May 1, 2026
Today Emily told me that it “feels like reality is slipping.” I replied that I don’t think there’s a shared reality anymore. People will blame AI but I don’t think that’s even really it; I think that this hyper-individualistic society has finally done most of the population in, by making them so self-centered and perpendicular only to the beliefs that they are comfortable with holding, and LLMs just allowed the corporations and people in power to tip the scales so much further in their greedy favor.
We end up with all these countless intersections where some people tend to congregate and others where we are all alone. The intersections that get super busy start to require tolls (paywalls, favors, conformity) while those who are lonely continue to guard their intersections for lack of anything better to do. And when you do decide to leave your various intersections, you end up coming right back to where you started, because the modern world has been engineered to do just that, bring you right back to start again. These feedback loops are why some people just seem so stuck in the past; because they literally don’t know the way forward. I’m at a point in my own life where I don’t see a way forward, just sitting here at this intersection with Emily putting out articles at a digital newsstand no one visits…
… I unfortunately share a character trait with George Lucas in that I’m pretty terrible at writing dialogue.
May 2, 2026
Insomnia was bad, scraped together about 5-6 hours of sleep before waking up puking mucus. It’s these drastic temperature shifts just totally screwing up my nervous system and making my body completely lose homeostasis apparently…
I was saying to Emily: I keep thinking about how 20 to 30 years ago we would’ve been valued much higher by society. Emily actually was. Our skill sets have become massively devalued. Everything today is you need to have a cache of people that pay you consistently for your output. The whole 1000 people who give you 100 bucks a year thing. And while there’s not actually anything wrong with that.. It was how I intended to scale my card business.
But it doesn’t work for everyone. You have to branch out into so many channels now. It’s exhausting. I would have to start entirely from scratch or get immensely lucky and someone with amazing reach with just the right audience members introduces us to a new crowd. Or Emily and I would need to pump so much money into having personal assistants build social media followings and produce all kinds of short form content as a marketing funnel… you can’t just do a thing well anymore, because we may as well be in the forest felling trees no one hears.
And the great irony is, now that the money would be inconsequential, we have even less chance of ever being popular. It’s just frustrating. Yeah actually you can be paid to be unpopular. Be a rage baiter and troll anyone popular. I had actually considered going that route. I was that desperate before I met Emily. It worked out though. Just now I’m writing for her and bots…
…
Fern ASMR now has an affirmations channel…
https://youtube.com/@affirmationsbyfernasmr?si=A5Owvppj0-znaSL0
I’m listening to fern’s affirmation videos and they are very interesting, especially how much she talks about divine wisdom and the divine plan. And being immune from negative energy. That last one I would love to have. I definitely need to be more quiet and peaceful now that so much is passed…
This one really caught me: “everything is working out for my highest good.” That’s one to think about.
I should work on intellectually rigorous affirmations, a spell book based entirely on logical and scientific basis. [Still need to work on this!]
May 4, 2026
Woke up to a couple beautiful things in my YouTube shorts feed. One was a bit from a Rain Paris cover of “Beautiful Things” over a year ago – that girl is special. Another special one, that SNL bit of Brina showing off her “Plain Tall Boyfriend” – one of the better bits from that show in years… and the paparazzi following Brina at her pre-Met gala get together and a guy shouted ‘Bring Your Love.’ The look she gave was priceless, half annoyance, half amusement. Absolutely gorgeous when she’s serious. But enough gushing over divas.
I’m fighting nerves and cramping to handwrite. There’s no goal, word count, filling a page, or otherwise. Probably until my hand gives out. I want to start my writing, especially on a Monday, with an affirmation. For now I’m borrowing from Fern ASMR. This is a practice I’ve been mulling for months. And in trying to reconnect with the paper and to heal my connection with my own interiority, I need to reacquaint myself with the potency of prose put to paper in blue ink.
The affirmation I had in mind was about honoring my past self: Look how far I’ve come, affirmed Fern. I embrace the pride of my younger self. (Those were the exact words, in fact, I remembered them perfectly.) Pride is a loaded word for me. I’d say my past self was less prideful and more full of oppositional defiance, a walking contradiction often choosing contrarianism as a front but preferring conformity when it mattered, and it should’ve been the other way round. Although being a contrarian for its own sake is not helpful [except] with strong forward-looking intention. Something I didn’t have 20-plus years ago when I wrote many of the things I was sorting through yesterday. I kept most of my yesteryear hardcopies, even if I no longer dare identify with the name printed on them, for a multitude of reasons not necessary to mention here, only that the “me” of my youth was the foundation of who I am now, and I must respect that.
I have certainly come so far, but my growth over the past three years, especially as a writer, has been staggering. LLMs actually forced me to improve by leaps and bounds. I refuse to even entertain the notion of outsourcing my cognition to a fancy calculator, but it has its uses in iterating and elaborating, as long as it stays a tool and never becomes a crutch or a “companion.”
In any case, yes, I embrace the “pride” of my younger self, mostly when it comes to the belief I had in the power of words. I suppose I may be considered a savant in this area, although I’ve not sharpened some aspects of my expression to such a degree that I feel justify that conclusion. I’m certainly talented, but not especially distinguished; I have the “exceptional aptitude” with “significant impairment in other areas of intellectual or social functioning.” Yes I turned to my phone and its quick connection to the New American Oxford Dictionary. Socially, I’m a mess; I’m not devoid of social skills, certainly, but they took twice or thrice as long to develop [compared to my peers] into something resembling adequacy.
Emily was lucky to meet me at 33. At 23, I wasn’t so… put together, shall we say. In writing, yes. Not interpersonally. I still struggle with my filter… sometimes I don’t have one. Back in the day, I filtered the wrong things. That discernment, like aging fine wine, only comes with time. Intellectually, I have my struggles with feedback loops, fogginess, and general malaise – a cocktail that sometimes greatly impairs my higher functions. It is a form of autism that I “suffer” from… I am profoundly neurodivergent. This is just how I was born, and others’ acceptance of me is optional.
I joked yesterday that after next year, the golden milestone, I’d start counting backwards. It’s not a fear of getting older. There’s just this sense that I have, a feeling that I’m near or already past the halfway point of my borrowed time. And I won’t let a number define how “old” I am. Even if in about 23 years I’ll run into a problem… then I can just count the other way I suppose. Numbers are mutable like that. You can make them lie a hundred ways before breakfast, which come to think of it may be useful to me right now…
One thing I’m actively working on is to stop speculating: take things as they are and act accordingly, gracefully as possible, and move on. Life is much too short to worry over the illogical and irrational states of other clearly distracted and confused minds. Sometimes the kindest thing is to step away. Yes, it sometimes means ghosting, not out of malice or frustrated indecision. Purely save your energy. It is finite after all. None of us are guaranteed tomorrow. Today is all we get, anything else is a bonus. Stop wasting time on those who look or consistently manage to waste yours or theirs.
I’ve given up on trying to figure out how people expect me to show up in the world. It’s no longer my issue. I’ve found that writing in the morning and being done for the day by noon isn’t uncommon at all. I’ve always struggled with routine past morning anyway. The rest of the day should be reserved for whatever life throws my way next. I need to write even under not ideal circumstances. I can always make an observation or two and make an affirmation. Today I choose to dedicate myself to moving forward and allow abundance to come to me, as there is no need to chase after it.
I just can’t be bothered with people’s opinions anymore that are deconstruction of my personhood, my gender identity, any of that. Work on the ideas, not create unnecessary conflict where none need be present. Friction is one thing, but outright abrasiveness or cruelty will no longer be tolerated.
I love how Fern said, “my flaws and imperfections are a work of art.”
May 5, 2026
I’ve been following the affirmations that the lovely Fern ASMR has been posting weekly. Now she has an entire channel of hour long videos where she recites them. And as lovely as they are, and some of them are quite powerful statements, I was thinking about creating my own affirmations, but with an intellectually rigorous bent. Rather than the more standard platitudes, I want highly specific affirmations that will help to unlock my true intellectual and mental potentials.
There IS one affirmation that Fern gave in one of her videos that I think IS surprisingly intellectually rigorous: “my flaws and imperfections are a work of art.” It’s funny how these incredibly deep perspectives can be found in the most unexpected places. I’ve certainly, from an Aesthetics standpoint, have been trying to understand flaws and imperfections as not negatives but as something to be appreciated. I often get so immensely frustrated when someone’s world view is absolutely irrational and illogical, and I just toss the text away and move on. And I don’t think this is good for my growth intellectually or personally.
Yes, I’ve been dealing with multiple sources of anxiety over my lifetime, and I’ve internalized that anxiety so much that when I meet a text that I greatly disagree with, rather than deconstruct it as I should, I simply dismiss it. I find that my wife Emily tends to dismiss people for singular statements or opinions far too easily, and while I find this frustrating, I have a much lower threshold for intellectual (and sometimes moral) friction than I feel that I should.
May 6, 2026
This guy Josh Czuba can draft two short stories in one day. All handwritten and he just started with a notebook and pen. Apparently, making yourself bored makes you crave writing, if you only allow yourself to write. I haven’t thought of that. (Neil Gaiman does this.) Also when you get distracted don’t get mad at yourself, redirect yourself with loving self-talk. I’d love to crave pen-to-paper the way he does. I’m glad I’ve come back to Moleskines… it is magic, indeed. Get the idea out of you quickly as possible, don’t work backward. Just take it to its natural conclusion. I get too much in my own head self-editing, “architect” mode VS “magician” mode.
When drafting, don’t think, feel. I guess Ray Bradbury said this. Feel it out, make sense of it later. Even transcribing, don’t focus on refining anything. Feel it out on the second pass, keep the edits minimal. The editing is his least favorite part; it’s my favorite part.. But I get into it far too early, it seems. Like George Saunders says, your story isn’t always what you expect or want it to be… you have to let it become what it will. When something feels forced, take a step back. When you don’t feel connected to the writing, take a break. Ask yourself, what does this want to be? And I think it’s not just stories this works for… it’s reconnecting with the magic. Sometimes you love where a story is going, and other times you can’t wait to move on from it. Detach, because your least favorite work is sometimes readers’ favorite.
I like Josh’s term “creative athlete” in the age of “cheap dopamine.” He sees this workout as an alternative to endless consumption. Really like that. I’m checking out more of his channel. I love how he said the best way to heal brain rot is just grab a piece of paper and a pen and write down whatever ideas you have without judgment. And do this just five minutes a day in the morning and five minutes a day at night. Even just basic things. Be more intentional about the content you consume, and specifically what you CHOOSE and not selected by an algorithm (which can be good but you need to practice your own agency.) Work on expanding your imaginative capacity, specifically short stories. The idea is to replace constant consumption with creative practice. Maybe I should read George Saunders. I love his writing advice. I still think nonfiction can be creative. Consume longer, deeper media that’s a COMPLETE story, completion is important. We’re always craving… leading to fatigue, hmm.
Double dose of Hannah Fry today. I got suggested an interview she did w/ Linkedin London (hosted by the cofounder of LinkedIn) about “Hacking Human Nature.” I don’t really like that title but I like her and what she has to say. I like what she said about Big Data being the “mathification of industry” and how math can bring incredible insights. [I would say] the problem is in how the data is used. Hannah is trying to “move the dial just a bit” on getting people to realize math is a living and breathing language, not just textbook learning [that people are afraid of trying to understand how it works in the real world.] There’s also a shift that computers have always been thought of as deterministic, but now we’re shifting towards using them in probabilistic ways. And the host, Reid Hoffman, said, everything is probability (nothing is 0 or 100.)
“Everything exists on a spectrum,” Hannah said. I’m so grateful she survived cancer and the world is better for it. I also love that Hannah talked about how prisons don’t actually work when you look at the data. (And she’s not a libertarian like me! Yay, math!) IMHO, only those who are actually a danger to society should be imprisoned. There are more effective, productive penalties. Like me, Hannah is excited about AI tutors and LLMs are amazing research tools that actually help us learn better – it’s a huge step forward in individualized learning. Hannah is an optimist about future tech, although she admits that optimism is a coping mechanism. But there are “dumb people designing things.” (She specifically cites driver-facing cameras in cars that try to determine “emotional states” and its junk tech.)
Hoffmann brought up a good point about how LLMs have a good chance of reducing suicides despite the narrative we’ve heard to the contrary. (The same is true with LLM’s actual ability to deconstruct conspiracy theories.) Interesting topic.
Hannah talked about focusing on having top-level questions being discussed in public rather than focusing on bad outcomes of tech going wrong and when systems fail. She also said you have to understand where people are coming from with empathy and giving them numbers isn’t going to change their minds; ask questions, don’t just bombard with information. I was also thinking, should I build in a “confidence percentage” into my LLM prompts? Might be interesting to follow. I wanted to also mention something Reid’s cohost Aria Finger said about how many students were terrible at writing, and even if they understood the ideas, she had to mark them down for their shortcomings at composition. Again, something AI can positively impact.
I sometimes have too many thoughts for my head to properly contain and perhaps if I’m able to get the words out of me that have already formed aiding them, perhaps I will be more at ease? Less anxious with so much less swirling around constantly distracting me and dividing my attention?
May 8, 2026
I didn’t go to sleep at a reasonable time and didn’t really sleep all that much or well, not out of any sort of excitement but out of pure disregard for keeping any sort of schedule. After all I only had two engagements today, one in the evening for dinner and the other an on again off again affair with my moleskine notebook. Do I have anything important to say? Not at all.
I will say that the Fool Time series from Jon Bois is a masterwork and that’s part of why I stayed up too late. I am for better or worse a completionist, a long time habit that honestly, I might just need to kick.
I am taking a self imposed rest day, not only because it’s my birthday today but also because it seems I subconsciously sabotaged my restfulness to force myself to take a break from overworking my poor foggy gray matter. Perhaps for the better.
I’ll come back to my handwritten notes later but I wanted to read something by Henrik Karlson, so I’m taking the notes on screen, even though I probably shouldn’t… but it’s that or sit here staring out the window and sneezing profusely. Allergy medicine season, clearly; should’ve intuited that by the buds on the trees outside.
The world reveals itself to those who travel by foot
Henrik is talking about a bike trip that him and his buddy took when they were sixteen to Finland (they were from Sweden)
“Our trip helped me realize that the world isn’t like one of those games with predetermined levels; it is a game of generated landscapes where the world keeps growing the further you go. You can go out and talk to people and do stuff, and the world opens up vista after vista.
“Or, as Werner Herzog likes to say, “the world reveals itself to those who travel by foot.”“ Or by bicycle in this case. Same difference.
Viktor sounds cool: “..at twenty, I met Viktor, who was a year younger than I and a serious socionaut, exploring the outer edges of what was possible in social space. Viktor was always conjuring small scenes and crafting creative social situations that made me realize how much more interesting life can be if you put some thought into it.”
I love that term “Socionaut.” Here I am trying to be a hermit and this is definitely suggesting the opposite of that….
He suggested… “For more on the theme of friends, this piece is probably the best one I have:
“Sometimes the reason you can’t find people you resonate with is because you misread the ones you meet” Henrik Karlsson, April 23, 2025
I love his long titles. He is, after all, where I got the idea of a blog post being more like a long search query to find interesting people who will send interesting stuff to your inbox from.
Fortunately that article isn’t paywalled: https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/friends-missed (I may pay for a month at some point to catch up on the paywalled stuff, but in those cases I’ll keep my notes vague because I respect this is how he makes a living.)
Unfortunately I have the opposite experience… I misread the people I meet as being friends… not a fun outcome. Emily isn’t going to start over at 47, and I’m not at 39. I feel like that if Emily and I meet anyone, it’s going to be through something we wrote.
I like this… “Looking back, I was heavily oriented toward friendships of utility as a teenager. Most children are self-centered like this, and I think that is probably healthy: you need people to help you out into the world when you are young, people who can help you grow. In my case, what I was (subconsciously) looking for were people who were active and extroverted and who could help me get over my natural shyness and break out into the world.”
At this point, I just need people to keep me honest with myself and accountable for existing.
“… I wasn’t yet mature enough to see the value of a person irrespective of the value they could confer to me.”
I have always had the opposite problem, thinking people could offer MORE value than they really ever did, or perhaps even could. I do absolutely agree with what he calls, well Aristotle actually, friendships of virtue. That’s what Emily and I have… and these are rare.
… I need to stop MAKING work for myself and DOING what feels necessary instead.
…
From the moleskine:
I had a few opening thoughts to type in my phone to jumpstart my cold writing brain. With my lack of proper sleep I should snooze for a bit, but I feel like after today, a lot of my days will be like this. Another year I’ve been “gifted” to have the privilege of breathing, and rather than let my imagination run wild all over this page as many pieces of advice would suggest, I actually think that today I’m only interested in real talk. The first thing, my imagination has often been my worst enemy. I don’t particularly want to elaborate on why presently and I’d prefer it be a later topic of discussion. But it’s vital I point that out.
I have a lot of issues. And they’re mainly with myself at this point. As traumatic as the events of the past decade have been, I’ve had a severe lack of taking necessary time to process. I overstimulate constantly. Even last night when I intended leisure I found myself far too attached to the screen. Yes, that four part series making brilliant correlations between the early history of the worldwide telegraph network and Tool Time (thanks to the many Al-Tim sort of relationship dynamics that were somehow everywhere in those days) was a genius narrative. [I meant to take much more notes on that series but it just didn’t happen due to being so fatigued, but Jon DID go a bit too hard on Tim, and honestly didn’t give even Al enough credit, and really glossed over Wilson. Great series, but I have some nitpicks specifically on the Home Improvement side. Not to say his remarks were untrue, but his liberal – in a bad way – slant is obvious.]
Perhaps I feel inadequate to create such a masterpiece, one who called herself a semi-serious historian at one point. I’m just an amateur who knows just enough to be dangerous, and a bit more than that enough to at times be delusional. This isn’t negative self-talk, of which I’m severely guilty. It’s a sentiment that I’ve expressed a few times over the years. Deep down I know I don’t really know shit. But the wacky commotions I do make, especially those down the line that are realized without me ever properly expressing them myself, why do I bury them? Why do I not explore so many of the ideas I’ve had about the “end times” or conversely, how mesh networks would basically make modern statecraft obsolete. A lot of what I come up with on a regular basis oscillates between the most bleak and blinding brilliance. Of course I’ve been focused more on the former, as if to purposely depress myself.
This is the internal Resistance that the early pages I happened up in War of Art was on about. But I think the truth is actually the inverse. We are all born with a spark and most often it’s snuffed out when we’re really young and many of us are never able to reignite it. [I believe, then, that most Resistance is learned, not innate.] I think my own internal resistance is a necessary evil. It seems that some creatives, especially those whose spark was allowed to crackle and linger well into their early teens, become pressure cookers when the “world” decides to try snuffing out your spirit. It reignited a few times in my mid-to-late teens, only to be snuffed out again by the “college experience” and “Young adulthood” which are miserable lessons in how ultimately you can only trust yourself and tolerating others is often barely bearable. We all need each other but most of us would be better off without one another. This isn’t an anti-social stance. It’s just been the truth of my existence.
I have been exhausted by humanity. It’s not getting better. So I must retreat, purposefully. I must stop concerning myself altogether with the mindset of production entirely. Ironically, I must trust my gut, indecisive, queasy, and fickle as it is. I need to allow myself to feel some very difficult thoughts. I need to admit some dark and potentially dangerous truths. I don’t have to even type them all up, but they need to be expressed and released somehow. And for the love of all that’s sacred I need to cut my screen time drastically. Even just to find a more manageable baseline of proper stimulation.
I used to touch grass often, you know. Now it’s once a week at best. Historically bad winter, fatigue, and nerve issues aside, I need the solidarity of indifferent Nature to remind me how puny I am and to finally get over my self-doubt, self-loathing, self-pity, and self-sabotage. Yes, by not entirely throwing myself at the notebook, I’m sabotaging myself. So here I am today giving myself the resolve to put down the damn phone, avoid screens as much as possible and give myself the space to just become absolutely and unbelievably bored [I passed out for over an hour and woke up extremely agitated instead, which was not my goal.] I don’t know what will come of this and that, I suppose, will be the story worth telling. [wtf is that last sentence?]
…
From that “Sometimes the reason…” essay from Karlsson earlier: https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/friends-missed
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
—Marcel Proust
And I suppose I’m looking to see things with new eyes, and the ones I have are pretty short-sighted as they are…
A bit Henrik quoted from an earlier piece about his wife Johanna: “You can only ever know another individual if you meet them in open dialogue — if you treat them as unfinished, as capable of surprise.” “Dostoevsky as lover,” That’s a beautiful sentence. He writes a lot of those. Glad I came back and finished this one.
Henrik concludes: “If someone seems boring to you, or a bad fit, it might be that you don’t know how to prompt them, that you haven’t seen them react to the context that brings out their full being. You probably don’t know how much beauty lies hidden in the people around you.”
I may have to make a Karlsson quotes page on OC…
…
A couple amazing lines from bear’s den “all the wrong places”
“you would lie because the truth would hurt us all”
“Out there in the deepest blue
Where I swear I can still reach you
In a place where all our shame
Doesn’t know our names
Beyond our whispers in the dark
And all the shadows that walk beside you
I don’t need to ask
I know where I can find you”
Also “save as draft” may be the best Katy Perry song ever and I don’t think it’s close… need to do a new vibrations whatever on it.
“You’re just a stranger I know everything about” – Olivia Rodrigo’s stranger
May 10, 2026
I can’t expect much of anything from myself on 4 hours of very light uneasy sleep peppered with absurd allegorical dreams. No nightmares. I just couldn’t stay in a REM cycle for very long. I burned through the fog yesterday, managed to keep myself from being overstimulated and the insomnia still clocked me!
After fighting with the chromebook to back up this past week’s work, I finally got around to Sublime…
Great post that read: “Maybe instead of SCALING and exponentially growing we commit to exponentially evolving.” This is exactly along the lines I’ve been thinking.
“People on the internet were cruel to me, but nobody was crueler to me than I was to myself.” – Lena Dunham, Famesick: A Memoir. I don’t know anything about Lena Dunham, but I have to admit, I think the same is true for myself
I like this poem “making it” and I have to look up who wrote it, especially these opening lines:
“Ignore all possible concepts and possibilities —
Ignore Beethoven, the spider, the damnation of Faust —
Just make it, babe, make it…”
Gurwinder always has interesting stuff, and this time it’s How Social Media Shortens Your Life – by Gurwinder. Specifically, “it’s engineered to speed up your time.”
Did you know the most common noun in the English language is “time?” That makes some sense, I think. It’s what we all don’t seem to have enough of, after all.
“We kick up a fuss when tech giants steal our data, but we’ve been strangely nonchalant as those same companies carry out the greatest heist of our time in history.” that is just an amazing sentence.
This article is actually from August 2025… obviously, still relevant. It never occurred to me just how similar casino design is to social media design, using the same psychological tricks.
I miss the days when I could reach the end of a social media feed…
“… by constantly interrupting you, social media platforms can impair your awareness and shorten your days even while you’re not on them, so that you end up scrolling through the real world as shallowly as the virtual one.” I definitely had this experience.
Critical advice in this day and age: “To make life feel longer, choose experiences that are novel over familiar, intentional over habitual, narrative over disjointed, and emotional over neutral.”
A hell of a memento mori in the form of a sentence: “If years were letters, the average human lifespan would not be longer than this sentence.” That 89 characters including spaces.
This conclusion is incredible: “This moment is the youngest you’ll ever be. It’s a moment your future-selves will wish they could have back. Don’t waste it scrolling through posts you won’t even remember tomorrow.”
And I’m now older than I was in the moment I read that, and when I repeated it to Emily, and now I’m even older as I write this run-on sentence. We gotta paint those brushstrokes, compose those symphonies, weave those tapestries, and explore those cosmos. And for the love of God don’t post an essay with any of those GPT-isms.
Great quote: “I want to talk about everything with at least one person the way I talk about things with myself.”— Fyodor Dostoevsky
There’s a picture of a sign that reads: “FOCUS ON THE ESSENTIAL. TRUST INTUITION. SEEK SIMPLICITY. REFINE. REINVENT. RESPECT INTELLIGENCE. LIVE WITH PURPOSE.”
“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” (Thomas Merton: No Man Is an Island)
I fell asleep to some fern ASMR affirmations. About an hour later I woke up and she’d posted her weekly options for a weekly mantra. It was an obvious choice: “I leave behind what no longer serves me.”
May 11, 2026
Happy birthday Brina! [Sabrina Carpenter] I had an immensely rough night, so bad I pulled a rib cage muscle and can’t comfortably write in my moleskine. So I have to put my waking thoughts on the phone, take a shower and see how I feel. Fortunately, I sort of front loaded my tasks for today, with MFA notes already gathered and ready to go and with a couple videos in the queue for me to watch and take notes. Hopefully after my shower and some chicken sausages I’ll feel better enough to do much beyond that. [Ended up having an egg sandwich with my fake American cheese as comfort food that Emily so lovingly prepared for me.]
…
This is a great article about why Clarence Thomas is the face with everything wrong with the Supreme Court: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/the-grievances-of-clarence-thomas.html#more-303445
The sad thing is the only way to change all the damage him and fellow “justices” have done is to start all over. To hear one of the most destructive American power brokers of all time blame an undefined “progressivism” for all our problems as a nation – and just blaming whatever democrat he can think of it seems – is absolutely revolting. And yes, as the author points out even lincoln was fine with racial segregation if it kept the peace.
Key point: “Thomas’ speech is really a plea for theologically based law, which runs counter to what the Constitution stands for when it decrees there shall be no religious test for federal office (Article VI, paragraph 3) and no government establishment of religion (First Amendment), and which in its text omits any reference to God.”
There is no God behind this theology… only men who are cracked out of their minds. Thomas is so out of his gourd and staring so deep into the past that I’m sure he forgot which century he’s living in…
… I had intended to give away my old Audubon and other nature books to someone with a child whose life could be enriched by them. Funny enough I know an inner child who could benefit by turning to a random page and being inspired again by nature… one that didn’t pay nearly enough attention at the time.
…
From the Moleskine:
I’m going to listen and write down key lyrics that strike me.
Noah Kahan “The Great Divide” – “…I tried to read the thoughts that you’d worked overtime to stop.”
“I hope you’re scared of only ordinary shit / Like murderers and ghosts and cancer on your skin / And not your soul what He might do with it.”
“But the world is scared of hesitating things / Yeah, they shoot the birds who cannot sing / Until I’m finally aware of how shitty and unfair / It was to stare ahead like everything was fine.
[All I’ve been my whole life is a hesitating thing. The few times I’ve gone all in, only one time worked out. Fortunately, it was the one that put me far ahead, but I would never count on something like that happening again.]
Something really cool about the Great Divide: It’s “interpreted by many listeners as a deconstruction anthem – often specifically within Mormon or evangelical contexts – for its focus on overcoming religious trauma, fear of divine judgment, and the separation caused by leaving a fundamentalist upbringing. The song explores guilt, the loss of faith, and the longing to shed rigid religious expectations.” Thanks, Google. Notably, Kahan himself jokes he’s the “Jewish Ed Sheeran” so he himself is proud of his Jewish identity. Such is the beauty of songs. They go way further than you might expect.
Noah Kahan, “Doors” – “I was born into a one-hundred year storm / Foot of ice across Vermont, and in that dark / And in that frost a heart was formed / Malcontented and unwarm.” (Yes, I knew he was from Vermont)
‘“You’re putting money on red, I’m a sure bet at a losing streak.”
“I keep showing you doors, but you can’t open them up / ‘Cause it gets harder to see me the closer you try to look / I just live here, babe, but you’re the one who decided to knock.”
Noah Kahan, “American Cars” – “And I hate to drag you back here, but I think he’s really lost it / He’s been sittin’ on the porch, oh, rantin’ like a prophet / And I can’t stand the nights, yeah, that dinner time silence.”
Adrianne Lenker, “Real House” – “I’m a child humming / Into the clarity of black space / Where stars shine like tears on the night’s face / With a cool wind.”
“I wanted to be an inventor, collected scraps to make a portal / I wanted so much for magic to be real.”
This is poetry put to slow piano. Yet hard for me to listen to. Couldn’t even finish listening to it.
Lenker, “Sadness as a gift” – “Chance has shut her shining eyes / And turned her face away”
“You and I could see into the same eternity / Every second brimming with a majesty.”
“You could hear the music inside my mind / And you showed me a place / I’ll find even when I’m old.”
Lenker, “Fool” – “Heart out of sight / Body and mind fistfight / Heart out of sight / Body like a bat in flight” All I liked from that one.
Lenker, “No Machine” – Lots of lines in this one. “Let no machine eat away our dream.”
“A needle shining like a diamond in the desert.”
“The sun that’s shining lighter than a feather / And every day the moon just sails away / The moon and the sun are keepers of the weather”
“To the ocean of your love, I am a river”
Lenker, “Vampire Empire” – This whole song is wow! “I see you there rejecting all your earthly power / Protecting and dissecting ‘til you’ve emptied every hour.”
“It’s like trying to start a fire with matches in the snow”
Lenker, “evol” is love backwards, the song is spelling a bunch of words backwards and it’s quite clever, but kinda silly.
Lenker, “Cell Phone Says” is a sweet little tune. One I want to come back to in full.
Lenker, “Donut Seam” – “Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming? / Before all the water disappears”
Lenker, “Ruined” – “we shared in the basement / as the fern bent to the window / and we drew to alignment / as the water soaks the pillow”
The album has amazing lyrics, but only two songs I truly liked: “Sadness as a Gift” and “Vampire Empire”
“Who put the baby in charge / It’s already hard to buy all the parts and learn to use them / Who put / The world on my back and not in my hands” – Sabrina Carpenter, “Exhale”
May 12, 2026
Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters is on the listening docket today.
“I want you to love me” – “I know that time is elastic / And I know when I go / All my particles disband and disperse / And I’ll be back in the pulse / And I know none of this’ll matter / In the long run.”
“Blast the music / Bang it, bite it, bruise it / Whenever you want to begin, begin / We don’t have to go back to where we been.”
Like the lyrics, don’t love the song.
“Shaneika” is worth further study [lyrically, that is.]
“FTBC” – “And you maim when you’re on offense / But you kill when you’re on defense / And you got them all convinced that you’re the means and the end.”
“I grew up in the shoes they told me I could fill / When they came around, I would stand real still.”
“Under the Table” – “I would beg to disagree, but begging disagrees with me.”
“Kick me under the table all you want / I won’t shut up / I won’t shut up / I’d like to buy you a pair of pillow-soled hiking boots / To help you with your climb / Or rather, to help the bodies that you step over, along your route / So they won’t hurt like mine”
Fiona’s music is an acquired taste, but these lyrics are amazing.
“Relay” – “Evil is a relay sport / When the one who’s burnt / Turns to pass the torch”
“I resent you presenting your life / LIke a fucking propaganda brochure”
“I used to go to the Ferris wheel every morning / Just to throw my anger out the door”
The next couple tracks I didn’t find any lines and skipped over. But “Ladies” – “Ruminations on the looming effect / And the parallax view, and the figure / Ans the form, and the revolving door that keeps / Turning out more and more / Good women like you / Yet another woman, to whom I won’t get through.”
“Nobody can replace anybody else / So it would be a shame to make it a competition / And no love is like any other love / So it would be insane to make a comparison with you.”
“Heavy Balloon” – “People like us we play with a heavy balloon / Keep it up to keep the devil at bay but it always falls way too soon.” Another to come back to in depth. / “Cosmonauts” same deal.
My issue is how repetitive the lyrics can get; as a poet, she’s incredible, and musically, there’s a lot of neat stuff going on, especially her use of dissonance. It’s a shame my ear just isn’t up to it.
“For her” is a difficult one for me to listen to… but some lines I may quote later.
Need to get going… I almost fell asleep on the way home, didn’t have enough caffeine. Forgot bagels but whatever, got everything else. Telling I left my purse in the car because I was so focused on getting groceries squared away. Another case of I thought I did something but neglected to do so in reality. Good thing I’m not worried about someone trying to steal my car right here at the house!
Back to lyric mining… “On I Go” – “Up until now in a rush to prove / But now I only move to move / On I go, not toward or away.”
I have to say lyrically this album is damn good. I just don’t like how 80 percent of it sounds.
My next album is “Hounds of Love” by Kate Bush. I already know I like the first track. I don’t have to quote “Running Up That Hill” it’s just all brilliant. I wasn’t really into the title track, but I like “The Big Sky.” More generally, I like the atmosphere her voice and music creates. My not writing things down is a function of me immersing myself in the experience.
What’s the story behind “Cloudbusting?”
“Waking the Witch” is um, interesting… and I was drifting off so that jolted me awake… Most of this album is great relaxing music. It gets weird in parts, but what a neat record overall.
When a comedian is on his game, the timing is near perfect. But once he starts slipping and the timing belt slips, the jokes don’t land, the punchlines trip over themselves, and suddenly the jokester becomes the joke, or worse, just super annoying. I feel like this anonymous imaginary comedian my brain just created a few moments ago. I always feel like my own timing is so out of whack and I’m not sure what’s even funny anymore.
(Truthfully, I haven’t been laughing at much lately. Probably a sign that I’m way too depressed. That would explain how much I have to fight my fatigue as I’m typing these up the next day. And I’m pushing through it this time. I can’t give in even if it physically hurts me. I was dopamine doping with games and mindless card stuff all the time, and that’s not healthy! So this is like a sort of withdrawal hump I’m getting over. It sucks, but it’s necessary unless I want to throw the rest of my life.)
I really struggled getting into Sylvia Plath’s poetry and I haven’t gone back to it due to a sense of overwhelming incompetence in “not getting it.” What is it I’m trying to get? I want to just sit there and comb through the text far lines that jump out at me, like with my lyric mining. But I don’t want to be merely extractive. It’s more like I’m seeking fragments compatible with my current state of being and perhaps as yet my software hasn’t been upgraded quite enough. But is it a requirement that I ever “get it” if I’m able to derive some tiny parts of Sylvia I can take with me on my journey?
…
One thing I was thinking about during my 3hr power cycle I kept on this idea about being on the “Edge of America.” I had this ‘great american novel’ idea I worked on a couple years ago. It was set in coastal Maine where my family used to vacation – I’m sure I could turn that into a short story, about both how political borders are kinda bullshit and that the places we loved as a kid slowly decay and become unrecognizable. It’s actually one of my better story ideas, honestly, but a novel was probably a stretch.
I have a few ideas like that I could reuse and get something written that’s at least a “good try” but only if the idea is worthy. And then there’s the places in Vermont at the same kind of edge, so this could be the protagonist’s “thing,” exploring the fringes of the U.S. It just focuses on that slice of Maine because it’s what I know. I won’t go all Stephen King and set everything in Maine, and in fact I’m more one to focus closer on character than a specific place. Like I was reading about earlier in the MFA, it’d likely suit me to turn the setting into an extension of the POV character. Makes it easier to get absorbed in the story after all.
May 14, 2026
…I had to write about my dreams. There were lots of puppies, and some haunted chairs that constantly moved themselves around. Nothing too spooky though. The scene before I woke up though was being in high school where this smartass dude was bragging about how he never read the book and always just read the cliff notes and essays from students of past years and used essay writing services to do all his papers because he was rich.
Meanwhile, some lovely brunette who looked a lot like an 18 year old Rowan Blanchard was watching her best friend next to her with a shredder at her desk, calmly ripping out all her notebooks and shredding them right in the middle of class. “These will never fall into the wrong hands,” she calmly declared in a very familiar singsong voice as the idiot continued to brag. I think it was like the last week of high school in this scenario. And the girl shredding all those brilliant notes that will set back academic thought by at least a decade to protect them from assholes like the guy next to her… was a just turned 18 Maya Hart. So yeah… that was a very happy sight. Absurd, yes, but this was like a Girl Meets World season six or whatever that we never got because the girl playing her was too busy building a foundation for superstardom.
Oh lord if I’d gone to high school with her in another reality… it would’ve been Marry Maya Hart or bust. And all the cute puppies! And haunted chairs… for some reason…
May 16, 2026
The first thing I noticed looking out my bathroom window, as the blinds are always closed in my room due to being on the side of the house that gets way too much direct sunlight in the late afternoon and evening, was the dandelions had already gone to seed. I thought being Mid-May, this is far too early. I asked Emily, and I was correct. Yes, it got hot too early this year, cooled off way too fast, and cut the lifecycle of one of my favorite flowers (it is not a weed, okay!) extremely short this year. Fuck you, global warming. I said to Emily, she got hot really fast, so please don’t go to seed… I am silly. But also kind of serious.
…
“…my brain has never respected standardized operating procedures.” I love this line. https://www.rescuegirl557.com/May-15-2026-First-Day-Of-The-Rest-Of-My-Life.php
“The world likes to separate tragedy from choice because it makes everyone feel safer, but life rarely does us the courtesy of staying that simple.” absolutely true
“…usefulness has a way of wearing affection’s clothing until the bill comes due.” That’s some great weed right there.
May 17, 2026
Midnight thought: an actually useful dream where it came up that style should serve as a tone setter in writing not a template. For years I’ve been trying to run a variety of devices in my work to illustrate a breadth of knowledge, skill, and talent when I should just be getting out works and not being so worried about stressing them up or nipping towards producing something. The words should just be, the experiences should be relayed ahead of the way in paint a scene or describe some abstract concept. That is to say you should prioritize variety of experience over all else. Otherwise rough days like yesterday, stuck on some past regrets and falling back into old habits that speed up time in day blurring and week ending fashion just makes me feel icky and sometimes even physically ill.
Yesterday flew by in mostly a blur because I returned to the comfort of familiar territory with certain YouTube creators and revisited a lot of familiar territory, although I thought of someone I hadn’t considered closely for almost two decades. But rather than fully appreciate why I was having this uncomfortable wave of regrets I let it consume huge swaths of my day, rather than simply break routine and explore these feelings in depth by allowing myself to feel them. I did come to the conclusion that I am probably better off for how things actually played out, as they most certainly were of massive benefit to Emily. I should have seen my regret as a reflection of what I could have done for someone actually worthy of my time and energy rather than beating myself up for directing my attention elsewhere in ways that led to hard rejection and consistent disappointment. I was trying to force people to like me. I wanted to bend the universe towards my own sense of justice. I wanted to help those who either weren’t interested in accepting my affections or simply didn’t know how to at the time, if ever.
Yes, sometimes we miss what’s right in front of us because we lacked the wisdom to recognize a perfect opportunity when it comes around. And that wisdom I did eventually gain, as I mentioned yesterday, because when Emily came along, as unbelievable and queer (pun intended) as her story appeared, I had just enough evidence to make me think that it had a strong chance of being true. Hers is the only time that following my gut actually worked in my favor in the long run. Even when I made seemingly poor judgments, long as I’ve been with her, somehow things work out in both of our favors. For most of my life, I simply benefited others at great expense to myself. Same as what happened to Emily. Doing the right thing and constantly being punished for it.
I keep thinking back to what Picard told data in peak performance, you can do everything correctly and still lose. That is just life. And apparently even though I did derive some useful lessons from not choosing the best possible potential mate to pursue at a pivotal moment in my development as a human being, I chose to instead focus on the decade plus of suffering I endured trying to force outcomes that seemed the most likely to fly under the radar. I wanted to save those falling through the cracks, and ironically, I fell almost as far down into the abyss you can get without being entirely a lost cause. And the one I missed, in fact, never panned out as they could because I was too chicken shit to approach a girl out of my league with the truth. We had only the most surface level understanding. We could’ve had so much more. Maybe not, but the effort would’ve forced me to face my own issues of self worth and self respect that still linger as time pushes me towards forty and I’m refusing to recognize the milestone for what it is, a wake up call to stop wasting my time on finding ways to waste my time.
Yesterday wasn’t entirely lost, but it could’ve been a chance to truly make a breakthrough. It took me letting my brain process how empty so much of yesterday felt to recognize my fault. Not only was I the best thing to ever happen to Emily, and her coinciding with my lowest point of life the best opportunity to ever come my way, my journey has led me to meet a version of myself that finally said enough bullshit. It’s time to release the regrets and allow myself to flourish. I apparently inspired Emily to new heights the way I always wanted for others, as I intended but to a degree I never saw coming. I had to fail doing everything right for all those years for Emily to flourish and by extension allow myself to somehow finally do the same.
To say passages like this are what open journals are made for would be an understatement. I now have to accompany the train to infinity in an endless rainstorm to get back to sleep after such an epiphany… for the first time in my life, I finally am being recognized for my worth. And I don’t know how to deal with that. And just as I hoped, Emily and I are finally able to pay it forward. And this time, after so many failed attempts at making a difference, we finally succeeded, all because all these failures eventually turned into a success. You only need one big success after all, to make your life worth living. It’s time I recognize my victory and share what I’ve learned, because honestly, the failures are actually a lot more interesting in hindsight. I’ve written about a few, and going forward, I am going to need to relate them.
…
What if I just unintentionally stumbled upon the masterminding of a set of heuristics that can solve any problem with mathematical proof? Then I can publish my proofs of concept in a volume called the unified theory of everything and other delusions…
…
I don’t know what this is from, but I found this on Sublime and here is the text:
“Like all good teachers,
the world repeats her lesson.
Over and over
. . . with wordless variety . . .
she spells the name of Love.”
People are getting lazy with the staff picks, trying to save stuff right out of their gmail account… not a great look people!
…
“Tom Waits so unforgettably observed, the way we do anything is the way we do everything, our style of waiting is a miniature of our style of living: There is impatient and petulant waiting; there is waiting with the humility that while we may be worthy of the object of our hope, we are not entitled to it or to the mercies of time; there is waiting with an open heart and a willingness to be surprised, for the wait itself may reveal something we did not yet know about ourselves that might change our desire for the awaited outcome.”
I would’ve loved to read what this was from, but nope it was from somebody’s inbox… it was from a piece called “You and the universe…” but yeah I guess tom waits observed a lot about waiting.
…
“What are you talking about specifically when you talk about those hard parts?
Whenever you put anything out into the world, you hope that it might land and connect with people. Some of that is luck, and some of that is resources. What determines whether something connects with people can feel so mysterious.
For a long time, when I stopped making music, I used to conflate how well something did with how good it was. One of the difficult things now is I really know that it’s not true. And yet there’s still this magnetic pull that idea has. So I find myself actively resisting it.” – singer songwriter Hrishikesh Hirway.
This actually has a link! https://sublimeinternet.substack.com/p/the-pain-of-releasing-work-nobody
In fact this was in the newsletter I didn’t read yesterday. I should read this whole thing. It’s really good.
This whole bit is really important. And as the interviewer pointed out it sounds like a song. What if the internet actually gave people the kind of attention a caring friend does? (You know like how things were back in 2003…)
“There’s already so little control that you have over what your world is, what your experience is. But so much magic happens through intentional accidents: going for a walk in a new city, going to a cafe for the first time, or talking to a friend who’s going to show you something you haven’t seen or heard before.
The idea that someone has to put their thumb on the scale to create a more addictive version of that, for the sake of a constant experience that’s always entertaining, feels like a flattening out of the special moments in life. The moments that are special when you discover something are special because you’re discovering something.
You need the topography of attention — the flat moments — for the highs to feel memorable and meaningful. The idea that every time you open the app, you need to get this spike feels both disingenuous to human experience and a cheapening of the times when that’s real and genuine.” The topography of attention, that is fucking brilliant.
“It can’t be chorus all the time.”
Sublime always has the best fucking interviews.
May 20, 2026
I’m gonna read this Henrik Karlsson essay… https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/love-and-change
“Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion” is the title, a sentiment I fully agree with.
“…well, what is it that caterpillars do in cocoons really? Dissolve themselves into a nutritious soup and assemble a new self.” Yeah that is pretty much it isn’t it?
“This is one of the joys and challenges of love: the more skillfully you love someone, the more held, encouraged, and accepted they feel, the more they change. If you love someone well, you have to run to keep up, growing your heart to hold what they are growing into. And this can be challenging. The direction of their change and the speed of their change can be the wrong direction and the wrong speed for you. There is no guarantee that another person’s growth aligns with what you want; sometimes you just grow apart.”
Not only is this an amazing paragraph but I know what that’s like.
…
The only civil right we have left in America is to be unmitigated in being hateful. And I have to be careful what I say, because even though I’m not ragebaiting, and I ACTUALLY feel this anger – and it’s actually not hate, as if I explain it all it does make sense – I still can’t express it. What’s happened then is people are allowed to have no filter and this is why hate is out of control and snowballing, and I don’t want to be a part of that. I’ve decided that I’m not going out to eat, on any trips, or anything. It’s not inaction… Anger leads to hate and hate leads to suffering.
What I really thought about most is how America is a nation built on the fringes. Most people that came here originally were people on the fringes. And it worked out! Obviously, most people on the fringes are fine, just normal people going about their business. But in other cases… well, yeah… you had the crazy wacko people that ended up in power… fun times.
My goal in life at this point is to simply walk away from situations that will do nothing but anger me and cause a scene. I am lowkey for a reason. I don’t want to end up like all these people who just spout off all the time and go down these very unfortunate rabbit holes that lead to justifying bigoted and irrational takes on this, that, and the other thing. If it means I can’t leave the house, so be it. I’d rather be calm, cool, and collected, and let everyone else have their fun, because what is fun if the risk is so high that I’m going to simply up and leave at the first sign of aggression? I’m not a coward. I’ve lived long enough to know that tolerating it ends badly.
…As it stands, I don’t think most restaurants and retail stores will be around much longer. Not the way they’re throwing shit together all sloppy and hiring people that are gender critical and have no self-respect.
Speaking of self-respect, that’s something I’m trying to work on myself. And yeah, today has been kind of a lost cause, but at least I got some thoughts down and “read” that excellent essay earlier [I had the phone read it to me] that I should come back to and properly comment upon. My allergies are still horrendous, so I’m not going to accomplish much… It’s a buffer day, we’ll call it…
May 21, 2026
4am thoughts… I dreamed about updating windows, whoopee. And getting paid in Amazon gift cards to watch movies, read books, and listen to music. That would be amazing. Speaking of thoughts…
Our thoughts are what make us uniquely human. They are what define our reality. And there are so many of us, still living, or have lived, or are beginning the process of living, that sometimes a lot of our thoughts overlap. We share many different thoughts but the shapes and the colors are necessarily different in the context of all the other thoughts we have and our experiences surrounding them. Our thoughts often have multiple layers, some of which are hidden from our conscious minds.
Many thoughts evolve into more complete ones, and can even become actionable to the point of realization. Some more become at least partially expressive, while others simply come and go. Part of wisdom is choosing which thoughts to entertain, which to immediately dismiss, and which to deconstruct. These days I’m trying to be more selective with those I deconstruct but also am trying not to dismiss thoughts that may lead to insights I may otherwise overlook that could improve my understanding of the self.
Ultimately, the self is going to be the catalyst for so much of what you think and how you perceive what others think, even if it’s fully impossible to truly comprehend another person completely. It is possible to come close enough to where it feels like you are entirely in sync but even then there is always going to be some missing context. Language unfortunately has its limitations, which is why humans invented other forms of art but also have mastered the art of body language. I have many other thoughts about thoughts…
…
[Notes on the Field Notes episode of the Rest is Science that week….]
Turns out Hannah predicted the COVID pandemic on a show two years before it actually happened. In the end that data from the bbc pandemic ended up helping during actual COVID. It was scary close.
The BBC voice sparring between Michael and Hannah is adorable. I adore Hannah’s Essex accent.
Also they are getting into whether consciousness is all an illusion. I honestly don’t know anymore with how nonsense things are getting. The readiness potential of neurons is definitely giving away that actions seem to happen after we are conscious of making the decision. Rather than you, we are “you-ing” as in we are stuck in these bodies which are just doing stuff and we’re along for the ride.
It’s also interesting to see how dreams evolve over our lifetimes, and the effect they have on our sense of selves. My dreams have always been super complex, extremely allegorical. My theory is that we do have some agency but we are more like training our bodies to do things we would like to do, and we don’t have as much direct control as we might believe. We truly are on a “journey” and everyone else is on theirs. Sounds cliche and silly but I think it’s more true than we want to believe.
What the heck is quantum spin? It probably shouldn’t be called that, nothing is physically spinning. It’s a property of a particle. More like a switch.
Also Hannah is actively working on a book on the idea of how having good information can be used deceptively or even maliciously. I also love what Michael said about making a video about evolution without using the word, and even super religious church people liked it! When you inform people, you have to be careful how you do it. I agree with Hannah also that intellectual humility is super important. Michael agreed that letting people make their own decisions and not feel persuaded one way or another.
…
I don’t want to become an equal opportunity asshole. Because I’ve been on the verge of that. And that’s why I’m setting these strong boundaries. I have to protect my own well being. Because apparently that’s valuable.
…
“Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life – well, valuable, but small – and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around? I don’t really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void.”
(You’ve Got Mail, 1998)
I like this tweet…
the things you are drawn to naturally matter a lot. they are clues. your job is to figure out why. – ceciatl
Exactly!
…
Amazing tweet.
“My people are the whitepill people
The ones who try to find ways to support instead of tearing down
The ones who never make fun of others for the way they look or for their struggles
…
The ones who are kind to others (though sometimes they could be kinder to themselves)” – Gptbrooke
…
“You find it fun because you are fun. You find things beautiful because you are beautiful. Everything is great because you are great.” – Ssunsetglow
May 22, 2026
The home road hitting splits for the Rockies between 1995 to 2001 are absolutely insane:
Even with the humidor, since 2002, only homers were suppressed. Plenty of total bases still.
fortune favors the bold. Jason pulled a #320 auto (Wei-en Lin) out the first pack of his jumbo hobby case of 2026 bowman. Nothing else crazy. Watch him hit a shohei anime in this series…
Wow Kyle Busch passed away at 41! He just won a race like last week! Sudden terminal illness, holy shit.
I had to unsubscribe from someone I followed for awhile because she said wrath of khan is a bad movie. Bye!
May 24, 2026
The mix of narratives you wake up with in your head truly has a profound effect on how you proceed with the day ahead. That’s why I snooze sometimes, to sort of reset the cache. When that doesn’t work that’s where the affirmations come in. Today’s snooze only helped slightly so I needed an affirmation in a hurry to not simply try and reset the cache again. It’s simply, today is Emily and me’s 5th wedding anniversary so today is for her. They are rarely that simple, so I was able to allow myself to snooze a bit longer until I heard a sign of life.
Solar farms may be a thing of the past soon, at least in Vermont. A recent wind storm broke a whole bunch of panels that aren’t only now complete trash, but they’re leaking chemicals which will require extensive soil removal. That will be a great thing for windmills and maybe we’ll get the hydro plants going again. We need fusion fast. We just need a new administration… unless of course Vermont decides to become its own country… [LOL]
…
“Mistake data for reality, and you will soon be enveloped by a bastardized version of reality. – via “Sun and Steel” Yukio Mishima.”
Right, data is only information. It is not reality. I agree with this quote. However, data IS useful, when properly contextualized and used responsibly. Which, um, typically it’s not.
There’s an image with two lists under the title Integration. On the left is a list of Projected (if you are strongly upset by others) and on the right is a list of Unowned (then you may have but not be using your own). They are supposed to be one-to-one, I think, so I will list them here:
Projected: flattery, foolhardiness, greed, guilt, hostility, hypocrisy, impatience, impulsiveness, incompetence, indecision, insensitivity, intimidation, jealousy, jumping to conclusions, lack of order, laziness, loneliness, loquacity, lying, neediness, obsequiousness, perfectionism, procrastination, rigidity, sarcasm
Unowned: complementing, bravery, self-provision, conscientiousness, assertiveness, ability to “act as if”, eagerness, spontaneity, willingness to experiment, openness to possibilities, objectivity, confrontation, protectiveness, intuitiveness, flexibility, relaxedness, openness to nurturance, articulateness, imaginativeness, asks for respect of appropriate needs, respect, commitment to doing things well, honoring one’s own timing, tenacity, wit
Notably the list on the left is alphabetical, so yes, they are meant to be one-to-one comparisons. I saved the image for reference but I wanted to type them all out to sort of get the words all bouncing about in my skull for a bit and see if they stick to some other thoughts regarding their nature. Maybe some of the Unowned ones will co-mingle and have babies while others will collide with the Projected like antimatter and go kablooey.
Anyhow, I think there’s a lot of good things to take away from these two lists. I will say that my own sarcasm has slowly calmed into something more resembling wit recently. And while I’d say I have many of the qualities on the second list, I still harbor too many of the first. And if it’s as simple as not allowing yourself to be strongly upset by others, you can cultivate more of the latter… that’s the message I’m getting here, and it feels fairly accurate that this is a good strategy.
It’s fine to point out what you find boring, confusing, or disbelievable, but so often “criticism” has devolved into personal attacks and political grandstanding, and it’s absurd. I refuse to fall to that level which is why I’ve abstained from posting ANYTHING on social media because it will bring out the worst in me (those items on the left) in great quantities. I truly need to work on setting even stronger boundaries and not letting others get to me…
… authors / individuals that greatly irk or even infuriate me are not to be discarded out of hand. I greatly dislike throwing out “the baby with the bathwater” which is what so many people do. I still want to understand the good ideas that people, horribly flawed as they may be in fundamental ways, sometimes have and respect that other people are on their own journey which we should just accept, no matter however unacceptable the shape or color of it may be to our own eyes.
…
Seeing these two team up on a MLB the show rebuild is actually pretty awesome. Some solid after lunch entertainment… um. Big irrelevant had 430 hr in year four. Wow. And Eduard Julien won game 7 with a walk off two run homer down a run in the bottom of the 9th. Zbrodie has a crazy year five though: Brandon Lowe, James wood, and junior caminero he added… on top of Yordan Alvarez and Matt Olson. He did still get over 307 hr for the challenge. (332 with big thanks to Yordan with 60.) big irrelevant lost NLCS game 7 in year 5. And zbrodie lost in the World Series in year five. So big irrelevant won that head to head easily. Still I think ZBrodie got unlucky.
…
When I say I need more concrete intentions, what question am I looking to answer? It doesn’t have to be a “useful” question because I’ve found the seemingly most useless pursuits, like writer’s lifts, can lead to surprising discoveries, like Emily! And I was thinking about the whole idea of paying forward, like the Phillies card guy did in the video yesterday. How it often ends up being thrown back in my face. I suppose you just have to be much more selective and do so in small purposeful bursts.
May 25, 2026
Stayed in bed for about eleven hours last night trying to reset my circadian rhythm. Didn’t help as I had bad dreams… I’m extremely sluggish so I’m going to take my time getting up. As I wrote before I crapped out last night, I’m not going to force anything and just let things come to me for a bit. I don’t need to rush into anything.
Even after a long frustrating night, I do have some positive intentions for today. The first is perhaps rather obvious which is to take it easy on myself. I’m far too harsh on my chronic fatigue which I think is more of a function of going so hard on myself all the time. Even though I relaxed most of yesterday, and really all I did was reading and notes, I didn’t exactly pace myself.
I also need to spread out eating the Chinese food today. It was a lot of salt all at once. So my body didn’t like that either. To be fair I probably needed the sodium, though. I’ve been kind of weird with eating lately. Nothing has been very regular lately. I tend to nibble here and there then have a huge meal all at once. My tummy hates that. But it’s also because Emily and I have been eating different things and her appetite has been all over the place while getting her book out and marketed. She’s putting way too much pressure on herself and thus I’m also pushing myself to produce something too. And I need to cut that out.
[Her book did well, by the way. I’m very proud of her on that front. I’m ditching my collected works for now… I have other plans for the content.]
Intention number one is to pace myself. I need to set boundaries for my mental wellbeing. I’m not young anymore. My energy reserves are shot.
Positive intention number two… to not be concerned with output.
The third intention is to stop worrying about “good advice” and just go with what works for me.
…
I love how the Phillies card guy went back and bashed his first ever YouTube video:
Yeah he got some things wrong, but hey, he’s come a long way, including making me cry with his generosity… he’s rebranding to simply Baseball Card Stories and doing some Supercuts of his collection videos that have made the bulk of the revenue that allowed to get him the Cracker Jack Phillies cards.
May 26, 2026
I woke up with some interesting words in the form of a Wendell Berry quote that I’m sure doesn’t exist about “miracle ideas.” Something about a “fuegologist” which is a term that I’m sure doesn’t exist but my brain thought meant something… related to musical eulogies? Something about beauty in celebrating death? Why I would associate these bizarre words with Wendell berry I have no idea. [RIP Mr. Berry, I knew you hardly at all, and while your words continue to baffle me sometimes, you did have a lot of good stuff to say.]
I did feel compelled while I was dealing with an unfortunate case of morning constipation to look up quotes about miracles and one came up that gave me pause.
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
It’s attributed to Albert Einstein, but so aren’t a lot of quotes. It’s probably another one that publicists made up and attributed to him. But that doesn’t make it any less profound. And while I typically don’t like these binary sorts of platitudes (even when I create them myself out of the bad habit of making binary options when I’m always compelled to choose a third option.) this one is actually pretty interesting.
I think my brain was trying to figure out what the study of fire was called. Funeral pyres, eulogies put to music, miracle ideas… What do these things mean? So rarely do I wake up with actual words like this. And it was only after I intentionally made myself go back to sleep. What does it mean? Probably nothing. But it came from deep within my subconscious…
I’m deeply frustrated with my physical state. And I don’t feel great today either. Even doing reading will be a challenge if I do it my normal way of taking notes. I apparently have to slow way down or I will end up dead and cremated. Perhaps that was my brain’s backwards way of warning me about that. But studying fire and miracles? What does that mean? I don’t think these things are symbolic beyond the words themselves. This is a very strange moment for me.
May 30, 2026
…it seems to me that all the people we meet over the years prepare us to meet others that will hold deeper meaning for us, and in turn, those others will prepare us to meet the ones who will make the biggest differences for us. How we see bits and pieces of other people we’ve admired, cared for, loved intensely, in totally strange faces. Bits and bobs of people’s personalities appear in unfamiliar bodies. I’m struggling to find the language for what I mean here, but basically, everyone we meet serves a purpose, and longing to return to a time when those people were still a part of our lives is counterproductive. They prepared us to meet people better aligned with where we are now and where we are headed.
May 31, 2026
The people who don’t accept you and your truth are those who can’t accept their own truth.
In desperate times, we are all pushed to our extremes, the limits of our understanding of what we think the world is meant to be. But we are all wrong. The world is so much more complex than any of us, even the best and brightest minds among us, could ever perceive. What is perhaps the one thing we can understand is we need to treat both ourselves and one another better. It all starts with us, though. I’m not going to sit here and spout cliches and platitudes. But if we don’t accept the truth that we can never know the full truth about anything other than ourselves, we won’t ever be able to accept anything or anyone else the way that we should. That is, we are each on our own journey and it’s not up to us that we be “acceptable” to others, but simply good to ourselves and good to others. Our example should be enough, and if it’s not, you walk away and keep going along your path.
I’ve too long been obsessed with the big picture and too often miss the good things right in front of me. It’s hard to fully appreciate how much my life has changed over the past five years, especially the last two. But for everything I’ve gained, I feel like I’ve lost so much more. And now I feel forced to shed versions of myself that continue to haunt me. I don’t really know how to talk about this yet, but as I just said, if I can’t accept myself where I’m at right now, how am I ever supposed to meet others where they are at? That’s my struggle: meeting people where they’re at without deluging them in metaphor and affection, often scaring them off because they either don’t know how to respond or feel that I’m just a tryhard who needs to practice more in the mirror until I stop coming off too strong and ridiculous.
I’m now five months into this year and while I have certainly learned a lot, so much that I’ve needed more rest than usual to let it all crystallize in my mind, my body can’t keep up. I mentioned recently in some reading notes that the body keeps the score, a book I only partially read before I got extremely frustrated with it, because it got too clinical and pharmaceutical and made me physically ill with how dry and mechanical their explanations got. I wasn’t in a good place at the time mentally or emotionally and I didn’t really stop to think about where the authors of that book were coming from, indeed, a clinical environment. But for as much as that book is praised, it just made me angry.
Nothing was being solved. People were just being broken down into test subjects. The absolute simple fact that I’ve learned just by living life is that yes, the body keeps the score, but that doesn’t mean there is anything medically wrong with you. It means you’re either trying too hard to fulfill someone else’s expectations of you, you have no idea what you even expect of yourself, or some combination of both.
The problem is that my own expectations for myself, and toxic productivity culture hasn’t helped my cause, are highly unrealistic. Yes I have chronic fatigue and nerve issues from my battle with cancer a decade ago. But the true fatigue is with my own battles with myself. I haven’t quite caught up to the fact that not only am I unhirable, but there is also no point for me to work in my current situation. My needs are taken care of, and this is something that I still haven’t come to terms with. I need to simply be. I need to stop occupying myself with building these massive frameworks towards building a towering skyscraper like legacy so that future generations may actually go, huh, I guess we missed something.
But it’s not the approval of others I’m really seeking. It’s my own approval. I don’t even approve of myself. I don’t feel capable of reaching my goals because frankly what even are my goals? I’ve published a few little books that no one read. I’ve written thousands of essays and poems and bits and bobs that remain unfinished or extremely raw. But the thing is, perhaps the best things are the ones left unfinished. Having loose threads or unanswered questions is a starting place for a future version of ourselves or for others who stumble across these unfortunate stories I never knew where to take.
I don’t want to sit here trying to defend my often curious viewpoints on a wide variety of subjects. I can’t sit here and anticipate every counter argument. That’s simply not worth my energy. I have to accept that I’m probably wrong on a lot of things, and right about things people would rather overlook, myself included. I’m not perfect. I will never claim to be anything close. In fact, I’ve needed to release any expectation for perfection from my words because the words themselves, the very tools I depend on for my continued creative development and growth, are very much flawed and imprecise.
