I've tried probably a dozen platforms, approaches, and styles for places for me to exorcize my thoughts, to emanate my vibe, but nothing has ever felt quite right. The purpose of Obstacle Allusion is for me to do just that, but to do it untethered from a need to defend or justify any of the connections I find in my head. Think of it as a map—a place to trace any and all of my lines of flight.
If I've learned anything through everything I've tried, it's that I'm not really a writer, I'm actually just a blogger. I've tried to categorize everything I've written by finding the right outlet for each little fracture of myself I'm shining light on with any given piece of writing, trying desperately to keep one identity from reflecting another. But it turns out what I really need to do to be a whole person is to put all the fractures together into a singular mirror, so that's what you'll find here. I collected all the writing I've done on the Internet over the last 10 years or so (going back to 2014) and dropped them here, incongruences, fleeting interests, and all.
The name “obstacle allusion”, obviously a play on “optical illusion”, comes from hearing a young boy ask his mom, after mishearing the latter, what an obstacle allusion was. To me, obstacle allusion captures the vibe—an otherwise inarticulable ontology—for the theory I'm drawn to. Deleuze and Guattari's entire metaphysics alludes to the obstacle of the normative engine that is traditional psychoanalysis; it's an elucidation whose goal is to transcend that normativity. My hope can only be that Obstacle Allusion is a space for me to do exactly that.
If you'd like to reach me, you can email me at dan@{this
domain}.