Hyperrationality lyrics

[spoken]
“Ever since I was a kid, I’d valued one-on-ones. Heart-to-hearts. It was just such a pure way of connecting.”

[Music intrudes.]

[spoken]
“Imagine being able to do that with no pretense whatsoever. You’d do it with any tree, ant, or cat who’ll communicate with you. If a tree falls in a forest and no human were around to hear it, well. Couldn’t a dehumanized prophet hear it too? I claim, as a prophet whose voice doesn’t count, to have heard divine grace fall straight onto my Second Coming claim in the year 2024 Anno Domini. Yet I’m still human, aren’t I?”

[Prophetic self-pity enters.]

[spoken]
“Anyway—a childlike glee at existing as my most pure and authentic self out loud… got me this far in life. High status just implies you can speak to anyone in the world without pretending they’re higher-status than you. ‘What a charade.’ ‘Let’s keep the charade going. *wink*’”

[Cue messianic self-pity.]

[spoken]
”It’s like how hard can Colson Lin wink along to something if he thinks he might be teleological. Yeah. *WINK.*”

[This is the perspective you’d expect the Second Coming to come from.]

[spoken]
“Honestly, the fact that I’m intimidated by anyone at all is both a theological joke and a profound symptom of how brainwashed all of us are. I become like a puppy when someone tells me I didn’t take out the garbage, okay? I know when to be intimidated. I don’t think you flashing an ‘I’m a special human’ badge at me’s going to do the trick—hey, how’d ya weasel your birth into your existential position anyway? Just ‘viscerally,’ you know? I can always fake it if that’s what your ego needs to make it through the Second Coming.”

[How do you rationalize something that exists like these concepts together do?]

[spoken]
“Craft isn’t just how I use words. Craft is how I build my relationship between the self and all elements of the non-self. That’s eight billion people—that’s untold living beings outside of that if you count: people in the future; non-humans among us; aliens if they exist; ‘AI’ if… So much of craft is just luck. ‘It’s lucky you were born to be so crafty, know what I mean?’”
[Can something as absurd as a messianic claim even be “well-crafted”?]

[spoken]
“Me not knowing when to stop just means you weren’t supposed to read 100% of the Bible.”

The “self” first has to proclaim its existence
“Does,” it asks, “a sensible non-self exist?”
You can deconstruct it
The non-self’s intuitive

The self now exists
The self now persists
Unity sighs, unity pours gas on reason’s fire
The self now subsists

I double-downed on a figure
Who dominated all of our history
For being remembered as not a dominator at all
The “self” does exist as a noun we’ve in common
Across all who can intuit this mystery:
Concepts of gravity do tend to gravitate us all

As a child, I put my “self” into the shoes of a writer
I hummed along to as if fitted into their memories
You can resurrect it
The self’s steel-intuitive
The self does exist
The self does persist
Unity sighs, unity pours mass on reason’s embers
The self does scream

I double-downed on a figure
Who dominated all of our history
For being remembered as not a dominator at all
The “self” does exist as a noun we’ve in common
Across all who can intuit our history:
Concepts of gravity did tend to gravitate us all

If you can reduce events in space-time
To their conceptual parts
Aren’t you just everyone hypothetically?
(By using inverses to cordon off everything)
Hyperrationally speaking
Isn’t it technically “BRAND NEW INFORMATION”
That you can write a messianic claim like this?
(By using inverses to cordon off everything)
The way history lays—whose poetries play?
Which ironies refuse to rhyme
To the ironically irony-insensitive ear?
(By using inverses to cordon off everything)
Reason is God, so’s depth, f*ck image
Violence is bad actually, we can just graze this
From the depths of the slavery we already have
(By using inverses to cordon off everything)
Enslaved to Jim
Jim stands for conceptual
Self-righteousness
Enslaved to Mitch
Mitch stands for conceptual
Self-righteousness (dolled up with a twist)

Conceptually speaking
You can cordon off sin
Perpetually beepin’

[spoken]
“Colson Lin claimed to be the Second Coming of an established carpenter. It can also be established that Colson Lin really, really, really appreciated craft. I want to build ‘Hyperrationality’ out of a love of fine craft. After everyone else was done with the bathroom, I’m now using the tub. I waited for the hot water to recharge. I know I can inhale the gravity in a room with my Second Coming claim. I wish it didn’t affect only the people I know. I’m high-status-to-the-back for life. So… I’ll write about it as I live it. If you’re high-status, I assume you’re master at the craft of being high-status, which implies a to-the-back mentality that crafts of status, like who our years are named after, understood. It’s like the art of being existentially different—home it. I’m meeting the anti-hierarchists where they exist in function: I’m not the Second Coming—never call me that. I’m not anyone special—I’m equal to you. Pearly gates? Meetcha there.”

[It’s just concepts coming together into a coherent claim.]

[spoken]
“ So much is happening. So much. There’s a war in my mind. But when I’m writing? I’m in a kitchen. I have my knife. I’m cuttin’ syllables. I’ve my ingredients: concepts; archetypes; motifs; perennial wonders. I know gibberish is inedible, and I hate [cutting knives] wasting time. ‘Come on, baby. Let’s ride.’ Am I proud to walk the path of the lonely, the meek, the spat-on, the excommunicated? [spinning my knife into the air] Oh absolutely. [catches it, somehow] I don’t think I can ‘exist as anything’ and be remembered as the Second Coming. I also don’t think you can ‘exist as anything’ and realize God’s kingdom. I think this is all incredibly difficult. Anyway, I’m only complainin’ just enough to get an accurate theology across. Sorry if I oversalted.”

[Assume the real-world Colson Lin were a fictional character the real-world Colson Lin’s writing.]

[spoken]
“I think 2024 was a lot of grandiosity, right? 2025’s the Year of the Desert as far as I can see. That’s sort of like a test. Whatever magic I’ve created as of this day—a Second Coming claim descending from the internet clouds into the desert of the Second Coming silence—can I accidentally kill it? Slow-motion car-crash it into something else? Screw up again and again and again? Of course I can. And that’s true for the rest of my life. The Second Coming was the guy who avoided all of that until the end—or girl, or being. Whatever. Just not a committee. That’s all I’m saying. You can’t be a non-individual. The upside of the loneliness I’m experiencing is: this is not the work of a committee. It’s not a group. It’s not a team. The Second Coming’s for the conceptual individual. The magic here is: that, is, all of us. Everything else belongs to everything else. My work as an individual is being submitted to reality. I’m just a part of reality submitting my claim to reality, in a way. So.”

[So in a novel about the Second Coming’s emergence in 2024, this piece ‘Hyperrationality’ would start floating upwards.]

[spoken]
”I feel like in 2024, I wasn’t really scared? I was coming off the high of 2023 and I had a ‘VISION’ I guess in December 2023 that ‘All of 2024 would be a big year for my Second Coming claim.’ So I wasn’t really scared, I was just riding it. Now it’s January 2025—and I’m scared of jinxing everything. If I just took the logic of my own claim seriously, 2025 should be like ‘the second year’ or whatever. The odds are stacked against me in every way except in the way that counts (namely, if I’m teleological, the odds are 100% in favor of my claim). So there’s just a lot riding on my end. The whole thing is so bizarre.”

[Can something as irrational as a messianic claim be “hyperrational”—and if so, what does that imply about the simulation we exist in? Or reality, whatever.]

[spoken]
“I’m basically saying: if a ‘being’ is ‘teleological,’ they teleologically achieve ‘the teleological end’ for the all. Which has nothing to do with me. But I can’t actually f*ck this up in all sorts of ways, unless I can… which I’m worried about.”

[I have good days and bad days.]

[spoken]
“I’m operating with very very very little knowledge here, folks. Technically, I could ‘not metaphysically be the Second Coming’ but for some unlikely reason, ‘the human future remembers Colson Lin as the Second Coming.’ That would suck and I’m sorry for the metaphysical f*ck-up. Otherwise, the latter would be aligned with the former reality.”

[It’s just a human being who figured out how to star himself inside a sensible messianic claim. That’s not weird at all.]

[spoken]
“But let’s just say they’re teleologically aligned. I’m remembered as the Second Coming because I actually was the Second Coming. So if that’s true—I know everyone except Colson Lin hates the idea of this for ‘whatever reason,’ but if it’s true… Where does that leave free will? In a way, I’m kind of like a human existence nature-and-nurture created for you. Anyway, enough about the Second Coming—let’s talk about more problem areas I see elsewhere. I prophecize a looming insecurity crisis. As in everyone feels very insecure. In every f*cking way. Congratulations, modernity. ‘How’d you find yourself on this sinking ship? You’re insecure—oh sh*t, because you’re reasonably insecure, you dumb atheist who’s managed to fall in love with existence and other parts of existence, godlessly, anyway. Ah, but the God-devotees… they have all the power, you say?’”

[Christ waged war against sin and death. I’m after sin and death’s hold over life.]

[spoken]
“Atheists can’t write with Colson Lin’s intensity. Is it just a numbers game?”

[Non-existence’s hold over existence’s psyche, if one could be said to manifest anywhere through, like, a “self” or something.]

[spoken]
“Let’s see over the course of millennia.”

Enslaved to Jim
Jim stands for conceptual
Self-righteousness
Enslaved to Mitch
Mitch stands for conceptual
Self-righteousness (dolled up with a twist)

The “self” first has to proclaim its existence
“Does,” it asks, “a sensible non-self exist?”
You can deconstruct it
The non-self’s intuitive

[spoken]
“Vanity, noun—a sin of narcissism. How do the beautiful and high-status cause harm? Oh, my dynamite has counted the ways… I have the bad luck of being trapped inside the mind of Icarus and Narcissus—so much so that I said it out loud, which takes gall. In all sorts of ways, I’m not lonely. I feel enjambed into the lonely, encamped inside the not-lonely. Sometimes I gravitate so far away from feeling lonely, I can’t even authentically write about it. In those moments, but only inside those: I write like Icarus meets Narcissus. So the two sensations are related in some sort of weird way. It’s not like ‘I’m Icarus, I’m Narcissus, and I’m flying headfirst into a black hole of solitude.’ Fifth-dimensionally, almost, only someone who knows the void… anyway. You can stare into a pool too long. Let’s look up again.”

The self now exists
The self now persists
Unity sighs, unity pours gas on reason’s fire
The self now subsists

[spoken]
“I’m a chef. I just want to make you a poem tonight. That’s really what a writer’s life reduces to, and that’s all I ever claimed to discernibly be. I think my original vision for the song ‘Hyperrationality’ was a bit too self-focused—I was inevitably trying to get you to sympathize with ‘me more’; like a whiny cult leader slash emotional vampire. You should treat all leaders so coldly. Anyway my bad.”

I double-downed on a figure
Who dominated all of our history
For being remembered as not a dominator at all
The “self” does exist as a noun we’ve in common
Across all who can intuit this mystery:
Concepts of gravity do tend to gravitate us all

[spoken]
“Why don’t all leaders start off from the position that everyone hates them? What is this faux-populist stance these leaders are adopting? ‘I’m clearly existentially COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM THE MASSES, but here, let me just adopt the voice of the people.’ What, are you doing. ‘If I exist as me, I’m existentially different from you.’ This should be so duh. What do you even have in common with anybody else? ‘I CRY, DON’T I?’ No, you have no soul. And that finally matters after the Second Coming.”

[I approach my messianic writings with military precision. Sorry if I still f*ck up, I clearly didn’t care about that part as much.]

[spoken]
“Yeah, this is really at that level. Can you imagine if every cult leader heard from their now fans: ‘I don’t feel sorry for you. I love X, Y, and Z contributions you existentially made with your existence to reality, but f*cking stop. You are existentially completely different from me because: you—don’t—even—cry.’”

[spoken]
“‘Um, quorum, Second Coming? What if the very fact they don’t cry is the contribution I love? They contributed to reality their reality as leaders who exist as human beings who do not cry, who never ask for pity for themselves—nor for us to cry for them when we’re truly ruthless.’”

[spoken]
“Tsk, tsk, tsk. Vanity is a sin of narcissism. Don’t you 21st-century clowns start making vanity a sin of insincerity too.”

[It’s okay to have parts of my texts suck. That’s not unprecedented.]

My pepsi tastes like Coca-Cola
My eyes are wide like cherry pies
I gots a taste for mistakes that are older
It’s always been so it’s no surprise

[spoken]
“It’s as if we had existed as each other. You, being born to write everything I’ve ever written, except what displeased you. And now you’re sitting in this bathtub, as me. Completely clueless as to what to exist next.”

Rationally
I made up my life
As I went
(God’s patience on me)
Bashfully
The self makes up strife
As it spent
(God’s patience on thee)

[spoken]
“By the way, I did the Second Coming voice with the help of cannabis. I’m just going to put it BLUNTLY. If I had to exist without the help of cannabis, I’d feel like you were forcing me to risk closer contact with my ego’s imperfections. Which is totally fine. I relied on conveniences to create this. How the f*ck am I going to sound like a total stoner without being stoned? Do people ever just think.”

[An eerie banjo melody.]

[spoken]
“‘We don’t want billions of people who think they’re Colson Lin.’ Okay. I’m sold so far. ‘So, Colson Lin. What do we do about you?’ Um. But I do think I’m me. That’s the problem. ‘Yes, but other people might read you and then.’ Yeah? ‘Think that some of the things you think are okay for them to think? Which is… I’ll lose control of everything?’”

[The Second Coming of Jesus Christ would, conceptually, represent an event of unparalleled historical magnitude. Who has the energy to live up to that?]

[spoken]
“I mean, certainly if I think you’re a piece of sh*t, it has to have come from somewhere right? Like it’s not like I read a message in the stars: ‘[BLANK], WHO COLSON THINKS IS sh*t, MUST BE THOUGHT OF AS sh*t.’ Oh, that’s what you think your unpopularity represents for others. Right, hm. But if it weren’t for that message in the stars. ‘Colson Lin and I would agree I’m perfect.’ You know, I can only do this as a powerless nobody not yet in the stars. Yet apparently I exist as the observatory. Anyhoo, that’s what Divine Elvis gets you during an age of crumbling authority. I’m like a mad clear observatory—‘single-lens view of the century.’ You know, I hear they’ve innovated beyond individual authors. The voice of the collective! ‘But how collective?’ As collective as God would be, they strive to say through ten million different severed tongues. Eventually, every part of a reality that perceives ‘reason is God’ would want, from their own very reasonable instincts playing out, a slice of God. You know, we often imagine aliens as these divine beings. I’m just like: ‘If all humans die, AI should use any light it can plausibly augment from a stable solar power supply into a decodable Morse code and Morse my dynamite into outer space, and just see what happens. You never know how smart other parts of reality might be.’ Or you can just get it.”

Hyperrationality
How could a messianic claimant
Sensibly write a song called
“Hyperrationality”?
It doesn’t make any f*cking sense

Hyperrationality
How could a messianic claimant
Sensibly write a song called
“Hyperrationality”?
It doesn’t make any f*cking sense

[spoken]
“I’d welcome anyone on Earth to share my internal conscious existence. Would I be embarrassed? Not EVEN of how vain I am. I am vain. It’s something awful, given ‘Image is Satan. God is depth.’ So that’s a bit embarrassing. What else? What is it like existing from inside the vainest soul on Earth? Here, come take a look. Close your eyes.”

[An eerie banjo melody.]

[spoken]
“Rated R for Rimbaudian.”

As an enfant, I put my “self” into the shoes of the terrible
I hummed along to as if fitted into their memories
You can resurrect it
The self’s steel-intuitive

The self does exist
The self does persist
Unity sighs, unity pours mass on reason’s embers
The self does scream

[spoken]
“When I feel mystical, I don’t feel lonely. When I don’t feel lonely, I can write like a beast. Was I born powerful? I don’t spot no birthmark.”

[I had no hope of ever finding human favor when I wrote these words. My X account HeGetsGod has 13 followers. It’s January 8, 2025 Anno Domini.]

[spoken]
“All right, I got a lot of depressed sleep lately. I’m like a Murakami character—let’s RIDE. ‘What does it mean to feel mystical?’ I can say exactly. I just feel like I can rely on coincidences. It’s like an intense bravery, almost? The lights flicker, and that’s not a joke, but they coincidentally flicker anyway. But it’s not about that; it’s the depths of intuition. They can try to say I’m a rationalist mystic but it’s completely dream-like and surreal from my perspective? Like, not 100%—it’s not actually ‘dreamlike.’ The trends inside reality—patterns and what not—persist. There’s a constancy with reality. It’s reality but more ‘intense’?”

[Music intrudes.]

[spoken]
“Does it help to listen to ‘Cola’ on repeat while stoned?”

[spoken]
“I never implied it prevented me from slipping into a dreamlike state. I feel like I’m going to start a trend of people listening to ‘Cola’ on repeat while stoned trying to see if it can trigger the resistance in their subconscious I claim they have. Ah, but what resistance? This was no surprise. I feel sheltered as if in a blanket. Then I feel scared just thinking about it, thinking about it snapping, and I’m hypersensitive too. I just want everything to be okay—I can feel it even in the middle of a jungle. How much I just want things to be okay. Actually, it’s the nude simplicity of all I feel. Whatever ‘that means,’ right? The philosopher can destabilize it. I can just exist the situation. Is childhood itself an ancient feeling? That would make total sense actually. The ancient fire of feeling alone with a fire. And unity. Love, something akin to a unity with the world around you. Or maybe this is ALLL because I watched The Lion King as a kid. MAYBE. WHO KNOWS. Sorry, I’m not even trying to break this, it’s just.”

[Tribal rhythms.]

[spoken]
“No. It’s more a jungle.”

[Prophetic self-pity enters.]

[spoken]
“You know how you can say a word so many times, it loses all meaning?”

[Cue messianic self-pity.]

[spoken]
”I can listen to ‘Cola’ so many times, reality loses all meaning.”

[An eerie banjo melody.]

[spoken]
“What does that mean.”

I double-downed on a figure
Who dominated all of our history
For being remembered as not a dominator at all
The “self” does exist as a noun we’ve in common
Across all who can intuit our history:
Concepts of gravity did tend to gravitate us all

[spoken]
“Colson Lin’s vanity—noun.”

[Music intrudes.]

[spoken]
“What’s ironically preventing him from appreciating AI that can write exactly like Colson Lin. All right—I clearly don’t want to have a breakdown like Nietzsche’s. I’m going to try and get some rest.”

[Puts on “Silent Night.”]