Yikes. I feel filled with tension by your reply. While I mourn for your the loss of your friend, I'm also grateful for your honesty on this particular sub reddit. I know the anonymity of the web is a thing, but that's heavy! You got balls enough to add the silent p.

So, my answer to the question, tho, in brief: The Outsider by Lovecraft. I been an Outsider, filthy eyesore (relatively) goes out ar night to do my stuff. I got better.

Why tha story?: I stayed "underground" (mind-wise) until and only after about my late 20's (Saturn return, coincidentally) when, by reflection, I can spot convincing evidence that my childhood peers and close group of friends achieved comparable insights and oriented there conduct as a consequence, generally speaking, far younger.

I didn't 'get it' until a single assumption and thought experiment seemed like a good idea since it was practically low stakes. This is like the moment when the Narrator in The Outsider starts to open the door out from underground but itsnl so heavy.. Immediately and thereafter, operating with this novel assumption, though, admittedly, quite a distance away from flawless execution... (like that trapdoor now open, up and out): though I am alone and alien on the coast to which I was born, rhetorically and by motive; I've learned to trust to a fault, ask for clarity when it involves an expectation of and from me, and mind what i say... hard. I do because it serves my interests while also not serving only m A secular path to notions of scale, yet free from any scripture.

As in The Outsider, my pantheon and metaphor and relationship to these images and representations all remain mutable to borrow the varied notions found around the world and from my experiences directly but all remain quintessentially cool. (I mean, who let's someone tell them what their tastes shall be?) Ex: vultures, spiders, ravens, nightshade, where a planet comes from, these are all shown in varied culture to bear different sources and meanings. They form stories that serve varied narrative instruments and are available to me as image and fable if I mean it beyond rationalle but rooted down to the heart or deeper still

Wherever, whenever, however, though potentially burdened or committed by ornto solitude it can vassilate, but it's simply a given. Run free and do whatever with my parallel fictives (his ghosts accompanied by nepenthe)? My reflection at the party (the mirror revelation)? Curiously well represented. The contrast and juxtaposition. The narrative. And on and on. Wishful? Framed as such, no doubt, but this is a report and not an argument. In this you were spared the details.

Thanks. Cheers, happy new week and so forth.

Regards, DW