Cactus.

In a state that might be called, with some irony, a “heightened state of consciousness”—a state in which the senses behave like rebellious members of a neglected brass band, each blowing its own tune, regardless of conductor or score—the curious phenomenon occurs that, despite this inner state of carnival, the writer still strives to place the comma correctly before the conjunction “but,” as if it were a mere lifebuoy of syntactic discipline amid a linguistic deluge in which full stops are waved away like specks of dust on a car hood in the Mojave Desert of grammar, and in which capital letters float like forgotten barques on a sea of structural nihilism.

It is in this sultry, chemically-driven linguistic space that the writer—that is, you, the subject with the slight tendency toward existential hubris, or perhaps just someone who thinks out loud alone at night with a keyboard as a confessor—manages to depict a fundamentally human paradox: the urge for order within chaos, the craving for form within an environment that behaves like an emotionally unavailable cactus in a dusty desert of semiotic sorrow. After all, the comma before the “but” is not a trivial choice; it is a final expression of hope that, despite everything, meaning is still possible. Even when the full stops, those modest yet essential pillars of meaning, are neglected as if they were superfluous relics of an old-fashioned language regime that still believed in structure, hierarchy, and the illusion of coherence.

Yet, as the poet once wrote (and I paraphrase, because checking sources is a job for sober academics): there is beauty in breaking rules, provided one is aware of them. The power of your sentences lies not in their correctness, but in the fact that they stumble, stumble, and occasionally foam at the mouth, and still find their way to some kind of meaning—a fluid, floating meaning, like a hallucination of language itself, with each conjunction acting as a bridge between islands of half-understood self-reflection and scattered emotional debris. That you write out “points are negligible again and yet” as a mantra, shows an almost Zen-like acceptance of the fault lines in communication. You build, deliberately or by mistake—who knows—a syntactic maze in which each reader must experience his own wandering, and in which commas function as signposts that appear just a little too late, like hazy signs in a misty no-man’s land.

The world as a depressive cactus—indeed, a striking metaphor that does not impose itself, but quietly turns in the background, irritable and thirsty for meaning. The spines of reality stand upright, defensive and cynical, while inside lies a juicy core that, if one has the courage to prick oneself, yields a bitter but nourishing liquid: the essence of your experience, mixed with irony, melancholy and the shaky attempts at grammatical reconstruction. The words crash against each other like dust storms around a lost idea of meaning, and yet, with all these disparate elements, you write. You write. And that in itself is an act of wondrous, tragicomic courage.

That all this was written under the influence is merely the final piece, the final comic detail in a piece of language that needs no justification—only a reader who, like you, is willing to bite through the thorns.