen to these records and do nothing else. Just listening.
  • I used to spend so much time in libraries, and then I used to spend so much time in bookstores, and I’ve stopped doing that because I live in Montana and everything good is a long car ride away. I can’t walk to these places on a whim like I used to.
  • One of my fondest memories from college was listening to my friends talk about movies and argue why The Departed was an awful movie and why Infernal Affairs was better. I really miss those times, and I really miss having a more active social life.
  • All my friends are married now and have kids, and I don’t think I’ll ever be married or have kids, and I’m okay with that. I still wish I had a more active social life, though.
  • I think the thought of sitting at an outdoor cafe, drinking a good cup of coffee, and watching people walk by for hours is a day well spent, and that’s all I want to do when I’m older.
  • I’ve been thinking a lot about death. Don’t mistake me: I want to live for another 30, 40, 50 years, so not like that. More of this idea that so many of us are afraid of dying that we don’t ever truly live. That, in a way, we’re more afraid of living than dying. At least, I am. That we can’t ever truly live until we’re comfortable and fully accept our mortality, with dying. Memento mori: remember that you have to die.
  • Sartre wrote that he hoped “the last burst of my heart would be inscribed on the last page of my work, and that death would be taking only a dead man.” I’ve been thinking a lot about that over the past few weeks, and that’s how I want to live, how I want to go out. The problem is that I don’t think I have to courage to live like that, but the other problem is that I’m running out of days to live like that.
  • Montaigne wrote about “The Master Day”: the day that is judge of all the others. It’s the last day of your life, the day that completes your story.
  • With that said, I wonder if I will spend the rest of my life talking about living or actually living. I’m hoping for the latter, but who knows.

The Final Triumph of Cormac McCarthy

  • Notes

Thank you, Ted Gioia.

Cormac McCarthy Is Dead

  • Notes

Speaking of having nightmares and living in the moment, my favorite writer, the man I have looked toward for guidance and inspiration during my entire adult life, has died.

I have no words.

❮ ❯

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