[Author’s Note: this Blog Post was heavily changed and repurposed to function as a chapter in the TMR Novel. This is the Revised & Refined version. Toggle under the title to read the Original & Unedited form.]

Been a while. I’ve been struggling to blog properly. For context, I had this Giant Sweeping Blog Post™ in mid-February that was trying to make some philosophical connection between Special Relativity and the way we as humans perceive patterns as a survival Mechanism. Blah blah. I almost broke my brain writing it and remembered I’m not nearly as smart as my manic episodes¹ suggest.

— February 2025, in retrospect —
A month lost in my head.

Time has been slipping by extremely quickly. I’ve begun working with Clev, Adam, and Mills on my next tentpole project à la the Junk Male short film. Can’t say too much about that quite yet, but I will anyway. We’ll call it the Codename: TMR Show. It’s a massive, interconnected multimedia project that, like all my Overly Ambitious Ideas do, started with a Simple Concept: make content to promote the True Modern Romance EP. How would I do it? The True Modern Romance EP is about my breakup with Codename: Didi, but I didn’t want to make content about that directly. Could you imagine?

— A hypothetical True Modern Romance TikTok —
POV your famous girlfriend dumped you and you wrote a song about it :/

It wouldn’t matter what I actually posted, if I made any content about Codename: Didi, that’s how the Internet would interpret it. I didn’t want to come off as exploitative, like I was clout-chasing my own breakup. No, I wanted to instead focus on what I have been feeling, what this blog has been exploring: What Is Love Like After Romance?
I thought about all the women I’ve met as I Put Myself Back Out There™ this year. I started seeing this girl, Codename: Annie, when I was in New York in February. We’ve been talking all the time since, and I’m a bit smitten with her. She makes me feel those old Romantic feelings as I picture her walking her dog around Central Park, and she sends me pictures of farmer’s market flowers she sets around her Upper West Side studio apartment. But I’m cautious. I keep her at a countrywide distance while I’m in LA. It’s about as much intimacy as I can feel safely right now.
I’ve been going on other dates while I’m here, but I’m just thinking about Codename: Annie the whole time. I think I’m doing Ethical Non-Monogamy wrong. Caleb manages to have multiple girlfriends, and his relationships with them persist and grow. Meanwhile, I can’t help but catch Oneitis. I’ve learned how to have extremely successful first² dates, yes, but after that, it falls apart. I am poly-curious enough to genuinely have feelings for multiple women, but I’m mono-wired for one to always rise above the rest. I therefore break the ethical boundary, no? I’m not actually practicing ENM, I fear. I might just be Dating Around. I don’t want to be Ted, and I don’t know how to be Barney.
Was I really ready to Do Dating? Even ¾ of a year after my breakup with Codename: Didi, I still have these walls up. They’ve manifested into a Mask that I’ve been wearing on my dates, and this Mask has become well-practiced. It knows how to Do Dating. It knows how to hold a conversation, how to ask proper questions, how to hit a perfectly timed That’s So Interesting. The Mask can Do an extremely successful first few dates, but after that, we reach a threshold beyond which it’s impossible not to start getting to know someone, and the Mask falls short. The Mask may know the lines, but these women don’t get to know me, and I definitely don’t get to know them beyond their answers to a few scripted pleasantries. I leave the dates feeling jaded, but I still get right back up and Put Myself Back Out There™ again. Which in 2025 means: swipe, swipe, Super Like; IG DM Template™; pretending to wonder, Why Do You Look So Familiar? at a house party; Wait 3 Days To Text™ after a first date; play the meta. Method, Method, Method.
Earlier this year, I had a first date at a wine bar on the east side. Just a few minutes in, she asked me directly— “so, what are you looking for?” I had to respect the forthrightness. The Mask, however, did not want to be broken through. Instead of waxing Romantic, I heard myself sputtering out a bunch of meaningless modern Doing Dating jargon:
I’m Just Looking To Have Some Fun; Why Does It Have To Be So Serious; I’m Really Prioritizing Myself Right Now; Let’s See Where It Goes.
She looked at me not like I was Barney, not like I was Ted, but like I was some even worse third character³. We didn’t Do a second Date.
I started noticing that I’ve been wearing the Mask outside of the context of dating, too. It doesn’t just block out the Romance there. It blocks out the Romance in the World. Maybe this was why writing music has been feeling meaningless. The Mask filters everything I want to say into what I think people want to hear. Or why interesting moments in my life, in which I would have usually seen the symmetry and kismet, have turned into Coincidences and Math. Why I stopped going out to restaurants and started meal-prepping the same Grey Slop for months. It’s Just Fuel. Movies and Books have stopped being Magic and have become Organized Ideas meant to Induce Emotion. I’ve lost the forest for the trees, and everything has become flat. Well, if I can’t see the forest anymore, maybe I’ll start looking closer at the trees.
About a week ago, I was watching Friends⁴. Rachel called some guy Sweet and I thought, Huh. What makes someone Sweet? Is Sweet when someone does a nice thing for you? Is Sweet when someone is endearing? Awkward? Is Sweet mutually exclusive with Cool? Is it better to be Sweet than Cool? But she didn’t like the guy, so is Sweet, while widely considered a good thing, actually bad when it comes to a successful love life? Is Rachel’s definition of Sweet different than Monica’s? And so the rabbit hole goes on and on, all in the span of a few seconds. This all leads to a complete jumble of meaninglessness and no conclusions, and my understanding of Sweetness is no stronger than it was before. The irony is that, before going down the rabbit hole, I actually had a better understanding of what Sweet is. It just… is. I know when someone or something is Sweet. Because of my Compulsive Derealization-Adjacent Overanalysis™, I actually lose the meaning that is useful in everyday life.
In this instance, the spiral broke my brain, and I had to go take a hot bath and shave my legs⁵. I actually took a few days to recover from this one. Only last night, when I did yoga and a few minutes of Nadi Shodhana Pranayama, did I come back to reality. What was happening to me? What was this Mask? What was it investigating? Could I turn it back on itself?
Thus was born Codename: Max Noir. He’d be the subject of my True Modern Romance content. Maybe if I could turn this behavior into a character, I’d be able to compartmentalize it and see it more clearly. Performance Art™. The Codename: TMR Show became a short film, interconnected music videos, a webseries and short skits in which I fully put on the Mask and let it do its thing. It was funny, at first, when it was just me, Clev, Adam, and Mills. Codename: Max Noir was an outlet for my most neurotic, self-obsessed, pseudo-philosophical navel-gazing tendencies. He’d take any mundane topic and abstract it into meaninglessness, perpetually losing the forest for the trees for the sake of making my friends laugh. As the series expanded, we started hiring new actors who’d see me on set acting like Codename: Max Noir, and they’d treat me like him off-set. This bothered me, because they weren’t treating me like the Real me, Max Bennett Kelly.
Oops. Freudian slip.
How many layers deep into the rabbit hole was I? How deep down had I pushed Marcello? Whose heart had been broken during the breakup with Codename: Didi? Max Bennett Kelly’s? Marcello’s? Did anyone in LA even know me, or did they know Max? Did I even know? When did this start? When did Romance die? Am I critiquing the Mask or indulging it? Is there a difference? The Infinite Loop.
These are the Important Questions™ Codename: Max Noir is going to investigate, like a good old-fashioned hard-boiled detective. Hope I Don’t Lose My Mind! Just kidding, making the Codename: TMR Show is going to be a good outlet for this, I think. Cute Little Content Series! I hope people like it. But I can’t control that, no matter how much I wish I could. Right now, I’m comfortable living in my little realm of Possibility, where it could blow up or it could flop. It’s Schrödinger’s content series. It’s all potential energy.
On a quantum level, you actually collapse infinite Possibilities into a single reality simply by observing. On a macro, Real World™ level, we see this every day. It’s simple. You cannot Do Anything without actually Doing It. You can think about it, you can hypothesize, you can analyze, but nothing actually happens without Action. It’s actually so simple it’s mind-numbing— Nothing Gets Done Unless You Do It. Uh, duh. It’s the immutable Truth. A little baby can understand causality. It’s so funny that we needed to invent physics and atomic microscopes and the Large Hadron Collider just to study the most fundamental concepts in the universe and go, Thanks Science! You Reminded Us Of What We Already Knew. Perhaps we need to give in to gravity, or entropy, or whatever Grand Unifying Theory I was trying to get at in my abandoned Giant Sweeping Blog Post™ in mid-February. Maybe to get the ball rolling, you actually have to stop pushing and just let it roll. One Must Imagine Sisyphus Was Catching A Vibe.
I’m doing it again, aren’t I? That’s enough Codename: Max Noir for today, big guy. Do you hear yourself? Don’t try to control the Outcome or you’ll destroy the Possibility. Blah blah.

The investigation deepens…
—mbk

FOOTNOTES:
1. A small hyperbole. I think. ↩
2. And maybe second. ↩
3. No, not Marshall. ↩
4. I’ve been working my way backwards through sitcom history, after finishing HIMYM. ↩
5. My version of David Goggins’ accountability sessions, I suppose. ↩

Been a while. I’ve been struggling to blog properly— for context, I had this Giant Sweeping Blog Post™ in mid-February that was trying to make some philosophical connection between Special Relativity and the way we as humans perceive patterns as a survival mechanism. Blah blah. I almost broke my brain writing it and remembered I’m not nearly as smart as my manic episodes suggest.¹

***February 2025, in retrospect***
A month lost in my head.

Time has been slipping by extremely quickly. Meanwhile, I’ve been more productive than ever— I’ve made a ton of music, made a ton of content, and begun working on my next tentpole project a la the Junk Male short film. Can’t say too much about that quite yet, but I will anyway. We’ll call it the Codename: TMR Show project. Essentially, it’s a series in which my character, let’s call him Codename: Max Noir, investigates the True state of Modern Romance™ in an attempt to make sense of his recent break up. But really, it’s a story of a man who has lost faith in meaning and truth and is struggling to lean on his friends to bring him back to reality. It’s a funny, awkward, social commentary with an undercurrent of existential dread. It’s a mix between a sitcom and a podcast, packaged as an uncanny, hyper-real documentary-style content skit. The ensemble cast acts as themselves to varying degrees of fictionalization. It’s been completely enveloping my brain.

The loose narrative is that Codename: Max Noir is in the process of writing a script for a film in which he plays a fictionalized version of himself. It gets pretty meta, because in reality, I am writing a film, in which I play a fictionalized version of myself, and Codename: Max Noir is a sort of intermediary charactery I play to bridge the gap between Total Reality™ and Total Fiction™. It gets even more meta, to an absurd degree, when you remember that I am actually Marcello, who is playing Max Bennett Kelly™ the persona, who is playing Codename: Max Noir, who is writing a script where he plays a “fictionalized” Codename: Max Noir. Oh, and Codename: Max Noir also breaks the fourth wall and talks to the audience, but the other characters on camera don’t know there’s an audience. Yeah. Can you see my struggle?

I’ve enjoyed playing him in the sense that, much like Hollywood Thompson before him, Codename: Max Noir exemplifies my worst tendencies and allows me to externalize them, observe them, and stop fucking doing them. Essentially, he’s a neurotic, self-obsessed, pseudo-philosophical navel gazer suffering from Compulsive Derealization-Adjacent Overanalysis™. He takes any mundane topic and abstracts it into meaninglessness, perpetually losing the forest for the trees. It’s played for humor in the Codename: TMR Show, but it’s really painful to experience in daily life. The silver lining of the whole thing is that by turning this habit of mine into a comedy bit, I’m allowed to compartmentalize it and easily recognize when I am doing it in real life. For example, I’ll be on a date and start launching into some theory or tangent and my brain will go wait a minute… haven’t I already done this in an episode of the Codename: TMR Show? and stop the thought process in its tracks. It’s like a shock collar or something. I am tired of being this way. And I had to create this entire artistic exosphere just to incubate personal change. It’s working, but it makes me really envious of how people who don’t make art are able to enact change in their lives. It’s a mystery to me.

About a week ago, I was watching Friends² and Rachel called some guy “sweet,” and I thought— huh, what makes someone sweet? Is “sweet” when someone does a nice thing for you? Is “sweet” when someone is endearing? Awkward? Is “sweet” mutually exclusive with “cool?” Is it better to be “sweet” than “cool?” But she didn’t like the guy, so is “sweet,” while widely considered a good thing, actually bad when it comes to a successful love life? Is Rachel’s definition of “sweet” different than Monica’s? And so the rabbit hole goes on and on, all in the span of a few seconds. This all leads to a complete jumble of meaninglessness and no conclusions, and my understanding of the concept of “sweetness” is no stronger than it was before. The irony is that, before going down the rabbit hole, I actually had a better understanding of what “sweet” is. It just… is. I know when someone or something is sweet. Because of my Compulsive Derealization-Adjacent Overanalysis™, I actually lose the meaning that is useful in every day life.

In this instance, the spiral broke my brain and I had to go take a hot bath and shave my legs³. I actually took a few days to recover from this one— only last night when I did yoga and a few minutes of Nadi Shodhana Pranayama did I come back to reality. When I’m in this Compulsive Derealization-Adjacent Overanalysis™ mode, everything becomes “flat,” like literally my depth perception, or at least my perception of my depth perception, goes away. Everything is fully in focus, extremely important, ready to be picked apart and viewed from every angle. I see every detail of someone’s clothing, I hear the subtext of the words they’re speaking, I smell the dinner someone is cooking the next apartment over. It’s sensory overload and every single input is subject to my incessant questioning. It’s no way to live. I’m tired of it. Thank God Codename: Max Noir exists as an outlet for that.

***A side tangent***
Is a character you play sorta like an Innie in Severance? Think about it. Like how an Innie exists in a perpetual state of work so that the Outie can live life, does Codename: Max Noir exist only in a perpetual state of emotional turmoil so that the “real me” can be happy and present?

I know this tendency to overthink is a gift as much as it is a curse, however. My ability to break something down to its atomic structure is extremely useful when it comes to creating meaningful art. In the Codename: TMR Show, I can analyze each creative decision— multicam, 24fps, flat broadcast color grade, hot mic, etc— as a means to an end to create a hyper-real, uncanny vibe. Okay, great. But where does it end? In music, for example, this way of thinking can actually be extremely destructive. Whereas film exists more on the left end of Logic <> Emotion spectrum, music exists way more on the right. It’s almost pure expression. The lyrics themselves⁴ don’t matter as much as the emotion behind them. When I’m writing with an artist and they want to say something along the lines of “I hate you, you fucking suck” I always tell them that in the language of music, what the listener will interpret is not a condemnation of said party’s character and more an expression of the singer’s unresolved feelings towards them, or a representation of said party’s impact on the singer. In other instances, sometimes a shittily recorded vocal take is the one, and you should resist the logical temptation to re-record with a better quality mic or room or whatever. If the feeling is there, that’s all that matters.

***A case study***
Happy, Healthy, Well-Adjusted.

When the chorus of the song initially blew up on TikTok, I was mortified. It was just a demo! A scratch vocal! I just did it on my demo mic! Oh no! Before releasing the song, I tried a version where I completely re-recorded it with a better mic in a better room. It sounded “better” in a fidelity sense, but it felt infinitely worse in, you know, A MUSICAL SENSE. Thank God Codename: Emily was there to tell me it fucking sucked, or my entire life would probably be different now.

Anyways— in my experience, film relies much more on “quality” or “precision” or whatever you want to call it. Filming Junk Male taught me that every set up counts, that the more prep you do, the better a scene is. However, I also know that you can “dead” a scene by performing it too many times. It’s a balance, but still closer to a Logical process in our little spectrum. By contrast, music is much more of an explosion. Usually, the first take is the best. You can’t control the environment as much to create any given emotion, in fact you can actually destroy the possibility of a feeling by trying to create it.

Ah. And there’s the rub, isn’t it? Much like Codename: Max Noir is my Innie to sever me from my overthinking, perhaps I am attracted to music as a whole because it teaches me that very lesson I stated above— you can sometimes destroy a possibility by trying too hard to force an outcome. It’s my core contradiction. In my life, I firmly believe that I can make anything happen. I have never set my mind to anything and not accomplished it almost exactly as intended. But is life really about trying to move an unmoveable object? Are we really Sisyphus? Perhaps we need to give in to gravity, or entropy, or whatever the fuck I was trying to get at in my Giant Sweeping Blog Post™ earlier this month. Maybe to get the ball rolling, you actually have to stop pushing and just let it roll.

Anyways, I’m back in my body and ready to start the rollout⁵ of not only the Codename: TMR Show but True Modern Romance™ itself. But I’m fucking scared, okay? And I’m not going to overanalyze the feeling, or pick it apart, or try to define what “fear” is, I know that I’m fucking scared because I’m putting something vulnerable and weird and new and boundary-pushing into the world and I have no idea if it’s going to work. Right now, I’m comfortable living in my little realm of Possibility™, where it could blow up or it could flop. It’s Schrodinger’s content series. It’s all potential energy. On a quantum level, you actually collapse infinite possibilities into a single reality simply by observing— on a macro, real world level, we see this every day. It’s simple. You cannot do anything without actually doing it. You can think about it, you can hypothesize, you can analyze, but nothing actually happens without Action™. It’s actually so simple it’s mind numbing— nothing gets done unless you do it. Uh, duh. It’s an immutable truth. A little baby can understand causality. It’s so funny that we needed to invent physics and atomic microscopes and the Large Hadron Collider just to study the most fundamental concepts in the universe and go— oh, yeah, I already knew that.

Okay, enough of the physics talk, big guy. Do you hear yourself? Don’t try to control the outcome or you’ll destroy the possibility. Blah blah. See you all soon. -mbk

FOOTNOTES:
1. A hyperbole. ↩
2. After HIMYM, I’m working my way through sitcom history to help me write the Codename: TMR Show. ↩
3. My version of David Goggins’ accountability sessions where he shaves his head in the mirror, only way more effeminate and itchy a few days later. ↩
4. The anchor to logic, or the closest thing to an appeal to Logos, in any given song. ↩
5. No pun intended. ↩