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9,098 words

January, 2026

Jan 1

What is masculine in the life of a flower? Spouting, penetrating the topsoil and growing, gaining height. What is feminine in the life of a flower? Budding and blossoming, alternately concealing and revealing her beauty and mystery.

Jan 3

Itching is not your typical physical pain; it is a compulsory pain, like the nag of an addictive substance: the promise of intense and immediate pleasure if you would just scratch. And, of course, scratching has the unavoidable karmic consequence of intensifying and prolonging the itch.

[[To Itch But Not to Scratch]]

The skin may be the most multivariate part of the body. Everything within and everything without me affects my skin, since it is that sacred membrane serving as liaison between the things I call "me" and those I call "thee." Since the skin is literally in the middle of it all, the root cause of a skin issue is nearly impossible to parse out. Is it a contact allergy, an auto-immune response, a hormone imbalance, a stress-reaction? It could be any or all of those in combination. That's why people with chronic skin conditions all share a kinship, the way two strangers do on the Camino de Santiago. The skin-healing journey is a pilgrimage—within and without.

[[To Itch But Not to Scratch]]

Jan 4

I just found out that Montaigne had eczema, from this Harvard Medical School article on the itch–scratch cycle:

'Scratching,' said the sixteenth-century French essayist Montaigne, 'is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature and as ready at hand as any. But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels.'

Now that the scientific community's view of itch has evolved to the point where it's considered a bona fide and potentially serious clinical condition, people who suffer as Montaigne did--his eczema caused him to scratch incessantly--may finally find some relief.

[[To Itch But Not to Scratch]]

The itch–scratch cycle may be the only in-built masochistic [relationship/process] in the human body. In response to an itch, the brain triggers a motor response to scratch—to apply friction and remove the perceived topical threat, whether it be an insect or a plant. (At least, that's the leading theory for the evolutionary justification for scratching.) Yet any and every scratch involves self-inflicted pain, applying that pain to the site of the itch. Even when the scratching goes so far as to cause lesions and bleeding, the brain perceives that self-inflicted pain as intensely pleasurable.

[[To Itch But Not to Scratch]]

Some great writers have suggested you draft drunk and edit sober. I've never been drunk, and it's safe to say that fact is at least correlated with my editor-first nature. For instance, being an editor before I am a writer means that the first draft of my current book was shorter than the final draft will be.

Jan 5

My Amazon review of Scott Britton's Conscious Accomplishment:

There is a level of care and craftsmanship in this book that is rare. Scott Britton has done something special here, offering a spiritual guidebook that is both esoteric and practical. Every concept that could be inaccessible or opaque is made immediate and concrete with an image, a character, or a story from Britton's own journey. Not only does Britton's style aid his reader's understanding but also makes everything feel more doable, because it all feels relatable.

Britton is not a guru and never pretends to be. He remains humble and grounded throughout this book, such that I found myself thinking, "If Scott can do it, so can I." Britton is like a spiritual scout, a recon-man who has been to the summit of the Mountain of Success and who is well on his way along the Spiral of Fulfillment. This book is his "field report," and it serves as a comprehensive map of a complex and challenging territory. Britton shares the pitfalls and setbacks he experienced so that I, his reader, can have a smoother journey. For instance, Britton's example has helped me give myself more grace for "not being productive enough" when I am in a period of deep inner-work.

This book would be valuable to anyone who has become disillusioned with the conventional idea of success (external, material success) and doesn't know where to direct his/her ambition, to anyone who wants to find peace and fulfillment without resigning from the world.

My Amazon review of David Kadavy's How to Sell a Book:

A Valuable Reference for Any Self-Published Author

The first time I picked up this book, I'd planned to read a chapter or two, but after spending a few minutes with How to Sell a Book, I decided that the best possible use of my time that day was to read the whole thing. Here, Kadavy has done a great service to indie authors by distilling his many years of experience and experiments into compressed and compelling chapters that, together, address just about every facet of self-publishing.

I love that this book is not full of advice but rather information and questions: all the questions I should be asking myself about my self-published books and all the information I need to make informed decisions.

This book help me create a launch-plan for my next book, and going forward, I will use it as a reference as I try to turn this whole indie-author thing into my full-time job.

I have always considered self-improvement to be an intrinsic good and an end in itself. Now, I still maintain that, but I would clarify the terms to say that growth is an end in itself. For at some point in a person's development, it becomes detrimental to focus on and to prioritize one's self. There is a stage of growth during which one starts to transcend the self, to become less identified with it and more detached from it, which leads to being more deeply connected with everything and everyone.

I want to be someone who doesn't need anyone, and I want to be with people who can be at peace without being needed. The healthiest relationships I've ever seen are those that are full of desire and devoid of [necessity/ neediness].

A volcano is of the world (feminine), whereas a glacier is in the world (masculine).

// A volcano is of the earth (feminine), whereas a glacier is on the earth (masculine).

Jan 6

Nudity is inherently sensual but not inherently sexual.

The opposite of attachment is not detachment but aversion. (In fact, detachment is the virtuous harmony among those two root poisons.)

On one scale of time, a human life is like a cairn, standing sturdy for a long life, and helping lead others where they hope to go; but on another scale of time, a human life is like a rock-balance: delicate, precariously perched upon itself, bound to topple over, created only to stand for an instant.

Here's some pretty good boilerplate copy to describe my upcoming book, which I just drafted while updating my Substack welcome email:

I'm currently working on a book that I'll self-publish in the first half of 2026. It's a travel memoir about the summer I spent hiking and camping around Iceland, full of coming-of-age-style mini-adventures and many pensive moments in communion with Nature. Beneath the Glacier will soon be available to pre-order.

My prose ain't quite as rich as the writers I love to read, but my words are not so impoverished as they used to be. I wonder how rich deep and multifaceted and stylish my prose will be in a decade, or at the end of my life. I've just gotta stay the course.

Why did the scratch-response evolve to be so violent? If the an itch is supposed to indicate the presence of some unwanted foreign body, why isn't it alleviated by a simple brushing of the hand or fingers over the area, like swiping crumbs off a countertop? Why, instead, does the itch persist even past the point of breaking the skin by scratching? Does the itch–scratch cycle assume that the unwanted foreign body has burrowed into the dermis? What invertebrate intruder could dig in so deeply so quickly that it must be so violently excavated, exhumed? This feels like a deep-seated fear-response that the body has about being penetrated by something unknown. "Get it out of me!" the brain seems to shout, even when there was nothing even on me in the first place.

(Then, of course, there's the irony that the more one itches and scratches, the weaker the skin-barrier becomes and the easier it is for foreign bodies to enter.)

[[To Itch But Not to Scratch]]

Jan 7

If I ever decide that I want to get serious about learning Icelandic, my end-game goal of linguistic mastery of that language would be twofold:

• To read all of the Icelandic sagas in the original Old Norse
• And to write bilingual English–Icelandic poetry.

Both of those things would be pretty incredible achievements, and they are decades away. Before I commit to those goals, I should probably work to refresh and improve upon my Spanish, which is already at a high level. I should probably, first, try writing English–Spanish bilingual poetry to see whether I like it.

Also, there's the obvious risk/concern of selecting one of the least spoken languages in the world to learn (and writing bilingual poetry would limit my audience not only to Icelanders but to Icelanders who are highly literate—meaning that they have the phonetics perfect, etc.—in English), but I think I would find the whole endeavor fulfilling.

(Here's one example to reference and study: Rhina P. Espaillat's "Bilingual/Bilingüe".)

The latest addition to my list of favorite words is exhume for the intense image it evokes, especially when I imagine it as meaning "evicted from eternity"; also because of how it rhymes with its antonym entomb.

Jan 8

Typesetting would be such a good skill for me to learn, especially if I plan to self-publish all my books (which is the plan). If I'm going to DIY the interior design for my book, I need to start learning typesetting and Adobe InDesign now.

Probably what I'll do is do my own personal pass at typesetting the entire book, getting it to where I think it's ready, and then have a designer come in and point out errors, inconsistencies, oddities.

The level of minutia of this process is pretty staggering. You have to contend with things like:

• Margins and line-spacing (duh)
• Kenning: the space between letters within a word
• Font choices and faces and information hierarchy (headers, emphasis, small caps, etc.)
• Justification and hyphenation (when to cut off line-ending words)
• Avoiding widows and orphans: the last line of a paragraph at the start of a page and the first line of a paragraph at the end of a page, respectively
• Headers and footers
• Footnote style
• Page number position and style
• Epigraph & block quote styling (also epigraph-attributions)

I have developed an eye for this stuff and am aware of what looks good and reads well, especially when it comes to the special relationship of words on the page and information hierarchy. (I'm still not great with fonts.) But it would still be a massive lift to learn and execute this on my own. I think it's worth the investment, because I want to be able to advise other authors on every part of self-publishing a book. I just definitely need a professional designer's eye on the interior before it goes to print.

An extended metaphor brings me some of the most intense possible type of literary pleasure. We don't extend metaphors often enough or far enough. Take them further, and if you can't extend a metaphor, maybe it is not an apt comparison; maybe it is the wrong figurative environment for you to be writing in.

Jan 9

My eczema/psoriasis cocktail has been worst in one area for over a year now, giving me leatherneck. It may be because my neck is so accessible to scratch—and equally so for both hands—but whatever the cause, the effect is that my skin there is constantly raw and constantly itchy, for when it is not raw it is flaking, and it is such that I can't turn my head without pain. A sting accompanies any stretch or fold of my neck-skin, so for a year now, I've been looking around the world like Michael Keaton's Batman does, wearing Tim Burton's notoriously inflexible cowl (known by some fans as "the Bat Turn").

(Written at 2:20 a.m. after being woken up by a sever itch in the neck area.)

[[To Itch But Not to Scratch]]

Jan 11

I just stumbled up on this YouTube video from Patrick Walsh, a writer and editor at Publishing Push. I've never heard of their company, but it seems like they do a lot of volume with a small team, and I like the way they segment their services. It'd be worth connecting with these people to learn about their business, Patrick being a good candidate for a cold email.

Jan 12

The latest addition to my list of favorite words is apt for it communicating so much meaning per letter: only three letters to say "suited for the purpose"; and because I find myself using it often, since there is no word more apt for its meaning.

Jan 13

Here's a snapshot of A24's website on January 03, 2015, when they were just starting to get some serious traction. That's about the time when I first heard of the studio too and started to look for more movies from them, because of how much I loved Ex Machina.

I sought this out to see what such an immutable brand looked like in the early days. If I'm going to compare myself to them, then I shouldn't compare myself to where they are now, after a decade of uninterrupted success.

Probably my most productive use of ChatGPT is to find new voices on a given topic. It's very good at recommending writers from a specific prompt like this:

Help me discover some new writers who are focused on place and nature in Appalachia and the Blue Ridge mountains. I'm looking for essayists, journalists, memoirists, environmentalists who write top-notch literary nonfiction.

I am now excited to dive into the works of:

• Erik Reece ("Fly-Fishing Under the Total Eclipse")
• Christopher Comuto (A Fly Fisherman's Blue Ridge)
• And Leah Hampton (Fuckface

ChatGPT is also how I discovered Mountains Piled Upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene, an anthology of Appalachia-based essays, which I am eager to read.

Now, about a month out from moving from NJ to NC, I find myself getting pretty excited and even antsy about engaging with the Blue Ridge / Appalachian mountain culture and community. Despite my love for Colorado and the Rockies, I'm remaining open to the possibility that Appalachia may be better suited to me, and that I may find beauty in it that I don't expect. One spiritually significant part of Appalachia is that it's one of the oldest mountain ranges on earth (which is actually why the peaks aren't so dramatic). And I'm also comforted and excited by the fact that the tallest peaks in all of the Appalachian range are in northwestern NC, in the Blue Ridge.

2026 Reading Plan

2025 was a reading slump for me. I only read about ten total books. To give myself some grace, this was also the first year where editing became my full-time job, so it makes sense that I had a harder time reading outside of work, for leisure. It was also one of the busier, chaotic, and stressful years of my life. So, there's that too.

The books I did read I chose very carefully and studied deeply; I read them slowly and thoroughly and integrated them fully. So, that was a win.

But my 2026 needs to be full of uninterrupted, leisurely hours of reading in stillness and utter focus. There are way too many unread books on my shelf and on my to-read list for me to not make this a quantity-focused reading year. I'm thinking 25+ books as a very reasonably goal. (50+ would be great, but I think 25 would be a news personal record.) Maybe I only study the writing craft of 12–15 of those and "only" learn from and enjoy the content of the rest.

I ought to have at least two books going at once. (I've yet to really try this, but I'm confident it will work.) One should be a book that I'm studying and reading slowly, maybe at the pace of a book a month, and the other should be a book I am enjoying (still annotating and deeply engaging with the content but not writing in the margins about stylish SVO inversions or delightful internal rhymes). The strategy here is that I should have a book available to me at all times that I am in the mood to read. I will not always be in the mood to study. Maybe I won't even read those books daily, but I should certainly read the "enjoyment books" daily, because that mode of reading is how I will really rack up a large quantity.

Maybe I should also have a third book going that is an anthology or collection of one-off pieces, if neither of my two main books are of that type. I find that those are the books that fit best on my nightstand. I can pick it up and read only one short essay/story before bed without feeling like I have to string together a bunch of reading time or reading days to preserve as sense of continuity. I discovered this in 2025 by reading E.B. White's New York Sketches this way. It was immensely pleasurable. (These would also be the books that I would allow myself to not annotate, since it's really a pain to annotate in bed.) My last thought on this is that, ideally, I would read before getting into bed in a reading chair, since the bed should be reserved for sleep only. So, maybe this book wouldn't be on my nightstand but on my reading chair.

I want to start books liberally and quit them without remorse. That said, I want to select books carefully and intentionally so that they serve the development of my taste and voice as an editor and writer. My genre-focus for 2026 will be place-based, nature-focused literary nonfiction, as that is the literary tradition I hope to join myself, and I am under-read in this tradition. Really, 2025 was my introduction to these kind of books, which makes me feel like I'm behind. I want to remedy that.

Last year, I read Annie Dillard and Robert Macfarlane for the first time, who are both masterful geniuses. This year, I want to read the people who inspired them and the people who are, like me, inspired by them: Barry Lopez, Bill Bryson, Jack London, Terry Tempest Williams, Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, D. H. Lawrence, Jon Krakauer, Rebecca Solnit, Gretel Ehrlich, John McPhee, Peter Matthiessen, Nan Shepherd.

My itch–scratch cycle has never been helped by the fact that I have exceptionally dense, fast-growing nails like tools I use as make-shift weapons, ten shovels at the ready. The difference between my nails' hardness and my skin's hardness is like that between a diamond and dirt. My nails are fecund, growing to dangerous lengths every two weeks, and my nail-beds have abnormally large surface areas, such that my nail is attached from the cuticle all the way to the edge of my finger-skin. The white part of my nail begins after my finger ends, so I could cut my nails as short as possible, and they would still be shovels. There is no option of declawing myself and cutting them so short that I would only scratch with my fingertips.

My nails are so dense that I have broken two pairs of metal nail clippers trying to sheer off the nail on my right foot's bit toe. Both times, I lined up the cut, pinched down, and the hinge snapped, rending the clippers in two.

I have only recently started to file my fingernails. That helps get them as short as possible and to smooth them out, since after I cut them normally I get a different type of lesions when I scratch that are microscopic, a result of the jagged surface of my newly severed nails. I find that the cut and filed nails do the least amount of damage, and I've started to do that at least every couple weeks.

[[To Itch But Not to Scratch]]

Jan 14

For a while, I've been wrestling with how and whether to list my upcoming book on Amazon. In the ideal case, I'd boycott the whole marketplace on principle in favor of a purely indie marketing philosophy. But that seems negligent considering Amazon's marketshare and potential for organic reach. I don't have a massive email list (yet), so any organic discovery of my book on any platform would be a gift, and it still may lead to email subscribers, even from readers who find me on Amazon.

But here's one thing I know for sure: I'm not going to link out to Amazon with a "Buy on Amazon" button on my site. I have absolutely no idea why self-published authors do this. If, as a potential reader/buyer, I have already landed on your site, sell me the book directly (at often double the margins). Don't link out to Amazon! I will not. If someone finds my canonical book landing page, their "only option" will be to buy directly from me. If they find my book on Amazon or search for it on Amazon, they'll be able to buy it there too. But I'm not going to do the client acquisition on behalf of Amazon. No way.

Jan 15

For Now, My Skin Is Healing

At the height of the day today, I had myself an outdoor workout at the calisthenics park, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. That wasn't the plan; I surprised myself. I didn't have long sleeves or a coat because I was just going to walk across the street to the gym. But then I decided to run a lap around the block as a warm-up. And then, after I started running, I had this furnace-heat flood of absolute elation, and I wanted to stay outside under the sun.

My eczematous and, as was confirmed by the dermatologist yesterday, psoriasis-tic skin has been healing pretty rapidly this week (now, Thursday). I've been sleeping better than I have been any time in the past two months, since there's been less inflammation, less itching, fewer lesions, less overall pain and distraction. Also because of my skin, I've had very little motivation or energy to exercise because of how violently my skin reacts to the heat and sweat induced by a workout. But today, I felt completely different, reborn, and I rode the high.

I ran the mile to the calisthenics park. I didn't know until I got there whether I would do a full workout. I wanted to see how cold I felt. There were no counts; the sun was shining bright at about 1 p.m., but it was still only about 40°. When I arrive at the park, I warmed up for a short, full-body circuit-workout. I did 3 sets of the six-exercise circuit—a full workout in the sunny cold: pull-ups, dips, split jumps, leg raises, inverted rows, push-ups. For the final set, I stripped off my sweatpants, down to my shorts, and went shirtless. I was still riding the high, which was also heating me up.

The workout ended, and I felt like I was about to throw up, so I sat down in a meditative stance for about five minutes, gulping down air to fight the upchuck-urge. (Lately, my cardio has been lacking.) There was a moment I had been hoping for, and it came while I was on a bench in my sweats and tucked-in T-shirt while my internal temperature dropped. I was free from the urge to yack. And I walked home—tried to job for part of it because I was getting cold, but I got a calf-cramp and resigned to a brisk, grounded stride.

Why did I do this bizarre thing?

1. Because I wanted to.
2. Because it felt right.
3. This was where it led as I followed my feelings of elation and my sense of play.
4. Vitamin D is very good for healing auto-immune skin conditions, and the most efficient way to receive Vitamin D is to expose more of my skin's surface area.
5. I received this workout as a gift and didn't want to waste this rare feeling, this rare energy.

And lastly, what have I been doing lately that may be contributing to my skin's healing:

• I've been taking shorter, not-so-hot showers, and I have stopped taking hot baths to soothe my skin (really, they were to numb the itch).
• I've been drinking aloe vera juice for the first time ever (daily, since last Wed).
• I went to the dermatologist and learned more about my condition and what may help it, and I got a sample of a non-steroidal topical Cream (Opzulera) that I've been applying to my face only.
• I've been sleeping long and more soundly with fewer disturbances and only about one conscious wake-up per night.
• We set the closing date for our new home in NC, so I now know have a countdown of how much longer I'll be in NJ (a stress-reliever).
• I've been meditating daily, for an average of about 20 minutes a day, at night, since Jan 5.

[[To Itch But Not to Scratch]]

Jan 17

DIY Book Shipping

I'm going to need a strategy for shipping my books at the cheapest possible cost without sacrificing professionalism or quality.

I've already decided to use Pirate Ship to buy my postage in advance at good rates (even though there are no discounts for single-item USPS media mail), and to print my labels and manage my order fulfillment (integrated with Shopify). So, then, there's the physical logistics of packing packages and paying postage.

USPS media mail is slow (2–8 business days), and all packages see subject to inspection, but that is still the best option. For a three pound package (which would be about the weight of a box with a paperback and hardcover in it), the Media Mail rate comes out to about $6.

I'll need two packing methods: one for one-off books (whether paperback or hardcover) and one for multi-copy orders (whether one of each format or even two hardcovers). After a short search on ULINE, I've found that I like the "Literature Mailers" for multi-copy orders and the "Easy-Fold Mailers" for single-copy orders. Even at the ULINE bulk rates, those packages add about a dollar ($0.85–$0.90) to the shipping & handling costs of each order. Then, every package also needs to have some plastic wrap or bubble wrap or paper to keep the corners protected and the book dry. So, figure the cost of shipping one paperback copy is about $6.25 and that the cost of a (3 lb) multi-copy order is about $7.00.

This means a couple things. It means that I should be charging for shipping + handling, for the postage + packaging—not just for the postage. It also means a "free shipping" incentive on multi-copy orders, I'm going to be giving up a decent chunk of my margin. If a paperback + hardcover bundle deal costs $47, I'd make 45% margins than 55% or 60%: ~$21 total profit rather than ~$28. Those would still be good margins and good profit on an order, but that promotion only makes sense if it actually is the difference between a customer buying only one copy or buying two paperbacks vs. one paperback and one hardcover.

For people accustomed to free shipping with Amazon Prime, they may balk at a $7 shipping & handling charge, especially on an $18 product. I would too. So, in my landing-page copy, I should address that, describing my process and the fact that $7 gets my hands on it and an author's signature, custom bookmark, etc.—to emphasize that they'd be supporting indie by doing that option.

Important wrinkle to consider: While media mail is the cheapest method, it is also the most restrictive. Any and all promotional materials are prohibited; the package would have to only contain the book itself. I would not be allowed to include my custom bookmark, and as far as I can tell, I would still be allowed to sign the copy. But there could not be any other materials included in the package. This may be reason enough to use USPS/UPS Ground instead, and with Pirate Ship, I may be able to get comparable rates to media mail, at least in some cases. (The current quote I see on Pirate Ship for my estimated paperback package specs is $6.62 for U.S. Ground from Charlotte, NC, to Kansas City.)

Data point: I just went to the checkout page for a paperback copy (bundled with the eBook, currently listed at $10 off at $15.95) of Savage Gods from Two Dollar Radio, and they gave me one shipping option that was Media Mail, quoted at $5.47. (Another quick note: the Shop app and Shop Pay products and UX/UI flows are absolutely top tier—so smooth and no doubt encourage and enable people to complete transactions. It's frictionless. I bought that book in about 10 seconds, mostly because, after I entered my email, Shop auto-filled my shipping address and credit card info.)

Jan 20

Even after some very open-minded research, it seems to me that the phrase "to have and to hold" is inextricably tied to the exchange of property (first used in sixteenth-century English legal contracts and then adapted to marriage ceremonies via the English Book of Common Prayer), and I'm having a hard time seeing "to have and to hold" as a healthy goal for a relationship, especially coming from the perspective that the healthiest relationships emerge from detachment and mutual desire, rather than from grasping, neediness, and a longing for safety and security in another.

I have a real problem with the language we use for love and find it perverted and unhealthy, mostly for it promoting co-dependent partnerships. I am getting married later this year, but I want to eliminate/avoid all of these pitfalls of language in our ceremony, to describe the union that me and my partner actually want: something co-creative rather than co-dependent.

The phrase "false dichotomies" is redundant.

Skin Check-In & Reflection

My skin has healed more rapidly in the past ten days than it has in any other period in the past two years, and it has healed from a severe flare-up to very little dryness and very little itchiness already. Around New Year's, I resolved to change my approach to my skin by trying everything I thought may help me all at once (as well as changing my mindset).

Here, I'll try to make an exhaustive list of everything I've been doing lately that I expect has contributed to my healing:

• Meditating: I've been meditating daily since Jan 5, which is the first time I've resumed daily meditation in about two years.
• Praying: I've been closing every nighttime meditation session with a "prayer": "Tonight, may I sleep in peace and please not scratch." In the first few days of my daily meditation practice, I was wording my closing prayer more like a lucidity intention ("Tonight, I will have many dreams. Tomorrow I will recall my dreams. Tonight, may I have a lucid dream beneath the glacier."), and I was tacking on the "skin prayer" onto the end. But one day, I decided to drop the rest and just ask thrice for quality sleep.
• Drinking Aloe Vera: For the first time ever, I have also started investing aloe vera juice daily, about 8–12 oz. I have been recommended this by a couple people over the past couple years, and I finally tried it since topical aloe vera gel has been so hydrating, cooling, and healing for my skin. So, I've been doing both the topical and internal as of late. I've now consumed an entire gallon, so I need to go to the store to get more today.
• Finding Peace with It: I've also felt a pretty significant shift in my outlook toward my skin. (I expect that this could be attributed in part to mediation.) For a while, I've known that my skin is not my enemy, and that it is trying to communicate something to me, to teach me something—that, if anything, I am the aggressor because I am the one doing the scratching. But now, I feel like I've finally achieved a shift it that outlook, where there is no animosity or conflict but collaboration. I'm sitting with my skin, and I am more at peace with the itch/dryness than I have ever been (even with it being a severe flair-up). I was able to achieve this by sinking into this feeling that I will heal in time and that the healing process will benefit me in all conceivable ways: physically, psychologically, spiritually. More than ever, now, I am at peace with the way my skin is and am confident that it will heal with time. I have more love for and understanding of my skin than I have in a long time.
• Dermatology Appt: I went to the dermatologist last week (after my skin had started healing from meditation and aloe vera). I had booked the appointment under the premise that I wanted to get screened for a biologic medication (a shot to wrangle my immune system, something I have resisted for two years). But I mostly went to learn as much as I could about my condition, hoping to get a diagnosis. The dermatologist confirmed my recent suspicion that I have both eczema and psoriasis, and I learned that those are expressions of two polar extremes of my immune system. Given my joint condition, he advised against biologic treatments, warning me of a common side-effect where, by treating one extreme (e.g., treating eczema with Dupixent), the other would flare up (e.g., a systemic worsening of my psoriasis). Instead, he recommended JACK-inhibitors, which are offered topically and orally. Those I would be more comfortable with, and it was helpful and reassuring to confirm my suspicion that the new type of dryness and flakiness I was experiencing was actually a new condition (psoriasis), and to clarify that it was, indeed, an auto-immune issue rather than a contact allergy. Now that my skin is healing, I'm going to cancel my follow-up appointment but keep JACK-inhibitors in mind as the first allopathic treatment plan I would try if my skin flares up again.
• Immanent Change of Environment: One week ago today, we decided on a closing date with our builder for our house in Charlotte, and that has certainly led to a reduction in my stress level—not so much because I was anxious about the house process but because now I am guaranteed to be getting out of NJ, and I have a one-month countdown. This change has been overdue. If I'm being honest with myself, I haven't felt at home here for more than three years. That feeling is most acute when I return from a trip, and the first time I felt that dread of flying back into Newark was when I returned from Iceland. Especially in the past year, it's taken me a day or two to recover from returning from a trip. It feels like I'm unduly trapping myself in an environment that doesn't suit me, like an animal in a zoo—"unduly" because I have the means and the freedom to be elsewhere. Now, I am exercising that freedom, and I will be leaving soon, and I hope that me and my skin will find that the new environment is better suited to my true being.
• Shorter Showers: Around the same time as the rest of these changes (a couple weeks ago), I decided to stop taking (scorching) hot baths to soothe my skin, because I noticed how inflamed it would be afterward, even though while I was in the water I didn't itch and didn't feel dry. Every dermatologist ever has recommended this to me, but it's hard to do it when a hot shower or bath was one of the only times I felt relief throughout the whole day—one of the only times when I could think without being distracted by the itch. So, now I've been taking short (<10-min) showers that are not scorching and are closer to my internal body temperature. I usually end it with 30 sec – 1 min of cold water too. It seems to be helping.

Erik Reece's "Fly-Fishing Under the Total Eclipse"

I just finished reading the first piece I've read by Erik Reece, published in the Missouri Review, and I love this guy. I feel a kinship to him, and I feel this essay is part of a style or tradition that I deeply want to contribute to. It feels like the type of writing I should be reading and writing, myself.

It is pensive and reflective, personal and divulging (only enough to give the essay a fingerprint and a deeper meaning than the mere spectacle/experience itself), and it's so carefully crafted with details of place that the reader floats along with Erik and his cousin Tye.

Here's the killer first paragraph, which I find to be economic and enticing:

A solar eclipse can force a person into some fundamental, elemental thoughts. I realized that while standing under one on the banks of the Eleven Point River, somewhere in southeast Missouri. But I hadn't really considered the existential dimensions of the experience months earlier when I called up my cousin Tye and suggested we haul our fly-fishing gear out the edge of the prairie to have good look, on April 8, at the day-darkening sky.

Note the sense of narrative tension and the expectation/intrigue he sows here; the deep significance of place; and, of course, the expert use of language: e.g., "day-darkening sky."

Throughout, there are these descriptions of nature and the attentive act of fly-fishing that really drew me in and astounded me by how vivid the images became in my mind. Here is one such image, which chosen details are perfect for communicating a scene and putting the reader square in Erik's canoe, looking through his eyes:

A family of eastern river cooters were sunning, in ascending order of size, on a tree limb near the bank. As always happens, the smallest ones dropped into the river first, leaving the matriarch, or the patriarch, to finally, begrudgingly abandon its ease when we drifted too close.

The penultimate beat of the story is the parties' actual reception of the eclipse, which I found climactic and utterly satisfying and mind-expanding. It's also how I have felt witnessing the majesty of nature, including the two partial eclipses I have seen. Here is an abridged version of that climactic paragraph:

As we all on the riverbank, I thought about how people often say a total eclipse reminds them of their cosmic insignificance. I agree with the Roman emperor-philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, that this is a good thing to think about in general. . . . But staring cup at the muted sun, 93 million miles away, I didn't feel small so much as I felt lucky. . . . I felt lucky to be observing the astonishingly unlikely phenomenon of a total eclipse simply because our sun happens to be four hundred times larger than the moon and four hundred times further away. The chances of that are, well, astronomical.

This is the perfect reference for the essay I hope to write after having experienced this year's total solar eclipse in Iceland. (I need to go ahead and just freaking book my flight!)

I'm watching Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, and the sentence I just heard is my favorite of this first episode. In response to Moyer's prompt, "Unlike the classical heroes, we're not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves":

And in doing that, you save the world. I mean, you do. The influence of a vital person vitalizes. There's no doubt about it. The world is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting it around and changing the rules and so forth. No, any world is a living world if it's alive, and the thing is to bring it to life. And the way to bring it to life is to find in your own case where your life is, and be alive yourself, it seems to me.

"The influence of a vital person vitalizes." So, to vitalize the world, one must vitalize oneself.

Jan 21

I'm at my favorite coffee shop in Hoboken (Bwé), and a couple kids have just arrived after school. It's 3:45. One is working on some math homework, and the other is reading. The kid reading can't be any older than six, which is why I am baffled by what I just overheard.

First, I hear him perfectly pronouncing "unfathomable" and "calamity" as he asks his mother for their meanings. (I have to imagine that he was sounding out these words, since it seemed like he wasn't familiar with them.) Mom explains their definitions well enough, and he continues reading. After a bit, he comes to the end of a chapter and flips ahead to the end of the book before looking over to Mom and saying (this is the most surprising bit): "There are sixteen chapters, and I'm on four. I've read a quarter." Then, just now, as he resumed again after finishing chapter five, he said, "After eight, I'll read half. I have three more chapters."

The subtraction involved in determining that, at chapter five, he's three chapters away from chapter 8 is what I would expect would be near the cognitive limit of a kid his age. Maybe I should adjust my expectations, because he so easily divided sixteen into quarters and halves and used the words "quarter" and "half" with not only mathematical precision but also linguistic elegance, in the flow of what was essentially his own spoken inner monologue. My goodness!

Notes from the Great Sand Dunes Reflecting on my afternoon on Aug 6, 2025

I walked for four hours and fort-five minutes on land no one else had ever touched, or more accurately, I walked on one of the fresh rugs that are rolled out daily over the Dunes that erase all signs of life on earth, rolled out and erased by these unique symphony of winds. The conditions for this particular collection of sand have existed for more than the lifespan of our species. So, in the fullness of time, these dunes will change too, or the nearby mountain range will erode such that wind passes over it rather than bouncing off of it, as it does now, and swirling into a vast collection of fine earthen dust. For now, on human scales of time, the dunes are solid enough that we can map them and name them, create hiking route that lead to the tops of them. I set out around 3:30 p.m. for Star Dune following a rainstorm. That settled and hardened and cooled the sand which is normally more fluid, more abrasive. I wore my sandals because I knew how rare the opportunity was to wear open-toed shoes there without getting burned by the sand that normally bakes in the sun all day.

Even though I had studied the map, I chose a path at random, because I didn't want to circumnavigate the dune-cluster, walking below them on the river, to the suggested start-point. And then once I did begin my descent, I lost my bearings almost entirely. The highest vantage points only gave me the information of my heading and the likely direction of my destination. The closer I got to it, the harder it was to identify Star Dune. For the sand is so homogenous and featureless under my feet that each one looks identical. Looking down between my toes, straddling a ridge-line, I saw—over and over—a shaded side and one illuminated, the edge of the dune's shadow bisecting me.

The clouds didn't clear until hours after the rain had stopped, and their departure recolored the entire landscape. What were a muted brown, the Dunes ignited and became a matte gold complete with highlights and shadows, depth and dimensionality rather than monotony. As the sand dried and heated up in the late-afternoon sun, so did my skin, especially the skin on my hands which was the most exposed. Thankfully, the sun began to set as soon as the rainwater evaporated from the surface, cooling me and the dunes once again.

More or less aimlessly, I wandered along the steep, winding ridge-lines of the dunes and, at times, crawled up their sheer, sliding faces. Then, I'd bound down the descents, each step sinking me deep and pushing pounds of sand downhill.

Except for my initial ascent, all of the time I spent on the Dunes was solitary; I could not see another soul or hear anything besides the sand falling upon itself from the wind, or the occasional grasshopper buzzing. The beetles made no sound as they scurried across the sand, leaving miniature avalanches behind them. Everything was dampened, and the grandiosity of it all made me small. I felt no larger than the dune-traversing insects. Was I anything other than that anyway? What was the difference besides the fact that I am bipedal?

(For the rest of this story, I need to refer to my Otter recording of the debrief from that day.)

Jan 23

From Genesis, the entire human endeavor is made out to be masculine: "That he shall have dominion over the earth"—

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth (Genesis 1:28, KJV).

—it does not say "That he shall live in harmony with Nature." Nature is feminine, so its placing the masculine (within both man and woman) literally over ("dominion over") the feminine.

(An annotation I made in the first chapter of Robert A. Johnson's Femininity Lost and Regained*)*

Line-editing is the most comprehensive and in-depth (also the most time-consuming) phase of the edit.

My focus for a line-edit is the clarity and concision of the prose; it's about improving the manuscript at the level of the paragraph, sentence, and word. These are not edits for correctness but more for craft and style. In my view, line-editing deals with the part of a book that can take it from being good to being great. (And people rarely recommend a book they think is good.)

A line-edit is not a final proofread. That would be the next phase of the edit, after the author has incorporated all of my suggestions into a new, near-final version of the manuscript.

The only thing that separates line-editing from developmental editing (high-level, structural feedback), to me, is the state of the manuscript. During a line-edit, I don't shy away from making structural suggestions—like swapping the order of two chapters or re-structuring the sections within a chapter—where appropriate, if I deem it important.

I've always found it difficult to properly pronounce the word horror. Saying it just now, I realized that the difficulty of Icelandic is that about half of the words are as hard to pronounce as the word horror, complete with the same repeated-vowel/consonant-sound issue. Even "Good day," "Goðan daggin" has the double-glottal stop with those two G's—not easy to get precisely right.

For anyone who asks me about leaning Icelandic, I'm going to tell them that it's like learning a language where all the words are as hard to pronounce as English words like horror and rural, and most of the words have double that number of syllables.

Jan 25

"You're crazy," she says.

"I'm 'crazy' about you," I say, "which is the most sane thing I could be."

The least illusory part of reality is the presence of other people. And the most real-feeling part of a dream is the illusion that other people are present.

I just learned about Flaming Hydra from reading one of John Warner's ire about Substack TV. Hydra is a collective of writers in the shape of a publication with a "weekdaily" newsletter:

Each of Flaming Hydra's more than 65 members agrees to contribute a minimum of one original piece per month to an ingenious, brief and captivating daily newsletter, in exchange for an equal share of the subscription proceeds, payable monthly. Flaming Hydra members retain the rights to their work absolutely.

This is, as Substack claims to be, a revolutionary business model, because every writer owns a proportionate share of the distributor (the publication itself), rather than being a pseudo-employee of what is effectively a social media platform.

Flaming Hydra's revenue comes from $3/mo reader-subscriptions, which subscriptions unlock 65+ articles per month—a staggering amount of content per dollar compared to subscribing individually to paid publications on Substack.

Jan 26

The latest addition to my list of favorite words: anomalous, which I just used in a casual conversation with a friend about the current volatility of the commodity silver, calling it an "anomalous market environment." I found myself using it later that same day while playing backgammon with my partner, as the most apt word I could find to describe my starting the game by rolling three doubles in a row. It has all the best qualities a word can have: versatility, specificity, economy, and phonetic quality.

Jan 28

The Norton Sampler, I just discovered, is a textbook/anthology combo intended to teach students how to write essays. The 70 essays in the collection seem to range from the 1950s to the present, and they are grouped by the writing tools they exemplify: narration, description, comparison, analysis, etc. This, especially in concert with The Art of the Personal Essay, could make for a great self-paced curricula.

Taylor moves through life at Nature's tempo, resonating with it and radiating that energy out into the world as light and love. Her presence is healing, even to strangers who have the privilege of passing her on the street. Even in life's most difficult moments, she brings out the joy.

Jan 29

This meme does a better job than anything I’ve read on the topic explaining why ChatGPT is a completely ineffective therapist.

Only another human (or oneself) could offer a response challenging enough to catalyze one’s growth and development. And I’d argue that any therapeutic value one derives from conversing with A.I. would come faster and easier if, instead of prompting, one were simply journaling (i.e., prompting oneself).

Hamster-Wheel Mind

I find that my mind has the inertia of a hamster-wheel. Its motion depends entirely on the activity of the hamster, which is analogous to my independent, autonomous body. When the hamster is stagnant, so too the wheel. But once the body starts moving, the mind follows.

My mind moves best once my body has already, and my mind's inertia resets with each day's dawn, after each night's sleep.

(Ironically, or maybe fittingly, this thought jumped to my mind as soon as I stepped outside to walk across the street to the gym.)

Crazy idea for a "book tour": I could travel to visit the most notable people I met during my time in Iceland, those who are characters in the book. I could deliver books to them and go on mini-adventures with them outdoors, if they will have me: Jared in NM, Grímur and Gunnhildur in Iceland, Emiel & Inge in Norway, Hans & Evelyn in Germany. And, of course, I could write a series of essays, or a long essay of vignettes featuring my reunion with these memorable, impactful people.

Jan 31

Here's a better essay title for my piece about reclaiming femininity in Western culture:

"Up with the Matriarchy!"

(Damn, that's good enough to be a book title.)

Subtitle/premise: Nurturing feminine values without warring against the masculine

Water is certainly feminine and fire masculine, yet ice is masculine and magma feminine.

Water and magma are of the world (in Her veins and bellies), whereas ice and fire are in the world (on Her skin and as her clothes). While it may seem counterintuitive, doesn't it make sense that different states of matter would have different yin/yang energies?

It is ineffective and shortsighted to vilify one side of a duality (two interdependent things that could exist in harmony), mistaking it as a dichotomy: two opposite things irreparably in a state of conflict. The Machine, the masculine, has been of great benefit to our species, and for maybe a thousand years or more, it has been imbalanced with the feminine, Nature. The only way to resolve our state of discord is to give life to the side of things that's repressed, drowned out, and harmonize the two: the Machine & Nature.

(Ref: James Taylor Foreman's review of Paul Kingsnorth's Against the Machine

Here's a passage I read today in Savage Gods that struck me as odd, as an example of warring against the Machine, rather than embracing its useful parts:

I listened to the birds sing a lot—our land is ripe with birdsong—and I watched them. I tried to watch them without naming them, though it went against my intellectual, analytical instincts. I didn't always succeed, because I can't resist the impulse to catalog.

In response, I wrote in the margins, "Not all of these impulses need to be resisted."

Fragments make me uncomfortable. Only in rare cases should a period delineate two clauses; full stops should almost always land between two sentences.

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