The way Tao Lin names states of being/feeling in the eleven page poem reminded me of working with young children who suffer from cognitive disorders. It seems like perhaps Lin is taking on a character who did not naturally understand human behavior to the extent most humans do, a character who had to learn each state of being/feeling as an item to memorize, not something that came of its own accord.
'good feelings toward you' ; 'brief calmness in good weather' ; 'i am the only person alive' ; 'angry face' ; 'people doing what they say' ; 'people thinking factually' ; 'people crying alone in bed' ; 'intense eyebrows' ; 'able to fall asleep faster at night' ; 'is accepting human dishonesty, unreliability and superstition the same as accepting death limited-time, and the mysteries of being and existence?' ; 'is never not angry or sad'
These states/feelings are much more complicated than the cue cards I have worked with to help young kids learn to read facial expressions and understand social situations. Yet I can imagine making picture cards with a cartoon depicting each, to point at when someone got confused. Part of the magic is that the cartoon would be so hard to draw, potentially impossible.
This naming of states and feelings adds to the sense of the narrator as a sort of test subject. Another phrase that stood out was the repeated mention of "classical conditioning." It seems as if the voice in these poems needed to repeatedly practice each facial expression and situation to function to the extent that he could. These states of being/feeling are advanced, so this character seems to have learned a great deal. But even when repeating them, he doesn't seem to understand them fully as experience, perhaps just boxes with words and pictures that match something he was taught once.
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