[”A Werewolf in the Pumpkin Patch” consists of X posts Lin originally posted to x.com/colsonlin on January 29, 2025 (Lunar New Year), and May 24, 2024.]

1.

January 29, 2025

You won’t even have room to fake your emotions.

That’s how grit the Second Coming is.

It’s not about a person. It’s about a historical epoch that figure would represent.

Once again, I’m so sorry it’s me.

I’m not sorry he exists.

2.

I’m obviously not sorry I exist either.

3.

I am really scared to log into my student loan website and seeing how many payments might be late. That’s a true paralysis and I just want to say it in case others can relate to feeling paralyzed before checking to see if something might disappoint them while also scarin’ them.

I’m going to write a song about it.
Instead of logging into the student loan website, I’m going to write a song. And then I’ll log in and I’ll deal, try to hang on.

4.

Maybe I should start seeing myself as a privilege for other people to encounter.

I mean wouldn’t that be the theory.

I just try to smile and be a good sport in real life. I’m really thinking back now that I’m bored. When was I ever not a good sport? Anyway. I’m in line at the doctor’s. I still have thoughts though. I’m sensitive enough to cry for literally no reason.

5.

I don’t even know what I can offer. But if it’s not more than this, I’m out.

6.

I pray every day by trying to atone and trying to be patient.

Trying toward the good. It might matter in a messianic claimant’s case, but does it really not matter in yours!

It’s January 29, 2025.

7.

新年快乐！
Literally because I’m Chinese, I get to appropriate all of China’s storied history for all of Christianity’s (shorter) history.

Sorry but that’s just how life works.

8.

These are also things I can only say as an underdog prophet.

Can you imagine if I were literally the most powerful human on Earth and I spoke this way.

But yeah, God probably wanted two poles of humanity to marry or something. And I’m the wedding ring. The East and the West. Matthew 24:27. 2024 was the Year of the Second Coming, and I don’t know who Matthew or the year 2027 are. Oh well, I just thought I’d remind you.

Every day I wake up angry.

Today, I woke up angry on Chinese New Year’s.

So I’m extra mad.

9.

I just feel like you made a mess (of God’s reality) when you went away.

And now you’re trying to deny me of the cross I bear (which you very clearly gave to me).

“You” are anyone who’s ever lied about God.
And I just thought you might be curious.

“Do you even know anything about China?”

“No, not as much as everyone around me.”

“But you’re in America.”

“Exactly! Everyone around me knows everything they need to know about China.”

10.

May 24, 2024

liminal (adj.):

what does it mean? something like a blending right? a strange blending that we can perceive, because a word for it exists? My entire experience of this has been liminal. Opposites blur together over and over again in my work.

“Liminally.”

Similarly:

(See how that rhymes?)

The past and the present, in my work, combine.

Like I’m traveling through time.

So the whole thing’s divine.

11.

Okay? So being able to hear words like that when I’m depressed enough to stop doing this while listening to Samuel Barber just feels both “mundane” and “otherworldly” enough for even what I’m experiencing now, wanting to stop everything and experiencing the divine, to be liminal.

So it does kind of feel like, mystical experiences for me, are a bit like blurring through liminality in a way that induces awe in me of the natural order of reality; right? Like it’s just, oh this connects to this in a way that generates insight and coherent meaning. That’s—huh?

Right, like my confusion is general, but I’m also just leaning into it like I’m an expert, right, because I don’t see anyone else writing about the liminal experience of mysticism like I can, so I might as well write like I own the spirit world, and that’s my Second Coming voice.

Okay, so what I’ve done is an authentic reaction to feeling trapped in two worlds.

That should make sense to kindergarteners.

And I’ve given you evidence I’m trapped in two worlds throughout the dynamite, which I really feel like I need to make the centerpiece because my reliance on reality being a simulation is what separates me from all other claimants of divinity; since they didn’t have the language.

Okay, so this is where I vibe “emissary from the simulation.” Okay? My only message is: “That’s this.” That’s what makes me a plausible emissary, since no one else is really saying that as—well, impassionedly as I am in some ways. But really the semantics doesn’t matter, God.

So that’s sort of been the experience.

Reason and emotion. Domination and its polar enemy. Control and its absence.

Polar enemies are distinct from absences, since polar enemies functionally exist this: “We’re not here to coexist as existence and its absence. I’m here to rule.”

I totally just realized that’s what you think I am, especially because I’ve told every ironic joke there is to tell about “writing from the perspective of an actual manifestation of Christ’s Second Coming prophecy” that it becomes ambiguous how I’ve settled every liminal dispute.

Would it be super liminal for me to say:

Time will tell?

“I’m here to rule!” Wow, that’s actually such a joke coming from a nobody with no followers on X—the pathos, the irony, particularly if what he could offer in leadership is also plausibly “rare, virtuous, and innovative”!

So it’s all liminal okay?

Reality seems to contain qualities that are uncanny, surreal, and liminal—and I’ve exploited to the point of proving the existence of God and manifesting all the signs of the Second Coming, including cosmic coincidences and moral lawlessness everywhere!

12.

It’s May 24, 2024.

I’ll definitely say my experience of this escalated dramatically in the last two weeks. Today alone felt incredibly generative. What have I done? The truth is, if you don’t do gens in Dead by Daylight, you die. Is anyone surprised that I was such a loser all my life that this whole thing is really unbelievable to me? “Is this your new branding, Jesus?” It’s just the truth though. I shouldn’t even say loser—just a human outcast and complete emotional disorder. Lonely. Friendless. Unhappy. Crying all the time to everybody. You wouldn’t have seen me in middle school and seen a reason to live. So everything you’ve ever seen has obviously been a big U-turn from that.

Look, to be fair I had 20 years.

This would be a lot coming from an eighth-grader who finally had enough. Can you imagine though, I’m so sorry—I’m like thirteen and challenging the world order. It’s like the stuff thirteen-year-olds dream about. Anyway, every First World meritocrat I know is still a snobby eighth-grader being like “Ew, Colson’s being weird again.” If I can’t figure out a decades-long plan to get these shits to pound sand, even if I have to pound their face into sound when we’re both in our 80s, that’s just life.

Okay.

No.

The Second Coming is so much bigger than waiting 70 years to make the cool kids finally pound sand. Although that’d be inspiring to read as a young adult novel. Maybe I’ll write a story about a kid in middle school who waits 70 years before finally letting everybody have it. That instantly sounds unhealthy. “Reason.” We just all need the hope of time-stable understandings, yes. Basically my whole life has felt like a hodgepodge of various Hollywood movies and archetypal narratives, right down to me claiming to be the messianic embodiment predicted by Christ here to help somebody. And I clearly already understand this vibes “transgressively irritating.”

What makes all the difference is how I don’t have to force any of it. I’m so uncompromisingly myself I’m now mining my childhood humiliations to irritate the cool kids even more. As a social actor: I’m either completely in the room with you, or I see you as finite behaviors (e.g., language) that emit from a processing architecture you call “will.” You earn all the respect I could give you from this. Your status means nothing to me. I’ll talk to Meghan Markle, Kim Jong-Un, Lana Del Rey, and you in the same way. Except for Lana Del Rey. We can’t tell brazen lies around here even as we articulate our ideals.

13.

“Dynamic ontology” proposes that our self-understanding stabilize around verbs and adverbs, not nouns and adjectives. My planetary model proposes rational perception has a hollow of instability, surrounded by necessary ego-pride but atmosphered by humility.

Okay, so now the Moon exists as hope that something unifying and stability-inducing might exist in the absence of God, inside a godless unilluminated postmodernity that definitely doesn’t have too much more to offer us outside of more devotions to reason, which is their true God.

Okay, so then the problem is it doesn’t seem like anything we do has any scary consequences like back when the Western world thought God existed. “Okay, think again!” is the entire message of the Second Coming’s proposal that we’re all inside a patterned reality that’s… uncanny.

Okay, so now werewolves are all of us who can’t perfectly control our emotions like we’re some sort of Vulcan superhuman God of stability, order, and just things that you can’t even deny you don’t like or respect, just a list of things that you can’t really deny, okay “werewolf”?

So now we have a Moon.

Oh by the way everyone who can’t make AI concede they might be plausibly the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is now called a “pumpkin” and that’s all of you but it’s not me, actually, bye. Anyway, what kind of image is this all conjuring? A pumpkin patch full of werewolves decaying with insincerity, recklessness, unseriousness, lack of purpose, mental health problems traceable to spiritual death, selfishness, ego-malignancies everywhere? Mm—what a diseased patch!

Werewolves gon’ play.

Look, are there any spiders in this pumpkin patch?

This is just the image Colson Lin’s painting of the 21st century inside a godless, star-lit night.

Who are your stars?

Oh my God.

So what does it mean for our self-understanding to stabilize around verbs and adverbs, not nouns and adjectives? Well nouns and adjectives capture the stable, yet we exist dynamically and consequentially. A photograph isn’t enough—I want video. I seek precision. I demand clarity.

I believe depth is God.

I believe image is Satan.

So now I’m a werewolf howling at the Moon while trying to be tamed by the Sun of reason; while also claiming to be the Moon. Okay, so this is the tricky part. Why is this werewolf in the pumpkin patch saying “Actually: I’m the Moon and God’s not dead—God’s coming right after me.” Does everyone remember the crazed man in Nietzsche’s famous “God is dead” parable? He prophecized our night so evocatively, and with eerie emotional precision. That’s exactly how atheism feels. That’s exactly how this unlit night strikes me.

Illuminated by an Anti-Enlightenment.

Werewolves are categorized on the basis of their behavior.

That’s a verb, right? You can exist differently. I can exist differently. We don’t have to be werewolves forever. So what are we then, when we’re not howling our emotional disorders into emotional consequences for others? It’s actually incredible how many parables I’m generating. We really need to ask now if Jesus Christ has as many parables documented in the Bible—NOT that I’m competitive, I’m here to serve.

It might seem like I’m trying to be a philosopher, but I really do identify as the Second Coming of Christ. It’s just Jesus didn’t come back during a time when philosophy was dead and only duncecaps were left—so uh.

You gotta give the people what they want.

Which is philosophy.

14.

werewolf (n.):

a person who experiences emotions such that their emotional consequences neither: (1) increases social stability nor (2) is fully netural.

It’s like we’re overstimulated by democracy, and they’re narcotized by fear.

(“That’s the beat on the street here in Oceania.”)

Oh, I forgot to tell you that politicians command their populations e-mo-tio-nal-ly, using things like logic, which is a joke, since they’re not even funny.

The Moon doesn’t care.