The Persistence of Donuts

Life is absurd. Open your mind and explore all of it.

Jan 20, 2025

Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you 👈

* Main David Lynch photo in collage by Josh Telles

You melt into and away and towards consciousness and not, as your sense of time distorts and dribbles off the sideboard of your life. Time. In this dragging, delicious moment, it slo-mo pans your eyes down and to the hypnotizing pattern of a multiplex-style carpet below. This carpet was designed to hide all. The stains, the accidents, the joy.

Melting, melting.

You see within this pattern the threads of pure memory. It is your memory. Your memory of this and that and a time that was and used to be. Of you. Small you. Child you.

A warm-ooze haze, sticky and sweet, smothers your brain.

BlinkBlink. BlinkBlinkBlink.

With shutter speed firing fast, a sugar rush of memory flashes and you see a vision of a once was, now a nevermore. (Presumably.) This was you. This was how you once existed on a childish plain of real and unreal.

Playful as a donut, free as a bubble. Imagination as loose and wild as a jar of sprinkles.

Remember that?

David Lynch knew about sprinkles. You have just forgotten.

Over time, your brain was swarmed by the ants of reality and adulthood and expectation and what guides the algorithm. Your work was nibbled at by the pincers of doubt. You forgot how to play—that’s all. Forgot how to access that part of your brain that finds no fence, only horizon. No lines, only space.

You forgot you have access to sprinkles.

Who and what did you meet back then, on that playground built by you?

RememberRememberRemember.

That playground in your head, in your unconsciousness mind: go to there. Go back. Go now. Melt the concept of time to your will. Fold it in upon itself as a collapsing star. As a melting clock. As oozing camembert. Go full donut. Ignore the hole. It’s what David would want.

I am projecting a lot of meaning onto David Lynch. He got that a lot.

David Lynch knew about sprinkles. (Though he may have called them fragments.)

David Lynch knew about donuts. (Though he may have called them fish.1)

Ideas. I’m calling them donuts.

I will not forget David Lynch telling me to focus on them and not the hole. I will not forget his curiosity. I will not forget his obvious interest in the world and in the smallest slivers of the moments of people. He was interested in interesting lives.

I will not forget his delight at the absurd and real of the unreal. I will not forget his championing of allowing your mind to go to there. I will not forget his enthusiasm for the power of unconscious thought and the internal mechanism of the unconscious mind. Of mindfulness. Of mind play.

Of melting donuts. (Though he may have called that transcendental meditation.)

I will not forget. I will never forget David Lynch.

We are a surrealist species living in a realm of half-truths and half-lies. Don’t forget this either: each 50% is 100%.

We can’t go back in time. 100% true. Child becomes adult. Play becomes work. Ants consume the donut.

We can’t plug back in to the child’s play of our imagination. 100% lie. Adult brushes ants off donut. Work becomes play. Creation sprinkles multiply and spill freely from the jar.

Why do we forget this? How do we remember? Is dreaming remembering a forgetting? Or is dreaming a creating of a memory never had? Is the donut good or bad for you?

You should explore this.

Play with that idea.

To have had and then to have not.

Donut and hole.

The landscapes that we live in—where are they? What are they? What’s out there for us to find? Will our mind survive the heat and fire and flood? Will the ants of time carry us away as we melt our lives into dirt and dust? Gone in that moment—that loss of our playful meander into the uncomfortable unknown. Extremes of sweetness and light. Soft and hard. Hole and donut. Is and isn’t. There and not.

Get it back.

Go beyond.

Get out of the fucking hole.

“It’s what David would want,” she says, projecting once again.

Pull the transparency slider of your mind this way and that. What is in this dark corner? What is on that bright shelf? Who can I play with? Where can I go? What can I cook up today?

Find that pantry in the wild of your mind. Seek out the sounds within then listen and follow them to the beyond. Mix your metaphors. Mix them as dough for your surrealist donut. There are no rules here—nothing is too weird or absurd in the safe space of your brain.

Weird is just play given its own jar of sprinkles. Let it scatter them on the plain of your unconscious as it fights for life in the real. Will it be expressed in the physical or on screen or on a canvas the size of an eviction notice? Will this play date yield a vision donut?

Can you feel the metaphorical mix rising?

Disassociate your associations. Disconnect all lines. Pull all plugs from the computer of your internal self-editor. Grab yourself by the brain. Feel the want of its warmth as you roll it into a perfect ball of unconscious thought, smooth and pink and free of holes. It is exploding with elastic Superball bounce. Your brain. Your weird and playful brain.

Now throw it.

Throw your brain ball as far as you can in that mind playground of yours. Be a retriever and bound after it with joyful slobber stringing wet from your jaws. Squeeze it. Bounce it. Kick it against walls. Throw it and catch it if you can. Examine the feel and the texture of it. Lick it. Sit on it. Pump it up, now deflate. Allow it to collapse in upon itself while you inhale the expelled aroma. Smell the sweet release of its bounty.

We dream.

We play on the open plains of a melting world.

We are crawled upon by biting things.

We are parched with our tongues lolling.

We are placing logs in the arms of sweater-clad ladies.

We are dreaming of catching fish in the deeper levels of our minds.

Focusing on the donut and not the hole.

If a black hole is the absence of light, a donut hole is the absence of hope. Find hope. Faith in yourself. In your brain. In the weird. Find an ear. Carry a log. Replace your head with an eraser. Be a blue box and key in your search for meaning. It may mean something, or it may mean nothing and sometimes it will mean both. Frustrating.

Play hide and seek.

Hide the doubt. Seek the donut.

Persist in the seeking of.

Watch the Video about the themes in this post 👇

Behind the Streams, Ep. 65: "Donut"

Janeen McCrae

Jan 30

Watch now (17 mins) | David Lynch has taught me so much. Let's talk about one of my favorite quotes: "Keep your eye on the donut, not the hole" and what it means to focus. And a little about Dali.

Read full story

This week’s amends…

"I came from painting. And a painter has none of those worries. A painter paints a painting. No one comes in and says, 'You’ve got to change that blue.' It’s a joke to think that a film is going to mean anything if somebody else fiddles with it. If they give you the right to make the film, they owe you the right to make it the way you think it should be... The filmmaker decides on every single element, every single word, every single sound, every single thing going down that highway through time. Otherwise, it won’t hold together. When there’s even a little hint of pressure coming from someplace else…like deadlines or going over budget…this affects the film. You just want support, support, support…in a perfect world…so that you can really get the thing to be correct. Now, this doesn’t happen these days. So…you dive within and experience the self…pure consciousness…it’s the home of all the laws of nature. You get more in tune with those and…nature starts supporting you. So you have that feeling, even if they’re breathing down your neck, and there’s pressure here and pressure there, it doesn’t matter…inside. I say, 'Every day is like a Saturday morning.' You got a great feeling, and it grows and grows and grows. Then it becomes more like a game. Even when they come by…maybe to tell you for the twentieth time that you’ve gone over budget, you welcome them, and you love them, and you have a coffee with them. And they start relaxing. We’re supposed to all get along and we’re supposed to all have so much fun…just happy, our tails just wagging. It’s supposed to be great living, it’s supposed to be fantastic."
– David Lynch

On Rotation: “Pinky’s Dream” by David Lynch and Karen O

A reminder that all songs featured in this newsletter over the years are added to the giant mega super playlist of magnificents and magnificence which you can access with an effortless depress of this button. 👇

The Stream On Rotation Playlist

The latest Bobby Fingers (although I’m late to post) is a banger.

My favorite part as on New Year’s day seeing people lining up to get the GPS co-ordinates off the dude’s eyeball and the comments of people who were in the dark saying things like: “Incredibly confusing content.”

bobby__fingers