⚡️ Logs | August 2022

August 31st, 2022

• Writing in public is the key thing. I've posted, but not distributed. I've dabbled. Time to ramp that up.
• Activities that transcend language— looking for rocks and shells at the bottom of an ocean, star gazing.
• The “I should do that” voices are merely suggestions. It's better to show up and work at your edge. Whatever happens happens. Trying to force outputs within some context where you’re not even on is unnecessary grind and anxiety.
• Book review of 4000 weeks.
• Hog island.
• There’s an urgent tendency to stay on top of all your information sources: catch up with the Twitter feed, read all the newsletters, finish all the books, empty Instapaper.. But these are endless tasks. It’s the Hill of Sysyphus. As soon as you consume everything, more generates. OK with incompletion. Not a task that needs completing.
• Spas as a commoditized ritual.

August 30th, 2022

Heat, salt, and chlorine

12:19 am – Day 1 of the Bahamian sun melted away my will. Some combination of heat, salt, and chlorine pacified me into a fog. Happy, but with blunted sharpness. It’s as if the blood rushed to my skin and there was nothing left for my brain. I found myself relaxed, at times profoundly grateful, with eyes that felt like lead, but with an abnormal absence of ideas. Now, past midnight, I feel that struck-by-lightning-feeling. I can’t sleep. One magnetic idea emerges after the next. First I tried to ignore them, then I watched them, until I jotted them down in chicken scratch, and now I’ve accepted that I can’t control when I get to put words into prose. If not now, then when? I wonder if the shark tank is open.

Elusive fish

12:11 am – In the ocean at the Bahamas, my wife screams with excitement when a swarm of little fish rush by. You can’t control when they come, but you can keep an eye out for them. The same is true for ideas. Sure, there are tricks to summon ideas, but that doesn’t stop the ones that arrive on their own. At the edge of sleep, or in dreams, drugs, and float tanks, or in conversations, it’s as if you get visited by a pack of peculiar fish that have an autonomous existence. They’re so clear, obvious, and exotic, but then poof, they slip back into the ocean.

August 29th, 2022

Paradox

10:22 pm – As I finish Four Thousand Weeks, I feel both relief and distress. It seems both like the ultimate guide to step outside our modern anxiety, as well as an invitation to slip into forgettable mediocrity. I realize that I both agree with everything in this book, while also disagreeing with everything. It's not about taking a stance, but existing at both poles. This is the essence of paradox. Our mind isn't programmed for nuance, dissonance, and contradiction. But if you can weather it, it's powerful.

August 26th, 2022

Orchestra of Frogs

2:11am -- not mad, but accomplished. In any case, I hear a jungle around me. Not sure if I’m hallucinating from sleep deprivations, or if the crickets in this neighborhood get really loud at night and I always miss it. Insanely loud. Might just be sensitive. But prob not. Just the sound of deep might. Or some event, where millions of preying mantis things sprout under a full moon and then all howl for an hour before they die. My wife breathing blends in. Frogs, actually.

August 24th, 2022

• Haven't stretched my brain, attention, will power this far in a long time -- approaching 70 hours of work in 4 days.
• If God is capitalized, then Internet should be too.
• When can I say "it" -- compress sentence before
• Can you frame 'madness' as a positive trait? Is madness a kind of fire, and endurance, to always be on, to always be at your edge, to never settle for leisure? What comes with it as a kind of discomfort. But learning to live with that surely seems more fulfilling than being 'calm,' 'mindful,' 'present.' I mean, you can be both. Perfectly in tune with the moment, aware that everything is an illusion, from your egoic concepts of self, all the way down to the splinters between atomic matter. It brings you an arc to life. A striving. A tragedy. Sure, storms will come, question is, do you want go back to the shore ahead, or triumph forward and hope you find land before your ship capsizes.
• 60s had the idealistic vision that everyone would turn onto peace. Some big orgy where the trash magically took itself out-- where everyone succumbs, unilatterally, to a peaceful facism with Buddha at the center. Reality-- a splintering of culture. They had a dream that a counter-culture could wholesale replace the dominator culture. A pipe dream. Rather, it was the beginning of the fracturing of cultures. Many sub-cultures, all independent-- some co-existing,  some counter, some threats to each other, some just hobby based, some serious... Ideological groups are bubbling up, and taking effect in the real world. They'll never replace dominator systems, but rather, the lack im consensus with usher a slow and gradual collapse, not so different from Rome. But Rome collapsed into darkness. America will collapse into self-sustaining tribes equipped with the tools of Gods-- a new kind of Darwinism.
• This is the prompt for another long-form essay we should write. Writing as an underdog. As a hidden phoenix. So many threads on McLuhan we can draw from. Isn't print dead? We should explore why print actually gets more important in a world saturated by multi-media.

August 22nd, 2022

• When the brain is so task-focused, the function of self-reflection is repressed.
• When the logs go dark, it's because of a deep flow, or because of conversation.
• Is it worth attempting to self-reflect in real-time? Or is it more natural to have periods of on/off time?
• Starbucks-- right under a speaker cranking Chris Brown. Behind a person in a Mike Piazza Jersey. Line features all genders, some button down, some athletic. One masked dude. 3 baristas cranking, overloaded with mobile orders. The dude with a bandana and headphones.
• The 100-Hour Work Week. Funny title for a book. Would you get sued?
• People watching. Assumptions we make show us ourselves.
• Approached by a stranger in Starbucks. Offered to buy me a drink, and wanted to pick my brain. But he has no idea who I am? Stalker? Offered to shake my hand? Who is this guy? Is there anthrax on his hand? Annoying approach, but eventually, I opened to talk. He proceeded to give vague answers, cut me off, and probe me for information. It makes me think, even if I cold approached  people to strike random conversation, could I hold my own?
• Story about a DMT pioneer living a suburban family life.
• Steve Sarkisian -- head of Texas football

August 21st, 2022

• Recent chatter about nuclear paranoia, both at family parties and trending on the Internet. Troops clashing outside a power plant. Reminds me of that appalling nuclear war movie.
• Music genres as a tool to shift moods. Sunday morning jazz and big-band could be a tradition.
• More strategic with the Inbox. Make a plan for the week. Inbox contains emerging tasks-- assume that by prioritizing an incoming tasks THIS week. Need to remove from plan to allow for capacity.
• Wilco-- Jeff Tweedy-- not on why-- but the act of doing- making ONE song, authentically, not trying to be somebody else, shortcircuit our need for identity.
• Tasks -- a day, a project, a type -- flow, hefty, a knockout
• Working all day — forgot about this

August 20th, 2022

• Saturday morning work hangover
• ‘Fortune knocks at least once on every man’s door. Be sure to answer.’ A fortune cookie mentioning fortune.
• Cashier at Zara bragging about TikTok audience size
• How to make Twitter feel like a small Circle of friends instead of a public square flex circus?
• On route to mall-- output resultant of inputs

August 19th, 2022

• Apples default alarm clock tone with jingle into the afterlife.
• Linguistically naked.
• "They stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, and everything about them is drowned." -JK
• Why does marketing for social VR apps feel tone deaf?
• Release valve theory: you can't do everything at full capacity, but some things are worth keeping alive, even if they're just a slow drip (ie: practicing guitar for 10 minutes a day).
• The plastic Gazebo in the middle of town still casts shadows
• Ideas are power laws, and by releasing hundreds of ideas a day in a single batch, you force readers to find the needle in the haystack.
• A proposal for bots that bait and read social media algorithms, to then develop the tactics on how to harness them.
• The sin of forgetting about nature.
• I realize that my reading has recently turned into a game of factoid harvesting instead of craft analysis.
• The hurricane of a gnat swarm

August 18th, 2022

• Remember to switch your environment when you transition between work session types (deep work, task blitz, a call, creative work, reading, etc.)
• The newsletter scaries (shit, that's today!?)
• Learned from Duck that micro-tweets are a thing (when you put 5 fragmented ideas into 1 tweet)
• The numerals rule doesn't apply to Twitter. When readers skim at high-velocity, 7 will catch you in a way that "seven" doesn't.
• It's easier to get allured by tangential ideas that glow. They're fascinating on their own, but they don't relate to or enforce the root impetus of an essay.
• A phrase for when a widely-held meme about X ends up being the opposite of reality.
• Writer Brain / Friend Brain. Our 9th grade teacher  is a ghost in the keyboard (Is Ms. Jacobs on Twitter?)
• An architect should visit a site at different times of day. A tree can be boring or exploding with light and color, depending on the sun. Same is true for concrete.
• Gesamtkuntswerk is a German word for 'a total work of art.' It's when a space is designed from walls down to the utensils. Every sale of detail points to a single concept. It creates a higher chances that meaning is transmitted.
• Chicken scratch signals a neglect of the present moment.
• Walking the dog reduces logging output by 70%.
• I feel confident that my thread-logs are uncontaminated from a desire to perform, optimize, grow. I did this on a weird corner of my site for 9 months. I like having high-res captures of my day.
• Idea: each of these threads opens with a sentence. It starts with a number (because Twitter loves numbers), ends with a date (because I'm an archivist), and has some self-mocking variation in between. '53 pointless musings on November 12, 2022.' '76 tips to unfuck your life on August 22, 2022'
• Just posted my thread from yesterday, and I vow not to check or open Twitter until end of day. There's work to do. These things should be created and launched with basically zero attention/time.
• Happy I declared the above in text. I've felt the compulsive pull to check, but I've rejected it.
• Still denying the curiosity to check Twitter. The attitude to truly not care about how things perform is a muscle to build.
• Some breakthroughs on the 'why start a website question?' 1) It gives readers a higher resolution sense of your identity, 2) You satisfy your reader's curiosity by helping them navigate your full body of writing.
• Writing the same thing across 3 places. 1) Scramble around in Google Doc. 2) Synthesize it in this Evernote thread. 3) Share it on Slack for feedback.
• Tim Urban's subscribe form is exemplary. "Nobody likes pop ups. Shit. Well, now you're here." It uses voice to ease/delight readers as they experience familiar marketing flows.
• Feels odd writing about 'Substack vs. websites'  in the patio as Wilbur and his friend wield their high pitch drills and perform surgery on 30-year old rusted machines.
• So much of writing is melting a paragraph down into a tiny elegant object-- you distill the essence, and then bend it so it aims at your next paragraph.
• Essays feature recurring distillation. By compressing a paragraph down to a sentence or phrase, you funnel linguistic complexity into a symbol. Since symbols are indivisible, they make it easier to build meaning on top of them.
• I caved and checked Twitter. Here comes the contradictory thoughts. I'm grateful that this experiment has low visibility, but also feeling an, "I guess this sucks."
• I lost 5 followers from this. The dilemma: grow an audience around a caricature, or, weed out the non-believers.
• Wondering-- when you post a 47-tweet thread, does someone's feed show everything? Or just the first and last tweet? (assuming the later)
• The fact that senorsyslog engaged with experiment #1 makes this a success to me. It's a reminder that these threads are a potential menu of conversation starters.
• Experiments should have time limits. Plan a point to stop and reflect. Don't assume tactics will sustain indefinitely. I'll give this 11 days.

August 17th, 2022

• Most ideas in our head sit behind the threshold of sentences.
• Conscientious people suffer from an amplified perception  of consequences.
• Spiders are the most inherently architectural species. They basically shit fractals, wonder, and shelter.
• The myth of compounding is when you assume that daily tasks will automatically accrue into long-term value. Most PKM systems accrue overhead, not knowledge.
• ‘American guts’ is a triple-meaning album title. Violence, obesity, and entrepreneurship.
• The design of fire hydrants and fire trucks seems like an oversight that congests city parking, but I'm a water infrastructure neophyte.
• Suburbs are stacked abstractions.
• When I shifted from Notion to Ghost, my daily logs shifted from public to private. Something important was lost. What if everyday was a thread? Interesting thought, but funneling consciousness into an algorithm sounds like hell.
• On my second lap around the block. I feel guilty for not taking out Dobe, our 95 pound horse-dog that lunges at neighbors, shits on the move, and howls at ghosts. He isn’t conducive for typing reflections. Maybe that’s a podcast.
• Instead of keeping an all-day interstitial journal of insights, maybe I just live-log one walk per day. Seems more cerebral than relaxing. What are the implications of that contract?
• Rumors of Nazi tunnels under my parents neighborhood.
• I wonder how a public, rapid fire, no-filter, idea release valve would affect my approach around long-form writing.
• Intentional vs unintentional transmission of value
• 13 ideas in a 32 minute walk. Experiment over. Back to work, though, I’ll keep this open and see if anything else emerges in real-time.
• While heating up leftover tofu: There’s a dance between private and public logs. It’s a dance between stakes and self-censorship.
• Time erodes the foundations of your past assumptions. I've held an arbitrary quality bar around tweets. I've posted 3 threads in the last 3 months. All carefully planned and edited. No tweets in between, just silence. Why?
• Sometimes quality bars serve, often they're prohibitive.
• What year (if ever) will physical mail services be discontinued in the US?
• Crazy to think that skills can compound for 15 years, but certain kinks totally block output and momentum. One 'chiropractic adjustment' can lead to an explosion.
• It would be cool to live tweet these in a thread, but I don't want to be on Twitter all day. I currently log these in Evernote throughout the day, and I'm planning to assemble them in a thread app at the end of the night. Any thoughts on how to do this real-time off-platform?
• Don't triangulate assumptions.
• 'How do you define yourself in 10 words?' It's a tough interview question. 10 is a lot (way harder than 3). Instead of trying to deriver random traits 1 by 1, start with a frame (ie: I went to architecture school), and then 1 by 1, extract traits out of your experience.
• Good feedback depends on context. You can master feedback in one thing, but many principles don't translate to adjacent domains. The benefits of switching, 1) you learn to orient yourself in the unfamiliar through good questions, and 2) you learn which principles are universal.
• A marketplace for feedback.
• Incoherent drum solos as existential cure.
• Grit vs. stamina = sprinting vs. marathons
• I’ve only tweeted 342 times ever. Interesting to think I could exceed that in a single day.
• 4 hours of focus complete. Back outside. It’s important that these threads contain more than compressed fortune cookie wisdom.
• Earth pimples.
• I’ve found James Turrell exhibits to be about perception distortions when you fix your gaze at specific points of an instillation. It’s the unlock.
• Lock your gaze at an object 100’ away as you walk towards it. What happens to your vision?
• Long, random, multi-topic threads take on the characteristics of a feed. It’s a feed nested in a feed.
• I got a clear transmission of Wilbur Doyle’s voice today (my bastard neighbor), and his NY accent is thicker than I imagined.
• The spiders are out.
• Perched on a red bench, I see the street life of Big Finger. A Mark Maron look alike loads a coal barbecue, as three elders smoke cigs under an American flag.
• Their conversation is a mystery to me, and they won’t remember it themselves.
• A half-empty school bus skirts by at 5pm. Now I’m at the point of the day where I render meaningless events in prose just to stretch.
• There’s a 40 year age gap between me and the average local of Big Finger. In some alternate reality where I have more courage and free-time, I get to know the local strangers.
• Bay windows let regal house plants become celebrities to the locals.
• A circular brick portal, where a clock might have once stood, is now empty, and you can see behind to what looks like melting August stucco.
• Two doors down, a neighbor replaced their mailbox with a rusting trunk with a gold skirt sitting on top of an empty bird cage. It sits at the direct center of their lawn.
• A phrase for feeling vulnerable about being shockingly ordinary.
• Heading to a local coffee shop to smother this task list. This is starting to feel like OG Twitter where you literally write what you’re doing.
• The Ultimate Guide to Bahamas Wedding Attire. A  title for a delirious HTS rant about the Bahamas. Intentionally void of practical fashion advice.
• I was in a deep flow for the last few hours at the coffee shop. Totally forgot about this experiment. Lost track of time. I was the last one there as they mopped up before closing.
• Realized the psychological importance of having one open long form essay that’s sitting at the edge of my ability. Despite short-form chatter, that’s the stuff that’s timeless.
• Program diagrams are the bridge between architecture and UX.
• Another late-night editing fest.
• In long-form writing (over 10k words), it becomes essential to include ‘maps.’ Alluring previews of the next thousand words help combat fatigue.

August 16th, 2022

The Future-Focused-Tyrant vs. The Loving-Saint-of-the-Present

6:33 am – I feel the tension between the future-focused-tyrant and the all-loving-saint-of-the-present-moment. The future-focused-tyrant sees the unfolding months ahead as abstract units of time. He wants you to plan, and to conquer it. To exploit every hour. The all-loving-saint-of-the-present is about easing into the moment as if it were some nostalgic slice of childhood. He wants you to pay attention, and to not justify everything in terms of how it serves you in the future.

The saint of the present moment is a tempting ally, but it's almost too good to be true. It's not so black-and-white. While the future-focused-tyrant can be stressful AF, I have him to thank for basically my entire life situation. It would be rude to throw him out the car.

These two forces shouldn't be exclusive.  You don't have to pick a companion. You don't have to revolt against task lists. Instead, it's about learning how to function as a 'schizophrenic' (not literally). One mind makes the list, with tyrannical ambition. The other completes each item on the list, with presence and joy.\

It's yet another example of paradox. All the deeply valuable insights in life seem to exist inside some crevice that's hard to see. Life is a complex set of 'false dichotomies.' There are hundreds of sets of A|B decisions. In a flurry, and because we don't have the capacity to investigate everything at once, we quickly default to either A or B. But when we stop and really examine a conundrum, the answer is almost always A AND B. Maybe it's A in one situation, B in another. Or, A in B in a perpetual loop. Or, A until B fails, then B until A fails. There's nuance in every dichotomy. Yet, there is some unique relationship between opposites, that if recognized, puts you in a position to have your cake and eat it too.

August 15th, 2022

About Page

9:12 am – The natural move with an about page is to welcome you, to tell you what I'm about, and most importantly, to tell you what I can offer you. This seems trite and transactional. The power I see in a website is to have an actual representation of myself through time. It's for myself as much as it is for anyone else. I see it as an alternative to social media. I've poured dozens of hours into this. It's work. Compare that to social media, template profiles. I'm just sick of social media.

The Three Pains of the Internet Age

8:53 am – Overstimulated (creation tools) – We can access it anywhere --It's made by our peers-- not just volume, feels 'local'

Lonely (social networks) --American individualism – Pandemic, change in social patterns – Changing nature of cities – Children, already natural --Families, descent, scattered, optionality

Unfulfilled (optionality) – Ability to do anything – Perfection feels attainable – Everything has turned into a marketplace – Nothing feels worth settling for

Intentionality – harnessing & using information for your own purposes (culture) – taking leadership and creating contexts for relationships to form – commit to less things, focus on the details

August 13th, 2022

"The Title is a Mystery That You Promise to Solve"

8:06 am – Love this quote. I think it's from a Ribbonfarm post on how they title their essays (it was forwarded to me).
Titles are several things:

• An invitation -- there is curiosity. One way to to trigger curiosity is to include two words that don't go together. Make interesting juxtapositions. Use contrasting connotations (good/bad). The article resolves these tensions.
• A compressed distillation -- It represents what's inside.  An essay is a multi-scale feat of compression. Paragraphs wrap up into a head sentence. Sections wrap up into a 'map' in the introduction. The whole essay wraps up into the title.
• Phonetic -- Think about syllables, rhyme, alliteration.
• Mnemonic -- Titles are memory devices. If any essay succeeds, and if the title works as a 1:1 pairing, you can walk away remembering the essay. It is effectively programmed as an ear worm.

Ribbonfarm's list of good words to use:

• Principle
• Fallacy
• Guide
• Hidden
• Secret
• Pattern
• Invisible
• Ritual + ancient

The 2x2 Inspiration Guide

7:17 am – Inspiration boils down to a pairing of source & time. The source of inspiration can be from your influences or your personal life. The time of your inspiration can be recent or timeless.

• Recent personal experience -- What happened this week? By drawing from the present moment, your art reflects the raw nature of your experience. Events that would be lost to memory are now frozen in your art.
• Timeless personal experience -- Family history, childhood, and other nostalgic jewels from the deep past. By drawing from your roots, your honoring where you come from, and create something only you could make.
• Recent influences -- Artists that I've stumbled upon in the last 3 months. By always drawing from inspiration, your art is always evolving.
• Timeless influences -- The Beatles, Radiohead, and others bands that left an impression over a decade ago. By drawing from matured influences, your work is anchored in your taste, and resistant to trends.

August 10th, 2022

Smith Island Cake

8:17 am – John Smith
woman on the island for 2-3 weeks, men fishing-- woman oysters – the method acted as a preservative – jordan helped brian make the company dry ice -- then too big – people from smith island come over and make it – ida may -- 400 cakes a year – Annapolis state cake

Dreams as Sand Objects

7:44 am – dreams as objects that turn into sand when you grab them, arch > CA, vr > company, writing > editing, always an approximation, continuously chasing and adjusting –  someone who accepts a default lifestyle at this weird edge– carving own path, yet turbulance

August 8th, 2022

Keystrokes

3:40 pm – Co-working with someone. Long moments of silence, and then suddenly, a burst in keystrokes, a flurry, a storm, lightning-- it's execution, it's willpower, a linear path through all possible things, and then another break. Work is a constant cycle of thing. Orienting, deciding-- and then boom, a string of letter, of linguistic code, that goes through some culture hive mind, reaches some assortment of people somewhere, and then converts into a slightly different reality.

The ego as a tumor

9:26 am – According to McKenna, the ego is a tumor-- a linguistic cancer that can grow and shape itself dangerously if not checked. He says early humans co-developed with mushrooms for basically hundreds of thousands of years. He calls the rise of agriculture "the fall from Eden," or, "the fall into civilization"-- it marks the moment we severed from the thing that would keep our ego growth in check. Language is an abstraction. Our identities are old mole hills built out of words.

DMT for Old Age

8:08 am – It's weird to straddle the past and future. At the old Maryland Comfort Inn, there's a painting of Ocean City boardwalk in 1915-- packed with crowds and circus entertainers and the timeless drones of ocean waves. But on the drive down here, I saw the far future of our species in the future-- a 5-hour hair-raising lecture where Terence McKenna unpacks his encounters with DMT entities.

It's the next morning now, and I'm in a hotel room looking out at an old ocean, catching myself thinking, "one day, I'll (basically) go to space." Not exterior space, but interior space. It's just a vast, and more alien. By the time I'm 60, I imagine extended-state DMT therapy will be something you can book through an app. Instead of smoking it, they'll drip it through an IV, leaving you suspended in an alternate dimension for as long as you can take it.

One hour, once a week. This sounds insane. From what I've heard, thirty seconds is all it takes to leave you drooling marbles. It just seems like the perfect late-life activity to ward off that, "I've seen it all" mentality.

August 7th, 2022

How to Retain Epiphanies

Epiphany is like lightning— shocks system, and can wrap your head around. Fleeting, maybe a slight divot in a hill, how to construct a city around the thing while it’s obsesses you? Even once gone, bandwidth to preserve
The feeling that phenomenon that experience evaporates away in real time
OS level insights? How to retain? Meditation retreats, psychedelics-- fade. Mantras, stale. Variable spaced repetition. New angels each day, otherwise atrophies, a recurring freshness, but around a shiny dime. A centripedal dance, a greek zimbeimo dance around a shot of Ouzo, footprints leave a mandala. Chaos among intention, chaos and flow around an anchor. Not a "definition" but a Dance.

People as components w/ an infinite interior & explosive power

5:42 pm – A weird metaphor hit me today-- people are components. We're all fundamentally the same equation, with different values for the variables. It's different from the hippy conclusion that "we are all one," which states that the boundaries between everyone are illusory-- that we're all part of "one planetary consciousness." It doesn't  make much sense. The sentiment of 'everyone is a component' acknowledge both sides of the spectrum-- we're all cut from the same cloth, and yet, the boundaries between each of us are very real.

This shouldn't be discouraging. The fact that barriers exist doesn't reduce us down to an isolated and lonely spec. The idea of everyone being linked into one "hive-bran" is cosmic and whoopy. But you could think of each person as a universe, with an interior psyche that collapses infinitely inwards, as vast as the cosmos is wide. Language and human consciousness are lossy, and ill-equipped to grapple the mysteries of the interior. Our capacity to know is just a sliver of what we are.

The idea of "you are a supernova" is New-Agey and gives me an Adam Neumann style cringe. But there's something powerful about envisioning any given human being having tremendous potential, a capacity that far exceeds a 6 foot creature that lives around 80 years. Similar to how small atoms can usher nuclear explosions, any human carries the capacity of Christ-- not in a supernatural sense, but the ability to emminate language and myth that warps the whole epigenetic meme swarm we're lodged within.

Being "a universe" doesn't have to be an ego-trip of an Egyptian pharaoh. It's more a matter of accepting things as they are. It's a natural order. You don't fear that the sun will explode or that the universe will collapse. It'll happen when it happens. It captures both magnitude with a lack of conscious steering.

McKenna as a religious figure

3:08 pm – Mckenna, highest resolution capturing of a historical figure, Bach, or a Christ-- 86 NC

1. at the frontier of the mystery, explorer
2. well-read, history- cite from memory
3. speaking ability, prose, fun

Misc.

• Careful of letting negative stories form
• Open experience— antenna on, flood of insight. Recently, bogged down
• Showing up to a state, Random parking lot, hotel, front desk, no research, that’s it. Consequences. Eliminate that hour of decision, get it back. Worth it
• Every interaction with strangers is an opportunity to decondition your invisible fear – what is there to lose? A confidence and openness is to be seized, and it'll carry into your relationships.

Existence Without Stories

2:52 pm – Slightly goofy with the cloud-lathered sky as the background to my text editor-- I'm melting into a towel on a beach in Maryland. High. High 90s. Eyes closed, and diffusing into the white noise chatter, I am away from my state, my wife, and all the roots of "home." I'm alone now in the fullest sense. Near a sea of kindred foibled humans, I revel in the mystery-- of life as both a blessing and a tragedy.

I'm reflecting on the art of infusing meaning into the stories I script for myself. They're double-edged, in the sense that good stories crash the hardest. I'm at a Crossroads-- a point where my old stories are fully deflated. I can revive, re-shape, or, I could opt the third door, to not build a set for me to be a character within, since that always brings ego and hopes and expectations.

Instead, I could live each day as if it's the day at the edge of death, which is pretty experimental to boot up in the phase of life that comes right before children and mortgages.

Take notes in prose

2:45pm – Since December, my logs have shifted between 5 different tools and methods.  This is a slight by product of tinkering, BUT, I’ve learned a lesson first hand that’s incredibly valuable. I see how the nature of prose shifts from medium to medium.

On a public real-time Notion, I was always writing in full on sentences. Since it was a low-key transparent performance, everything had to be in prose— it had to be somewhat intelligible.

Now that I’m in a private Evernote, I’ve devolved back into chicken scratch bread crumbs, which are a mystery to myself, only days later.

If I don’t switch back to a real-time log, I NEED to be mindful to shape my thoughts in sentences. It makes it easier to publish at the end of the month, and it exercises both the nature of my thinking and my prose.

Poetry is written at the edge of running water

10:45 am – Poetry is written at the edge of running water
White goddess, graves

August 6th, 2022

The one-way doors are glowing

9:31 am – In the sun, post-haircut. A quality life means sucking on the tit of civilization for decades. There's always the decision to live life on your own terms. Zero compromise. The one-way doors are glowing. Where you want to go is delusional, and there's a threshold of madness or anger that has to be crossed to truly chase it, regardless of consequence.

At any moment I choose, I can rupture into that future. I can do a thing that inevitably rushes my life in one direction or the other, and the effects will cascade, day by week by month by year. A fork in history. A butterfly wing. The union with the Godhead as you let go of the steering wheel and your conscience.

August 3rd, 2022

Successful counter-cultures

• 60s --> tinder, uber, air bnb
• science was a counter culture
• Christianity as a counter culture

August 2nd, 2022

The manager mind & the writer

8:38 pm – The manager mind of the writer can be an illusion of being a writer.I caught myself looking through some fuzzy logs.I'm flipping through my 8 entries in the last 2 days, and I'm trying to make sense of them as a whole.What are my best ideas here?It's a mode of processing and synthesizing.It's useful.But it's not prose.

How much personal context?

12:35 pm – Great question. And I think I should write a mini-essay on this point! For now, I'll say that it depends on the type of writing.

In the context of a log, a personal memoir, a casual newsletter, or fiction, there's no detail too small to include. In the context of refined and structured essay, I think balance is more important than being comprehensive.

Excluding the temperature of your tea isn't inauthentic, it's just not the full picture of your ritual. Perhaps, there's a separate essay on your tea ritual, where all the details help illustrate some concept separate from the muse.

In essays like this, I see personal stories as a way to both anchor in the shiny dime, while revealing some humanness behind the writer. Too much context risks adding noise that masks the shiny dime.

The danger with context is going wide. Instead go deep. Pick the one part of your story that ties with the shiny dime, and show that in crazy detail, but feel free to completely exclude everything else. Your body of work is a mosaic, and shards of you are scattered through it. No one will ever get the whole you from a single essay, but from your "coliseum of ideas," they'll get a more accurate (but still fuzzy) picture of you.

August 1st, 2022

Artists vs. Entrepreneurs

2:34 pm – The writer as an entrepreneur

Fear of Dirt

2:07 pm – Pearl holds an irrational obsession with dirt. It's a kind of paranoia, a phobia, a mental sickness. Will some dust lead to disease? I don't get it. If you see something, and you feel like it's dirty, then yes, fix it. And weekly or monthly cleaning habit? Totally. But what happens when you're so obsessed with keeping a tidy space that you have no time for anything else in life? Cleaning is your distraction. And then, you cover all the furniture with ugly tarps. Sure, now all the furniture is unusable and requires obstacles to use, but at least there's no dirt.

Universe thoughts:

• Consciousness as the universe becoming aware of itself
• Universe like Pac-Man, a sphere, yoke direction, you return home