L O G S

Fishing my fleeting thoughts for ideas worth writing

2024 Logs

Word Count: 61,921

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October

October 31 A dramatic film is not comparable to a novel, nor a documentary to a nonfiction book; films have their structural analog in writing in the forms of the essay and the short story. And you can become a much better writer within those forms by studying cinema, especially screenwriting and editing (not so much directing). Studying film is among the most efficient ways to understand both story structure and essay structure.

At the root, here is the analogy to keep in mind as you watch any feature film, short film, or video essay: a shot is to a film as a paragraph is to a short story / essay (and each cut a paragraph break, not a period).

The best screenwriters and directors design shots that accomplish as much as possible with as little camera movement as possible, and the best film editors make every cut purposeful so that each shot accomplishes as much as possible (regardless of the pacing of the scene, the number of total cuts). The best films are elegant and economic, and the same is true for any great writer's paragraphs. They could be long or short, disorienting or starkly clear, but they are undoubtedly economic, and each paragraph break is utterly purposeful.

If you want to learn from great essayists and short story writers, study their paragraphs -– What is the form of their contents? How do they flow? Why are they captivating? When do they choose to break? And if you want to learn from great films, study their shots and cuts. As you read or watch, ask yourself what decisions led to what you see.

Ref: This clip from Every Frame a Painting's recent video on Billy Wilder's Sabrina perfectly exhibits the importance of thoughtful cuts and elegant/economic shots.

The invisible art that makes movies and books magical is the cut. In your normal, everyday awareness, there are no cuts. There are no vignettes or scenes or shifts in perspective. It's just a stream of information and sensations. But in a film or a book (or a dream), you are delivered a sequence of scenes, and (ideally) those scenes contain all you need to know about the story and deliver that information in the most compelling and engaging way possible.

Maybe part of the reason why I can't get excited about distribution is that I don't think my writing is good enough to warrant too many people's time and attention. It'd probably best if I could get that limiting belief out of my head. But, even if I don't, I think I'm finally reaching the level of skill and quality that I believe is worthy of others' time and attention. I don't think had reached that bar until the last two or three months.

Notes from David's Q&A, on Oct 30, 2024

• When you are deciding on an essay idea, consider it along these two dimensions and maximize for one: depth and distinctiveness. Either you're writing about something with a depth of knowledge, or you're reaching to write about something you're learning about and you need to make it interesting by doing that in a distinct way.
• David's 100/100 way to keep the ideas coming: (1) Reading, (2) talking to smart people, (3) moving my body.
• Don't let editing make an essay too orderly. If there's not enough chaos in a piece of writing, you have stripped it of its soul. Those two forces must be in harmony in a piece of writing.
• Text is the most malleable medium: small size, easily searchable, portable.
• Find writers who you just read for style and whose work you want to absorb, and it will seem into you through osmosis.

An exceptional editor doesn't just offer a better word; he intuits the word that the author intends but has yet to find.

"An aversion against" is inaccurate and redundant. The correct prepositional phrase is "an aversion to" (also not from).

As Stephen Pressfield has said (on How I Write), "the female carries the mystery" in a story. But that doesn't always mean a human, female character. Often, it is Nature -– the desert in Dune, the sea in Moby Dick -– and sometimes it is a character with a feminine energy (being the object of desire, elusive, powerful), like Bill in the Kill Bill movies. The feminine energy is mystery, and there must be a mystery in your story, which serves as the object of your character's ambition.

October 30 I just discovered Maggie Rogers's song "Resonant Body" via Spotify, and I couldn't believe I hadn't heard it yet. It's beautiful, but it's not on any of her main albums. It's on Notes from the Archive, which is a collection of her unreleased tracks. After listening to it twice, I understand why it didn't make the cut. The bridge ruins it. Everyone loves a good bridge, and often the bridge is the most memorable part of the song, for it being a pattern-break and usually the space for the most poignant lyrics of the song. The lyrics are great in the bridge of "Resonant Body," but the instrumentals and syncopation (syllables matching to the beat) are off.

The musical motif of the whole song, which is this call-and-answer, two-tone string plucking, cuts out entirely. And words come across loose and mismatched with the beat. It's disorienting, and it prevents the message of the lovely lyrics from coming across.

Two solutions that would make this an album-worthy song:

1. Cut the bridge entirely and take a stand, make a bet, on this being an alternative song, that I imagine as an interlude in an album. Without the bridge, it'd be 2:50. It's already repetitive and lacks a typical song structure. The forced bridge abandons the spirit of this song.
2. Rework the instrumentals in the bridge so that the lyrics don't come in like a multi-syllabic salad and clash with the rhythm. Represent the musical motif differently, maybe by changing the key, rather than cutting it completely.

Today is a perfect fall morning. I'm walking along the Hudson, headed to a coffee shop. Yesterday, I was longing for the mountains. This morning, I am filled with gratitude for being in this city.

October 29 I have a special appreciation for animated television and films that I can't quite articulate. Maybe it's because it seems so outside what I would ever be able to create, but certain animated shows and movies just blow my mind and stick at the top of my list of all-time media.

Part of my appreciation for this medium might also be my natural affinity for surrealism, which is inherent in cartoons and animation. It's all dream-like because the images are imagined and exaggerated and are drawn to evoke feelings, not to convey reality. To be more accurate, when they are not surrealist, they are impressionist.

Among my favorite animated shows and movies are:

• Batman: The Animated Series
• Batman Beyond (show and movie)
• Batman: Under the Red Hood
• Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox
• Avatar: The Last Airbender
• Avatar: The Legend of Korra
• Bojack Horseman
• Arcane
• Ben 10
• Codename: Kinds Next Door
• The Simpsons
• The Midnight Gospel
• Justice League: The Animated Series
• The Incredibles, Toy Story, Inside Out (and almost any other movie by Pixar)

(This Reddit thread has a good list of recommendations, which users say are worthy of the label "masterpiece.")

I want to be so adept at conversation that I can reliably start up and round off a conversation within a three-floor ride on an elevator with a stranger.

October 28 Adventure is wired into our biology: the play of the masculine, ambition, and the feminine, mystery. These archetypes have their roots in our anatomy. The masculine ambition is to sow seed and to understand the mystery of death. The feminine ambition is to nurture the crops that are sown and to understand the mystery of life. So, the man's adventure is to get himself inside the woman, and the woman's adventure is to birth the thing that is latent inside her.

To feel at home abroad, you not only need to be at peace within yourself but to have a deep connection to something other than yourself.

Example of slide-show sentences (purposeless fragments, used for cheap emphasis):

It took her back right to that one day. That day she had so desperately wished to forget. That day had changed her life forever. And not in a good way… She had decided to forget about it. To just leave it behind and go on living her life like everything was fine. But now, this woman stepped into her plane. – Random news article, Happy in Shape

The fruition of introspection is not knowing thyself but knowing thine Self.

The kitchen counter is sacred, for it feeds us. The kitchen altar. Even though it's an attractive surface for clutter and filth, keep it clean so that it's always able to do its divine duty of meal-making.

Detaching in the present from all future outcomes is, paradoxically, the posture that brings about the best possible outcomes. And living in fear of the worst possible outcome is what will bring that outcome about.

The final act of creation is detachment, so that what you have created can become autonomous.

October 27 I'm writing a book about my summer in Iceland 2.5 years after it happened, because it took that long for me to become a good enough writer to do justice to these stories and ideas that I hold so dearly.

The worst kind of American? One entitled.

Naiveté is the belief that nothing bad is going to happen. Neuroticism is the belief that the worst possible thing is bound to happen. Both are errors equally illusory.

Naïveté is a false sense of security. Neuroticism is a false sense of insecurity.

It's a Sunday afternoon, and I'm trying out a new coffee shop. It's huge with a lot of seating, and it wasn't even full before noon. Yet for some stingy reason, they don't offer wifi on the weekends. Strike one: disincentivizing people to work here on the weekends. Also, they have about six of these nice, huge wooden tables, and they're at exactly the right hight relative to the seats of the chairs. But the chairs are all stools –- all of them have no backs; half of them are those colorful, tin-metal square ones with the cut-out handles in the middle that force you to sit at an awkward angle for more surface area; and the other half have circular seats that are smaller than any adult's bum. Strike two: uncomfy seating. I'm about to take the first sip of my jasmine green tea. It was specially made in a pour-over, loose-leaf contraption, and the barista really loaded it up with honey, so I am optimistic. But if it's not up to snuff, this will be my last visit to Kuppi: The Coffee Company. . . . A base hit. Kuppi gets to stay in the lineup. Maybe I'll come back and give it another try on a weekday.

Besides the tea and the ample seating, there's one other pro to this place, which is surprising: they don't play any music. It's refreshing. It means that I can work with just the white noise of the crowd or listen to music in my headphones without hearing the café's soundtrack in the silences.

When your writing feels a little unkept, loose, and meaning is too sparse, let these come to your AID:

• Action
• Imagery
• Detail.

All of these are solutions to the problem of buoyant, flimsy, porous writing. To pack more meaning into the same number of words, add action, imagery, and detail. And if you are struggling to communicate an idea altogether, try conveying it instead through metaphor.

There are two ways to make your writing more dense: either

1. Communicate more meaning in the same number of words
2. Or communicate the same meaning with fewer words.

AID helps you accomplish the former, and metaphor is the most effective way to accomplish the latter.

Often, writing feels like drinking from a waterfall in winter; words drip out slowly, and I can barely get a taste. But after sitting with it long enough, my fingers melt, and the river runs rapid. I begin to surprise and delight myself with words and wonder why I ever dreaded the work of writing.

October 26 The Halloween Moment in a story is when things get scary. It's the moment of greatest tension, right before the climax.

October 25 The thought I'm going to get robbed is just as inaccurate and misguided as There is no crime in Iceland. The reality is somewhere in the middle: I could get robbed, and I should take precautions against it.

Etymologically, naïveté means "native disposition." That's why it's associated with innocence and ignorance. It describes the hopeful and playful perspective that an infant has toward the world, which is both beautiful and dangerous if not balanced by pragmatic concerns about things like how to not die.

Everyday and anytime suffer from the same grammatical error. Writers use these adjective forms interchangeably with their adverb forms, which are phrasal: "every day" and "any time."

Reverse Outline for "Neuroticism & Naïveté"

A Story-Led Essay Hook: I got robbed in Iceland.

Promise: I'm going to go on to the Westfjords, even without my passport and without any money.

Claim: Peak naïveté is operating as if the worst possible outcome is impossible. Peak Neuroticism is acting as if the worst possible outcome is the most likely.

• I was naive: "There's no crime in Iceland."
• I was neurotic: The terns are going to puncture my skull with their beaks and rip my head off with their talons.

Takeaway: You need enough neuroticism to prepare for the worst possible outcome and enough naiveté to keep going once it happens.

• I can get robbed in Iceland, but even if that happens, it can all work out.
• The terns weren't going to kill me, but they might shit on me.

Payoff: I had extra cash stashed away, and I gave Monkey the money –– minutes before the ferry departed for the Westfjords.

Awareness is step 0 — not even step 1. Awareness creates the opportunity for change. But every step making the change requires action. Awareness is knowing what's wrong and what you need to do. Action is following through.

Cite this clip (23:00–25:00) from Robert Greene, on the Subtle Art Podcast on the value of introspection and the absence of it in our culture.

Slow down. Look up.

All fiction is fantasy, because the movement of realty does not neatly follow a three-act structure.

Courage is competence less comfort; it is the space between your competence-zone and your comfort-zone. That means a few things:

1. All courageous actions are inherently uncomfortable (otherwise, they wouldn't be courageous).
2. As your comfort zone grows, the number of courageous actions available to you decreases, unless your competence grows at the same or a greater rate.
3. To become more courageous overtime, your competence must always outpace your comfort.

Your competence-zone contains what you are capable of doing. Your comfort-zone contains what you are comfortable doing. And courage is doing something that you are capable of but uncomfortable doing. It is reckless to do something outside your competence-zone — reckless or risky but not always bad.

Consider these zones for a neurosurgeon. In residency, she rapidly develops her competence-zone and slowly develops her comfort-zone within her work. What she does requires courage and obligates her to constant discomfort, uncertainty, self-doubt: Do I know for sure that I'm capable of doing this?

Now imagine her 25 years into her career. Her competence for neurosurgery is nearly maxed out, and the comfort-zone has caught up. Every case she sees is similar to something she's done before, and she's not just capable but comfortable doing it again. Neurosurgery no longer requires her to be courageous.

There are a few risks to be aware of and to work against:

1. You never want to become deluded to the point where your comfort-zone exceeds your competence-zone. That would lead you to do reckless things nonchalantly, without proper planning or precaution.
2. You don't want to be so worried and have such self-doubt that you tamp down your comfort-zone and keep it artificially far from your competence-zone. That would be exhausting, because even the things you would naturally be comfortable with you have chosen to be sources of angst and uncertainty, requiring courage unnecessarily.
3. Finally, you never want your comfort-zone and your competence-zone to be the same, because that means you've stopped learning. You have done what you're capable of for so long, without acquiring new skills, that all those things have become comfortable and pose no challenge, cause no worry or self-doubt or growth. Too much comfort is a signal of stagnation.

Don't aim at something you can see; aim at something you can barely conceive, that lies ever beyond the horizon.

October 24 On the State of the Course call, we just had a conversation about how to help the lagging writers in the current Write of Passage cohort. The assumption is that they are struggling to write and aren't getting words on the page, or at least not words they're proud enough about to share with the community and ask for feedback.

I was outnumbered, being the only one of us four to argue that this is not our problem to solve. I wasn't particularly articulate about it and was a little too insensitive and dismissive on the call, which hurt the whole rhetorical appeal of my argument. But I wrote it out afterwards to clarify my position.

And I'm recording it here because it's (1) an interesting business-ethics case study about responsibility and obligation to customers/clients (and how to manage expectations), (2) a study in the relationship between marketing/positioning and product/experience delivery, and (3) an anecdote that illustrates some of my more deeply held values –– namely agency, autonomy, and self-reliance.

Here's my argument:

"Hey team, I thought a little more about this and just wanted to be clear on my position (in case you’re interested). I certainly care about the problems of our students, but I’m just also sensitive to the problems we’re designed and obligated to solve.

Our main problem is: “Help me become a better writer.” But the problem we were talking about is: “Help me overcome psychological and emotional obstacles to my writing.” Everyone expects us to solve the main problem, and we can deliver on that. We don’t want students expecting us to solve problems related to not writing, because we cannot deliver on that expectation (for everyone).

If I pay for a subscription to a month of workout classes and don’t show up once to do the workout, I can’t blame the gym for my dissatisfaction. And the gym makes no promises and offers me no support to get me out of bed and into the class in the morning. They are not responsible for that part of my experience.

We don’t (or we shouldn’t) guarantee satisfaction if you don’t write in the writing bootcamp.

And to be clear, it would be nice to help students in any way we can (hence Discussion Gyms). But if we use Live Session time to support students psychologically/emotionally, they’ll start to expect it as a guarantee of the experience. And then, if they don’t write and are not satisfied with their experience, they could rightfully blame us because we promised (implicitly) that they would get words on the page."

The watch doesn't make the watch-maker. Mr. Paley, you may be conflating empirical evidence with a pleasant, lyrical analogy. Your thought experiment is not evidence for God but evidence of your faith in God, the fact that you see Him in the watch and not merely man.

(Ref: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on teleological arguments)

Professionals pull their titles from some salient part of the body, whether it's a great essay, a great book, or a great album, or a great film. If the title appears somewhere in the work, it won't be part of the hook or conclusion. (If it's an album, it won't be one of the song titles.)

Examples

• Of Monsters and Men: My Head Is an Animal (from the chorus of the first track)
• Caroline Polachek: Desire, I Want to Turn Into You (from the chorus of the first track)
• Anne Lamont: Bird By Bird (from a less-than-one-paragraph anecdote from her second chapter)

This has the effect of giving credit to your reader. You don't need to sell me anything with the title. You've already sold me for the quality of your words and your work. The title won't make sense until you read the book, watch the film, listen to the album. The title doesn't have to be so concrete and sale-y. And if you can avoid doing that, the title can be this little breadcrumb that incites a satisfying payoff partway through.

Even Kant's entire ouvre on ethics has a Shiny Dime: The Categorical Imperative.

The bookends of any piece of writing are principally important. With your intro, you need to capture your reader's attention. And with your conclusion, you need to reward their attention.

Oct 23, 2024

I just worked a 13-hour day. That was coming off of two ~10-hour days. It was my "final exam" for my role as Curriculum Director at Write of Passage: creating the net-new "Make It Flow" session, my main contribution to the curricular legacy of the best writing course in the Internet. We nailed it, a square 90 minutes packed with content and exercises and breakouts and high-energy engagement. For a v1 of a session, it was dangerously close to our standard of quality.

Two years ago, I was sitting in Bwé doing a LinkedIn Learning course on Keynote trying to figure out how to design an instructional session on writing. And today marks the fruition of my evolution. (I still have poor visual design chops, compared to my colleagues', but that has gotten better.) I just created an entirely new session for the main cannon of the Write of Passage curriculum. It was clear and helpful and solved the problem are students are currently facing, asking "How do I bring it all together?"

Right as the session wrapped, I yelled and did a flip onto our bed and danced and slapped the wall above the doorframe like a championship athlete. And this is the first time I've felt that energy since about two years ago, when I got hired to Write of Passage via Zoom and promptly stripped to my underwear to run a lap around the Overbrook house to commemorate my achievement and the first snow of the season.

October 23 David played "Hells Bells" to start Live Session 4 of Cohort 13. We were hyped about the session and chatting in the back channel. I drafted a message: "Hades can't hold us." Then, I deleted it –– a bit too corny, especially for a company group chat. But it's too phonetically perfect for it not to live somewhere.

Disney World's Splash Mountain perfectly follows a three-act story structure, and it's worth studying. It is "rising action" incarnate, as well as exhibiting a textbook Promise-Payoff pair (the big drop at the climax), and a satisfying resolution ("Zippity Doo Dah").

There is no star brighter than the one we make together, my love.

October 22 "Earn your food" isn't toxic; it's simply biology. So maybe the best way to live in harmony with my biology is, each day, to not eat until I have done something of note with my body: either "hunted" or "gathered".

In any story, you must fulfill the promise(s) you've made to your reader/viewer, but it must happen in way they could not have predicted: surprising in the moment and inevitable in retrospect. You must fulfill promise(s) while subverting expectations.

During my first few weeks in Iceland, I finished a 13,000-word short story intended to serve as an allegory for the inevitability of suffering and man's agency over it. The only people who have read it are my parents, my favorite professor, and this young woman I sat next to for 15 minutes on the bus between Selfoss and Hveragerdi. She offered me some candy –– a gummy bear, I think –– and I emailed "Thropo" to her because in that short time, she learned I was writing a short story inspired by Camus, and I learned that she wrote absurdist poetry. She asked to read my draft, which I had finished the day before, and I shared it with her before I sent it to my dad, who is my most eager and responsive reader. I never heard from her again.

She the kind of girl who says "harder said than done" when she means the opposite and who will say, in place of an expletive, "Go suck a toe."

October 21 Spiritual parody of Sinatra's "New York, New York":

If I can be still here, There's stillness everywhere. It's up to you. Slow down. Slow down.

Ironically, I am dictating this while driving down the road along the Hudson River.

Headphones are augmented reality devices.

What is the culture of a company besides the caliber of its people?

October 20 I have only love for you.

I think I am anti-pragmatism. Pragmatism is interested in discovering the beliefs about reality that are most useful to you and for humanity. I am interested in discovering what is most true to me and for humanity, regardless of whether that belief is useful. Truth and pragmatism are opposed, because the truth is very often uncomfortable and inconvenient and difficult: in other words, not pragmatic.

What I'm going for with Feeling Fire and Ice: essays disguised as a memoir

Here's another artist whose energy I ought to channel: Stephen Soderbergh, five-time Oscar-winning director of the Ocean's franchise. I need to watch his "Butcher's Cut" of one of his favorite movies, Heaven's Gate. He shaved it down from 3.5 hours to under two hours. That's exactly the same intention and spirit I'm taking to my edit of DFW's "Authority & American Usage."

Also, there's a shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's Psycho from 1998, starring Vince Vaughn. Soderbergh cut together that reportedly atrocious move (4.6 on IMDB) and Hitchcock's original into one black and white film, which he called Psychos and casually posted on his blog.

This man is my kind of craftsman.

Finally, his website is beautiful and a place I want to hang out.

In a way, doesn't "virtue" mean "having a good reason for doing whatever you do, and doing it all with attention and care"? Virtue is not what you do but how you act.

Inspired by this excerpt from Simon Sarris's post:

One belief I have is that if you wish to be virtuous you will learn to eat cereal virtuously.The novice of virtue is tempted by dreams of heroic acts, just as the novice sculptor daydreams of palatial monuments, or other grand work. But the master sculptor is extraordinary not because he has been commissioned for monumental bronzes (which may never happen), but because he labors over every small detail.Virtue should not be thought of as a handmaid of heroism, but instead as an undercurrent of everything one does. Day-to-day matters are more important than theoretical great acts, and failure to give them proper attention is its own cowardice. Let every small thing you do be as careful and good as it can. The virtuous person should live so well that they leave breadcrumbs of virtue everywhere.

Theory: Its harder to have lucid dreams as an adult because fewer things appear as dream-signs. And that's because you have more experiences, more memories. Your dreams are filled with people you know and places you've been. As a young kid, most of your dream-content comes from your imagination — creatures and people and places you've never seen. And it's easier to recognize those sorts of dreams as dreams, to become lucid.

October 19 Neuroticism is an acute case of negativity bias, and negativity bias is an entire chunk of code in our biological software, in part responsible for the survival of our species thus far.

For some reason, ignoring messages helps keep me sane. A hundred little obligations are so much more overwhelming to me than to have one that requires 100x more of my time.

In a very real and serious way, a writer's voice and style emerge from the myriad decisions they make about grammar, mechanics, and usage. A writer has a voice and style once they have derived a set of principles upon which they rest every decision about grammar, mechanics, and usage.

You only want your reader to struggle for the challenge of the terrain, not for the poor quality of your trail.

All editing and no writing makes Jack a dull boy.

Naiveté is the illusion of security. Neuroticism is the illusion that you are unsafe.

October 18 Speak your insecurities. That's how you dissolve them and move into a posture of faith: everything will work out. Let other people hear how you're feeling. Their empathy and the weight of the wind will carry wipe those illusions away.

"I got robbed." "I can't pay you right now." "I have shit on my face." "I have no idea how I'm going to get to Isafjordur."

You can speak insecurities into extinction.

Personal Style Guide Rule: Don't use "I would argue," to introduce a claim, because you are presently arguing. Use a verb in the present tense (or in the past perfect tense –– "I have argued" –– if you're referencing your prior work), but definitely don't use the subjunctive. Would is inaccurate, because you are presently arguing.

DFW often says things like "I submit" or "I opine," which are in the present tense, and I find those very pleasant and accurate.

October 17 In Iceland, the most vicious and dangerous wildlife you'll encounter is a bleating sheep.

Random memory: When I was probably 12 or 13, my friends and I were trying our hands at freestyle rapping (and doing a very poor job). At one point, I came up with a line that rhymed romper with "thromp her." I was proud enough about it that for some reason, I shared it with my mom, and the look she gave me made me feel immediate remorse. In a moment, she saw me in the future treating women like objects and only valuing them for what they would put out. It was a look of disgust from my mother, and a few stern words, among them the question, "And why is that funny?" She set me straight immediately, and I still regret uttering those words. Maybe I had to tell her because I had to know if it was acceptable or despicable.

Please don't banish the semicolon; we need to preserve it, that versatile mark.

This is my personal rule: I only use the semicolon to join two independent clauses (that are related causally or conceptually), and I only use the em dash to attach or include a dependent clause.

Instead of writing a comma splice -- like, "I left my wallet at home, I can't pay for dinner" -- use a semicolon. Em dashes set apart supplemental information and are much more like parentheses than they are like the semicolon.

Here's a great use of a semicolon, featured on the tab of a tea bag:

"The unknown is where all outcomes are possible; enter it with grace."

October 16 A little, lifetime-level goal of mind: Contribute a new myth to American culture, through a work of philosophical fiction (narrative philosophy).

A common misuse of an idiom: "Can't see the forest through the trees." Through here is wrong, even though it seems interchangeable. I most recently heard it in the currently popular song "Lose Control." The correct idiom is "can't see the forest for the trees," which means that your perspective is limited to the scale of trees, whereas through suggests that you're trying to see the forest but that the trees are in your way.

Endling (noun): The last remaining member of a species (learned watching VSauce)

Read Richard Powers's The Overstory and his latest, The Playground.

Right your heading toward your bearing. Do not lose your bearing for your current, misguided heading.

Read Ken Wilber's The Integral Vision.

October 15 Trust your talents and hold fast to a faith that everything works out, even in the midst of what would otherwise be debilitating insecurity.

To achieve the utmost understanding in your reader, express your point both explicitly and implicitly, both concretely and conceptually, both literally and figuratively. Before or after they eat the cake, teach them the recipe.

October 14 Minimalism: Communicating information with literal language

Maximalism: Creating a Feeling with figurative language

You need both in everything you write.

I could lean into the "A Day Is a Life" metaphor as an aid for structuring my days. What is the arc of a life? Do you start work when you're an infant, or when you're an adolescent? Then, maybe the mornings should be for play. Do you work until the day you die, or do you retire some time earlier? If you do work at the end of your life, it is only on the sort of work that fuels your soul.

Here's an example of a day that maps to the general contents of a life (assuming a 100-year lifespan and a day with 16 waking hours –– hours listed as time since waking up):

Child-Hours: 0–2 hours:

• Exercise, walking
• Play
• Reading, journaling
• Reflection, meditation

Adolescent-Hour: 2–3 hours:

• Learning
• Light work (non-flow)
• Context-shifting, flux
• Correspondance
• Planning/projection

Adult-Hours: 3–10 hours:

• Focused, deep work (flow)
• Problem-solving, management, execution
• Decision-making
• Accomplishing

Elder-Hours: 10–15 hours:

• Soul-work
• Spending time with loved ones
• Learning
• Movement
• Conversation

Falling Hour: 15–16 hours:

• Stillness, gratitude
• Reflection
• Devotional practice

For me, these intervals would roughly be:

• Child-Hours: 7 am – 9 am
• Adolescent-Hour: 9 am – 10 am
• Adult-Hours: 10 am – 5 pm
• Elder-Hours: 5 pm – 10 pm
• Falling Hour: 10 pm – 11 pm

And that feels about right. This might actually be a helpful framework for managing my energy and directing my effort.

Book recommendations on writing from this Substack post: "Writing advice is a lie.."

For that, you are better off reading books like the various grammar guides, Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Fowler’s Modern English, Forsyth’s Elements of Eloquence, or any other primer of rhetoric. Read as many of these as you need to so that you can practice the techniques you find there.

October 12 Reverence, never deference.

Negative 60°: the same shameful gaze-angle that men assume when masturbating, seated on the toilet.

In the past month, I have spent more time shopping in bookstores than I have spent reading books. That is no bueno.

Bocce ball is radial shuffle board.

You are the Arbiter of Truth and Justice. Moral laws come from somewhere within you, as the images of a dream spring up from your unconscious. You cannot be absolved, and you cannot be condemned. Your moral standing is the sum of your actions and utterances. The only means of expiation is to do better by your own will into the future, until you die. There is no one to save you, curse you, forgive you, or deliver other than yourself.

What would a sheep do if it didn't have to graze to survive? Would it not choose to stay still, maybe to sleep all day –– effectively to die?

We are animated by our mortality; the awareness of death colors and engenders life, for making us desire, thirst, and strive. The immortal are inanimate.

Ascetics deny themselves pleasure; hedonists permit all pleasure but delude themselves to the consequences.

October 11 I want to be an editor's writer and wow publishers and publications. I want to have traditional success as an essayist and be paid to have cool experiences, meet cool people, and write about it. And I want all that to fuel my book-writing and my exploration of philosophy, and my speaking and editing and writing coaching.

Playlist name idea: "To Be a Rock 'n' to Roll"

A rule to fix an almost inconsequential but very common usage error:

"Not only" always needs "but also."

Incorrect

Not only is she kind, but smart.

Correct

Not only is she kind but also smart.

October 10 Even though I accomplished nothing while I was there, maybe going to Iceland was the most ambitious thing I could have done after graduation. It's what I was moved to do; it's what I knew I had to do to walk closer to the ideal version of myself. It requires a type of ambition to graduate college and start work in one of the jobs that suits your major and maximize your starting salary. But how ambitious is it if it's what everyone else in your cohort is doing? Is there any risk or adventure in it? More importantly: is it what you actually want to do, or is it just the most quantifiably "good" option available to you.

Intention + Obstacle = Conflict

Conflict as in "All stories need conflict." (H/t to Aaron Sorkin's "I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.)

Maybe Eden was a place fit for our inhuman ancestors to exist, before sin. But now that we have the divine knowledge of good and evil, Eden would be another kind of Hell. In Eden, Adam and Eve were free, but they had no moral agency. They had no will to exercise in the world, no capacity for good or evil. They were meant to merely subsist (and, I guess, to "be fruitful and multiply"). That sort of stasis is not fit for man. We are meant to move and change and strive and die, not to merely persist in perfect obedience.

There is truth to Original Sin, and there is a painful lie deeply embedded in Western culture. The truth: we are mortal beings with the divine moral knowledge. The lie: mortality is a punishment, and we are meant to be otherwise, immortal.

Some very helpful prompts on relationships from Katie Love's newsletter:

"With each of our relationships, we can ask the questions:

• 'Why is this person in my life?'
• 'How does my relationship with this person support each of us?'
• 'How does our relationship serve the world outside of us?'"

October 9 My Five Sketches for Write of Passage Cohort 13: "Feeling Fire & Ice, Escaping Mimesis, and Gratitude for Original Sin"

I'm writing a book of essays about the 81 days I spent trekking through Iceland. My first three Sketches are the chapters I plan to write next, but I have other ideas that I may work on too.

1. Faith & Insecurity: What I learned from getting robbed in Iceland

Faith is the illusion of security. Insecurity is the illusion that you lack faith.

There's a difference between feeling unsafe and feeling insecure. It's the difference between getting mugged and getting robbed. One is physical and the other psychological. You can affect and guarantee and protect your physical safety, but security — whether familial, financial, professional, residential — is an illusion. Nothing is secured, tied down; everything is always in flux. Or, if it is secure, it's like a tether-ball hanging from a pole, just waiting for someone to come along and smack it into the stratosphere, out of its comfortable equilibrium. For my first 25 days in Iceland, I felt safe and secure. On day 26, someone stole my passport and cash from my pack. I didn't feel unsafe, but I did feel insecure. There was only one thing to do: lean on my faith that everything would work out.

2. Solitude & Company: The dark side of self-reliance

How do you feel standing above a thousand-foot drop? If you can’t see the bottom, are you more likely to jump? Maybe the blanket of fog will slow you down, and you’ll splash safely into the water. On the edge of a cliff, do you fear falling, or do you stand still and sturdy and daydream of the feeling of free fall? How do you respond when you hear the call of the void?

3. Stillness & Ambition: Learning to be a bird with a nest

The fruition of your ambition requires stillness.

A bird wants to be flying, and it wants to be nesting. It cannot resign to one or the other. If it stays in the nest, it will starve, and if it stays away, in flight, it won't ever bring food home. That is the duality; the bird must do both. All birds must leave the nest, and all flights from the nest must lead the bird back to it.

4. What Does Monkey Do When He Sees Himself?: How to escape mimesis

• The Deferential Human: Monkey hear, "Thou shalt..."; monkey do.
• The Contrarian Human: Monkey hear "Thou shalt..."; monkey don't do.
• The Mimetic Human: Monkey want; monkey do what he think other monkeys have done to get what he want.
• The Autonomous Human: Monkey look into himself; monkey do what he want to do with his time before he die, regardless of the outcome.

5. Eden Is Hell Too: Thank God for Eve, the Mother of Man

There is truth to Original Sin, and there is a painful lie in it that is deeply embedded in Western culture. The truth: we are mortal beings with the divine moral knowledge. The lie: mortality is a punishment, and we are meant to be otherwise, immortal.

A verse from the version of Genesis that exists in my head:

Then the eyes of both of them opened, and each seeing the beauty in the other's naked body, the two were moved to make love. Beneath the trees in the center of the garden, God's creatures conceived of twins: the first mortal man and woman, both burdened and liberated by the knowledge of good and evil.

A great aphorism from Thomas Aquinas:

"If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.” – Thomas Aquinas

It scared me how comfortable I felt being alone in Iceland. At one point in the summer, I told a close friend that I felt like I could live the rest of my life on the Moon and die perfectly happy. But I later learned why that was so misguided and blind. I never felt lonely in Iceland because I had people awaiting my return, people who were checking in on me, and people who visited me. It wasn't easy because I'm so self-reliant; it was easy because I'm so well supported by a community. Yes, I'm happy with my own company, but if that was all I had, I wouldn't die happy.

October 8 I need to write an article about all the times I have corrected ChatGPT on matters of grammar, mechanics, and usage. It's only a helpful sparring partner if you're talking to it about something where you have enough knowledge and expertise to call out bullshit. And for most English-speaking people, that is not true on matters of grammar, mechanics, and usage. ChatGPT is useless as an editor, and the same goes for Grammarly.

Here is just the most recent example, where ChatGPT fails to distinguish between a hyphen and an en dash for a compound, phrasal adjective.

What Does Monkey Do When He See Himself? How to escape mimesis

The Mimetic Monkey: Monkey see; monkey do

The Mimetic Human: Monkey want; monkey do what he think other monkeys have done to get what he want

The Authoritarian Human: Monkey see something monkey don't want; monkey say, "Don't do!"

The Contrarian Human: Monkey see; monkey don't do

The Autonomous Human: Monkey look into himself; monkey do what he want to do with his time before he die, regardless of the outcome

• Use the anecdote of the statue of the monkey looking into a mirror
• The monkey doesn't know he's going to die. If the monkey knew he was going to die, he wouldn't do everything he sees.
• Introspection is the route to autonomy. And autonomy = self-sufficient and self-directed.

October 7 Imagine that a dad buys a brand new car, parks it in the driveway, and sets the keys in the middle of the kitchen counter. And then he says to his kids, "You can get around town any way you'd like — walking, running, biking — but don't drive that car. If you drive it, you will surely die." What are the kids going to do? If they have any will at all, they'll seek the freedom that is available to them, and they will naturally understand that driving the car is not what will not kill them, even though driving means risking death. The kids will take the keys and drive the car and feel the intensity of their autonomy and agency. And if the kids' father is anything like the Judeo-Christian God, He will fulfill His promise by killing His own children as a punishment for their disobedience.

The people who have the most sex are either among the most insecure people or among the most secure people. Either, you have a need for sex to medicate self-hatred, -doubt, or low self-esteem; or you want to have sex because you love yourself and want to share that love with other people. Look to either tail of the bell-curve of self-acceptance, and you will find people who are getting it on.

You don't want your reader to stumble because of the trail you've written. They should be able to follow it with ease, without any missteps. Your reader should never struggle for the quality of your trail, only for the challenge of the terrain.

October 4 I just read my first piece ever by Annie Dillard, and I am hooked: "Living Like Weasels." It's from her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, and I need to read more of her writing. It's so lyrical and embodied-philosophical. Also, this particular essay is perfectly structured. Her writing is squarely up my alley.

This is also certainly prose-poetry, which I am keen to learn. And boy, do I have a lot to learn from her.

Notes on "Nimic" by Yorgos Lanthimos

• I'm not sure I love short films. They're usually too limited in scope or too obscure. It's hard for them to say much, and too many of them seem to merely evoke a mood. That makes it entertaining. Of course, the ones you see are well-told stories, but they aren't like written short-fiction, or at least the stuff that I like.
• This film asserts an absurd reality, where you may accidentally put someone in a trance, like waking a sleeper agent with a trigger phrase ("Excuse me. Do you have the time?"), and they'll start to follow you and mimic your every move. No one questions this reality, so much so that the main character's family cannot distinguish him from his mimic.
• I guess this suggests things about how much people know us by what we do, not even how well we do it or the style or care we give to the things. It's as if this husband was just a fixture in his family's life, as if they only knew him as a person who eats a hard-boiled egg in the corner of the kitchen for breakfast, and the person who spoons the kids' mother and interlocks their feet.
• Toward the end, you realize that the mimic has supplanted the husband in his home and in his profession, even though she eats the egg all wrong and cannot play the cello at all.
• If there is a commentary at all here or a question being asked, I guess it's "Do you know the people in your life beyond the things they do? Do you truly know who they are?" Or maybe: "How would your life change if someone you love was replaced by someone who acted exactly as he does? Are others fixtures in your life, or are they agents in the world?

October 3 All ideas need their time to mature, and they all have different incubation periods. There's no way to know how long it will take before you're ready to write about an idea, but you can speed up the whole process by starting early. Sometimes you have only the seed of an idea or only the egg. It feels like you have an idea, but you haven't actually conceived it. When you have a seed or an egg, have urgency! You need to find the egg before the seed dies; you need to find a seed before the egg drops out of your head. When you have an idea, you must fully conceive it, because only then can it start to mature. Let it incubate until you're ready to give birth.

I have a fetish for Snæfellsjökul.

Where do ideas come from? They come from the other part of you, the part you can't see. The Muse does not peek through your window, cross her elbows on the sill, and whisper to you while you're cooking. The Muse resides within you.

October 2 What I should do when I don't have the energy to do what I should be doing: walk, exercise, journal, meditate, read, cook, call a friend or family member.

Halloween, originally called "All Hallows' Eve" has a rich etymological meaning. A hallow is a saint, and "All Hallows' Eve" is the day before All Saints Day. It's the scary Dark Night of the Soul before resurrection upon the visitation of divine beings, or becoming a saint yourself. Eve not only means evening but also "the moment right before any event." Halloween is foreboding and hopeful, the anticipation and appreciation of something grand on the horizon.

You must combine literal and figurative language in your writing. To give your piece a consistent tone and style, one of these should take the lead, but use the other for emphasis. If you're telling a straight-forward story or writing an information-heavy article, throw in an illustrious metaphor or a lyrical description. If you're telling a fantastical story or writing a poetic essay, make sure you have some concrete, concise, declarative statements that ground your reader and give them a clear sense of the theme/message/lesson.

If you have faith, there is within your belief some doubt, because you are choosing to believe something you cannot verify or guarantee. That's why insecurity is inherent in faith. Faith requires some doubt, and insecurity holds room for hope.

October 1 Rhythm is a great thing to add to your writing — whether it's prose or poetry, whether it's a paragraph or a sentence. Rhythm is great, but it's not enough; you also need variety. You might see a bunch of four-chord pop songs on the top charts with no key changes and no changes to the tempo. Some of them might even be missing a bridge. But in your writing, you need to have rhythm and to vary the rhythm — just how heart-rate variability is a measure of health. You're going to take your reader on a ride, so you might as well make it a roller-coaster rather than a merry-go-round.

One to watch: Amelia McLean, a singer I discovered through her cover of "I'll Follow You Into the Dark" with Stories.

September

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct

September 29 Read Peter Shelton's essays on skiing (and more).

I found him when I stumbled upon the beautiful coffee-table book Ski the Rockies, which has a forward by Steve Cohen and stunning photos by Marc Muench.

September 28 Random memory: The first time someone walked in on me while I was in the bathroom was at the Chateau marina in Brandon, and a young woman peaked into the room while I was seated before apologizing. I was pretty darn embarrassed — probably 8 years old.

Random memory: The first time I rode a dirt bike, with Luke Jamison on his uncle/aunt's or grandparents' farm, at probably 11 years old, riding fast through the trial that led around their land, and by the pond; also that weekend: running across the top of the hay bales in a row

September 27 The more ambitious thing is not to make more money. It is more ambitious to do what you want. And if you are already doing what you want, concentrate your ambition on making more money.

On the face, fire and ice is a dichotomy. But in fact, both fire and ice are both masculine and feminine. Each is a Duality. Fire is masculine in because advances and expels; it is feminine because it is chaotic and formless and wild and untamable. Ice is feminine because it conceals and withholds and protects; it's masculine because it is rigid and structured and perfectly ordered and impenetrable.

I will not inherit the Earth, and I am okay with that.

September 26 I live in New Jersey, and my car horn doesn't work. There's some thing to write about there, as a metaphor for a practice in passivity/detachment.

A very tricky and common idiom mix-up: "free reign" (as if you were granted the freedom to reign over a kingdom) instead of "free reign," which is correct and has the allusion to horseback-riding.

A verse from the version of Genesis that exists in my head:

Then the eyes of both of them opened, and each seeing the beauty in the other's naked body, the two were moved to make love. Beneath the trees in the center of the garden, God's creatures conceived of twins: the first mortal man and woman, both burdened and liberated by the divine knowledge of good and evil.

September 25 Concrete and asphalt and rubber stand as barriers between man and God, keeping him apart from Nature. God is everywhere, except where we have forbade Her to enter.

One thing I love about working in text is the size of the data. It's so portable. You can download an entire book in seconds, and you can have your entire manuscript in a single Google Doc. But video is so much more cumbersome. And you're working in time (the timeline) rather than in space (on the page) when you edit. My brain doesn't think that way. I'd get totally lost, out of my depth, disoriented.

The essay is a woven form: the best have both a convincing argument and a compelling story (or stories).

Reclassify English verb tenses so that there is a clearer hierarchy and more intuitive classifications. (Ref: this Grammarly article)

One of the best ways to honor individual human agency (especially in a capitalistic society) is to create incentive structures that promote the behavior you want, rather than asking the person for a certain behavior by expecting them to appease and obey you, or by appealing to the "goodness" of their character. For instance, if your employer wants you to work longer or take on more responsibility, they ought to offer you a raise or promise that rewards would be due to you if you preformed well with the new responsibilities. It violates your agency for them to ask significantly more of you, as if you are required to acquiesce, without offering some sort of compensation or benefit in return.

In short, expecting someone to do something you wish when there is no incentive to do so is to be ignorant of their agency and autonomy.

The park ranger explores a place and loves it so and finds it so valuable that he thinks, "Other people need to see this!" And what must he do then? He must make it accessible to others, by blazing a trail to follow from the parking lot to the grand vista at the summit.

Whether you’re writing a one-paragraph anecdote, a lengthy story as part of your essay, or a fictional short story, it will consist of these three elements: Promise, Progress, and Payoff (from one of Brandon Sanderson's plotting lectures):

1. You need your reader to have an expectation, for them to be anticipating some change (a Promise).
2. Then, you need to move toward that expectation in time, place, and character (Progress).
3. Finally, you need to resolve the expectation, either by subverting it or fulfilling it in a surprising and satisfying way (Payoff).

Consider taking Andrew Holecek's course on The Tibetan Book of the Dead whenever I end up reading it.

September 24 A dichotomy that is hard to blend into a duality: Love and Logistics

The way to bring about the Kingdom of Ends is with the Will of Power.

The sheep in Iceland trample and even graze on the 10,000-year-old moss. But you and I alone can understand that organism's toil and labor. We could trample it too, or we could honor and protect it for its dignity.

In Hornstrandir was the first time in my life that I spent a day alone, in any meaningful way. For 48 hours, the only macroscopic organisms I encountered were the bugs that would leap up as I sloshed through the marsh and the few birds that silently soared about the fjord.

The fruition of your ambition requires stillness.

Why is it Tree of Life and The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the center of Eden? It’s because moral wisdom and immortality are the two primary characteristics of God. The only way man differs from God is that he is mortal.

How I would rewrite genesis (from the Creation of Man to Expulsion from Eden — Genesis 2:4 – Genesis 3:24):

• God is both the Mother and the Father (Nature and [Knowledge/Time]).
• The paternal part of God creates Eve, and the maternal part creates Adam.
• God places Adam and Eve in a particularly beautiful part of Earth, within the Garden of Eden, home to the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
• Adam and Eve are born as infants. Adam floats down from the sky and lands comfortably upon the high-up cradle of a large leaf spanning two tree branches. Eve floats up from the depths of a lake and is carried along the surface upon a large leaf. Seeing the two humans are helpless without Them, God comes down and takes the form of two beings, to be the mother and father and rear their creations.
• They build a shelter together and procure fruit from the Tree of Life, each day. Within a day, the two are walking and talking.
• Over a meal one morning, the parents, God, tell their children that they can eat of any tree in the garden except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They ask for their trust that they will avoid that tree until they are older. And they promise to tell them more about the tree when they are ready to be on their own.
• Within a week, Adam and Eve are going off from home to the Tree of Life by themselves, and playing throughout the day with the animals of the garden.
• Soon, God agrees that Their creation is ready to be left to Earth alone. Before returning to Heaven, the mother and father share their knowledge of the world and give their creation a choice: There are two trees in the center of Eden. The Tree of Life will sustain you so that you never die, and you can roam the Earth as you please in perfect harmony with Us and with Nature. Then, there is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. If you eat from it, you will gain Our divine wisdom and become moral agents in the world. But having that knowledge on Earth has the consequence of making you mortal. This effect is irreversible. If you eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Tree of Life will die and will leave Earth for good. With the introduction of death comes also the divine power to create life. Eating from that tree will make you fertile, full of the seed and eggs of life, and you could rear offspring of your own, as we have done for you.
• They emphasize that it the choice is with Adam and Eve, who are owed agency for the fact of their existence: We have created the world and given you this choice so that you can decide your fate, according to whatever you deem your nature to be. Either you are meant to live unencumbered together, in perfect harmony with Nature, or you are meant to have dominion over the earth and the capacity to create offspring of your own. These are the existences available to you. And we will leave the Earth to you. We just ask that you do not forget who you are: the son and daughter of God.
• After millennia of living together and being fascinate with the earth and getting to know each other, Adam and Eve consider eating from the Tree. There are no decisions for them to make, and they have a sense that there is a buried capacity in them that is inaccessible. It's a subtle longing for wisdom, responsibility, and to create offspring.
• And the fruition of their creation is when they decide to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and become mortal. Eve procures a piece of fruit that the two share beneath the tree.
• After eating the fruit, their eyes are opened, and they see the beauty in each other's naked bodies. For the first time in their lives, they are moved to make love. And they conceive twins, the first man and woman born as mortals with the divine knowledge of Good and Evil.

In Eden, pre-Fall, Adam and Eve were incomplete with only the seed of humanity within them, yet unsown. Sin was the fruition of their creation.

September 23 Deduction vs. Induction

Both deductive and inductive arguments reveal what is likely to be true; neither can offer certainty. The difference between them is where the uncertainty lies.

For deduction, it is uncertain whether the premises are true, especially when they are rational rather than empirical. But if all the premises are true (which is impossible to verify for any worthwhile deductive argument), then you know with certainty that the conclusion is true.

For induction, the conclusion is what's uncertain. You build an argument from accepted, demonstrable, empirical truths and use those accepted propositions to propose a conclusion. Induction rests on the faith that the facts you have chosen do in fact indicate the conclusion you predict.

You can see how this plays out in an arguments about black swans (in a time when only white swans had been observed:

Induction

• Humans have observed millions of swans.
• Every single one of the swans observed has been white. Therefore: All swans are white (there are no black swans).

Deduction

• Humans have observed millions of swans.
• Swans have been observed to have a pigment other than white, namely gray
• Grey is the combination of the white and black pigments
• A swan could exhibit a black pigment, either on a single feather or on its entire body Therefore: Black swans may exist.

The problem with induction is to assume that all the swans observed represent all swans. The problem with deduction is the premise that the swan is capable of producing a black pigment.

Intro: What are you writing about, and why does it matter? Thesis: What are you saying about it? Body: How can you say that? Conclusion: What does this mean?

Labor is sacred, because it requires a human's time, attention, effort, and energy. That claim is my justification for the following moral dictum (of omission): Do not make someone else's job any harder for them than it already is.

That means refraining from any action that would create a problem (that you could have prevented or that you could solve yourself) whose solution would require the labor of another person. (The exception here is if you opt to compensate a person for the extra labor you have caused them, as a consolation for being an inconvenience.)

A simple example of an immoral action that violates this negative principle: spitting your gum out onto the floor indoors and leaving it for other people to step on, causing them to fiddle with the goo on the bottom of their shoes, and leaving it for someone else to dispose of when you could have — much more easily — disposed of it yourself.

Parable of the Pack and the Herd (v1)

You could live as part of a herd of sheep in a fenced meadow, led by an omnipresent shepherd. The shepherd is the one who caught you when you fell out of the womb, the one who grooms you, feeds you, and the only being who could possibly kill you. You have no desire to mate, only the urge to graze and only the sense subsist. Any new lambs in the meadow were procured by the shepherd and, as with the entire herd, proclaimed to be your kin. You are free to roam the meadow and graze wherever you like, except for a certain acre between the two streams in the middle of the meadow that harbors fruit unfit for you. Yet, if you keep to the herd and graze where the shepherd permits, you will live forever.

Or, you could live as part of a pack of wolves, deep in the forest, high in the mountains — or wherever you please. The bounds of your home are only inscribed by your ambition. You live among kin you have chosen and pups you rear yourself. You hunt and explore and tussle and howl with them. Your days are filled with variety, difficulty, and always the risk of death. Your only hope for immortality is to leave a lasting impact on your kin, so that they may prosper and endure. You will die, but your spirit may live on, in whatever portion it is expressed in the spirits of your descendants.

In either case, you are inhuman, because you are without sin. You have no self-consciousness and no concept of success, which means you cannot fail. Would you rather live as part of the herd or the pack? Would you rather be a Wolf of the Wilderness or a Lamb of God?

One world is pre-Fall Eden, the other Earth.

Faith is the illusion of security. Insecurity is the illusion that you lack faith.

Joh Muir in his journal, reflecting on the brevity of life after seeing the first soldiers sent off to fight in the Civil War:

"As the leaf on the ripples of the Lake, generation follows generation. We are passing away. How great the need for energy to spend our little while to purpose." – from Son of the Wilderness

Do you have an acquiescing spirit or one autonomous?

September 22 A bird wants to be flying, and it wants to be nesting. It cannot resign to one or the other. If it stays in the nest, it will starve, and if it stays away, in flight, it won't ever bring food home. That is the duality; the bird must do both. All birds must leave the nest, and all flights from the nest must lead the bird back to it.

Vehicles alienate you from time and space. The closest you can get to the present place is by walking. And the faster you go, the more you lose touch with where you are — from two wheels to four to two turbines.

A lot of content — on whatever medium: articles, essays, Tweets, TV shows, films — is just jizz. Some content is actually full of meaning, the offspring of a mind or heart or soul. But you can conceive anything with just ejaculate; you need to pair it with the egg of a valuable idea.

Adventure is acting on ambition, animated by mystery.

Deerfield Academy is a place where one of the most damning schoolyard rumors is that one has an Oedipus Complex.

Ecstasy is more ecstatic when earned than when it is fabricated, purchased, or consumed.

September 21 Assuming it doesn't prevent you from finishing your project, outlining is the most important part of the writing process.

I'm torn on the phrase "Welcome in." It's phonetically nicer than just "welcome," when you're greeted upon entering a place, but isn't it redundant?

September 20 My productivity is inversely proportional to the number of things I have to do. It is directly proportional to the proximity of my most urgent deadline.

Man knows nothing about the nectar of life, except that it will not fall into him naturally like fruit from a tree; he knows that the nectar's in the knothole. Man must reach into darkness, not knowing what the mystery holds for him, because that's what the Mother made him to do.

September 19 Research (and maybe write about) Julia Hill, who lived on a small canopy at the top of a 1,000-year-old Redwood for two years to prevent a logging company from cutting it down.

Lists of four or more items suggest that there are more in the set that aren't listed. Three feels complete, exhaustive. Two suggests a contrast or tension.

If you believe in the doctrine of Original Sin, you believe that you are a victim of mortal existence rather than its beneficiary.

Books on writing contain great advice. Books on writing advice are bad books.

September 18 It's always a good day when you schedule-send an essay.

Why live life believing that you are fated to be perpetually severed from God, especially when there is so much evidence to the contrary? Is there not more evidence that God is within you and around you than there is evidence that he is elsewhere, or above you?

It's hard to do the right thing, and when we do wrong, we can't help but feel shame, guilt, and regret. So, we spun up the narrative of Original Sin so that we could hope for some other world that does not require us to be active, autonomous moral agents: Eden. And we created the myth of The Fall to justify our self-depreciation and -perceived depravity, and so that we can spend life hoping to be delivered from this world rather than using our time to learn to live within it.

Man's plight is that he cannot reach as far as what he can conceive. He can imagine what lies beyond, but no matter how far he ventures, he cannot get any closer to the horizon.

(Upon re-reading this, I realize a very odd biological connection that I am compelled to note. Of course, "man" here refers to all humans. But if you think of anatomy of intercourse and the mechanics of conception, the man (males) must literally reach with part of himself and then eject part of himself into the unknown, hoping to achieve what he can conceive (hoping to conceive of a child), and in this case the "horizon" is the cervix.)

The Nectar Is in the Knothole A three-act play of the world's mystery and man's ambition

Man has a desire for something that he cannot yet conceive. He's willing to risk his time, efforts, and wellbeing for an idea of what he might possibly reach. And what catalyzes man's effort, what justifies this risk? What is the object of his devotion and attention? The feminine, mystery.

Man looks to the moon and longs to walk on the dark side. Man looks at the swells of the sea and longs to breathe underwater. Man looks to birds in the sky and longs to fly faster and further than they can. All of these objects in the world contain the mystery of the Mother. That is what animates the man and activates his ambition, which is naturally latent. Until a man discovers a worthy mystery, he is lame and aimless. Man convinces himself that the mystery beckons him, but in fact she is simply being, not any form of striving.

Man has this aim that is most likely unattainable, yet he reaches anyway. And where must he go for it? Into the unknown. He must launch into space, leap from a high place, open his eyes underwater. Man must reach into darkness, not knowing what the mystery holds for him. Man knows nothing about the nectar of life except that it does not drip from the bark or fall like the fruit of a tree. He knows that the nectar is in the knothole.

The greatest evidence for the validity of The Fall is the fact that we created that as our origin story. After sin, Adam and Eve gain the divine knowledge of good and good evil, which makes them self-conscious and aware of their transgressions. They become shameful of their nakedness. If you read The Fall as a fantastical story about the origin of man, then it is blatantly a way to justify our negative feelings of shame and guilt and the struggle of living, and to blame our current state on our ancestors for throwing us apart from God.

We are self-conscious and shameful and guilty, so we created the story of The Fall to justify our self-hatred and depravity. Instead, why not use our time on earth to achieve self-love and live with grace? We don't have to wait for heaven; we have to create it. Heaven is how you treat other people.

The story of The Fall is true for how it describes the post-fall nature of a man: we are mortals with the divine knowledge of good and evil. But the story of The Fall is untrue for how it characterizes these traits. Are we supposed to live perpetually as if we are lacking some fundamental part of our being: a perfect union with God? No, the human plight and the path to fulfillment is to acknowledge the lack and live within it, to span the gap with the breadth of your terrestrial spirit. We have God's knowledge of morality but not his immortality. Those are the facts. The human endeavor is not to retreat, to escape this conflict but to embrace it and find peace without resolution, self-love without salvation.

Original sin made humans autonomous moral agents. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were subject to the will of God. After eating from the tree, they gained the knowledge of good and evil and the power to do either good or evil. They finally became human because they assumed moral awareness and responsibility for their actions.

Adam and Eve had some freedom before The Fall, but they were not autonomous moral agents. That requires the knowledge of good and evil.

Life is not Sisyphean but rather asymptotic. We do not struggle in cycles and fail to reach a goal we can see. Instead, we struggle daily to stay on course toward some indeterminable goal that is ever beyond the horizon.

It's not that we fail again and again to roll a boulder up the same hill. It's that we keep rolling a boulder ever higher, over hill after hill (sometimes back-stepping, slipping, and losing progress), but our plight is that there is always a higher mountain, always a next hill.

A better way to imagine this is sailing at sea with no land to guide you or to offer respite. In the vast, formless, infinite sea, how do you navigate, and what heading do you choose? What you're headed for is always unknown to you, and you never truly know whether you're on the right course. The trick is to keep sailing anyway and take yourself as far as you can go toward an aim you choose along the horizon.

[[Die at Sea]]

September 16 Most actions and utterances are a-moral. If you become too concerned and obsess over everyone always acting morally, you can very easily slip into tyranny.

I’m a lexical conservationist concerned for the semicolon; it’s an endangered species.

I have an intellectually homoerotic relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Muir.

September 14 From what do you wish to be saved? From what do you long to be delivered? From this beautiful life?

Everyone Misunderstands Dorothy's Story

You all have the meaning of The Wizard of Oz wrong. It's not about Dorothy escaping Kansas to a wonderful dreamland. It's about the dreamland beckoning Dorothy so that it could send her on an adventure that would show the wonder she's missing in Kansas.

This misconception comes from the colloquial and dumbed-down version of this quote from the movie: "You're not in Kansas anymore." But that escapism is her delusion — that she needs something she doesn't already have. The thesis of the movie is actually expressed in the line "There's no place like home," which means that all she needs is already within her, and within her community.

There was a missed opportunity to have Dorothy wake up in the Technicolor world of Kansas, to drive the thesis home.

Other examples of colloquial phrases that betray the original thesis of the source material:

• "The customer is always right in matters of taste."
• "Jack of all trades master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one."

September 12 "Doing it on your own" includes asking for help. If you invite intervention, that's something you are doing on your own. People having to intervene due to your neglect and self-sabotage is the only form of you not doing it on your own.

Inertia and the Chaos Pendulums

Sin (self-consciousness) is the second pendulum. It's what makes human existence chaotic and a struggle rather than predictable and natural. Existence is better modeled by chaos theory than by Newtonian Physics. We are not dealing with billiard balls starting from rest on a flat table — more like asteroids hurling through space from an unknown origin, with unknown mass and momentum, and we're trying to predict their trajectory over billions of kilometers.

Simple mechanical systems can be measured backwards and forwards in time depending on their current conditions. Precisely the opposite is true for chaotic systems, which are completely and very precisely dependent on their set of initial conditions. And the most simple way to illustrate the difference between these is to compare a single pendulum vs. a double pendulum.

You can calculate the period of a simple pendulum simply by knowing its length. And there's not much else to calculate about it. It can only travel along the same arc. There is no variation or surprise.

If you attach two simple pendulum's together, by hanging one from the other, things get chaotic quickly. The motion of both pendulums is complex, though it can be calculated and predicted at low speeds. Under certain conditions, double-pendulums follow the laws of chaos theory, which means it remains a deterministic physical system that we cannot predict or measure (or that we could only do so with infinite computational power and infinitely precise measurements of the pendulum's initial conditions).

Being a human is like being a double-pendulum. Life is chaotic and unpredictable. When we gain control of one part of ourselves, another spirals. The difference between a human and an inanimate pendulum is that we have the power to bring ourselves to rest. Humans in motion tend to stay in motion, unless their will exerts upon themselves the force of stillness.

In my writing, in place of the royal we, I should write "you and I/me" — as in, e.g., "You and I are bound to the finite concrete of reality" vs. "We humans are bound...".

September 11 Why are seeds so cheap? Because it requires foresight and labor and patience before they bear any fruit. Seeds are pure potential. Everyone's looking to buy a tree. But not you — if you see a seed, holding the promise of fruits you want to reap, buy it. Plant it and tend to it, giving to it the patient labor required for anything worthwhile.

Sin is incompatible with immortality, unless we think ourselves God. You can either be a self-aware mortal human or an immortal, ignorant animal.

Women feel insecure more often and about a greater number of things (higher on average in neuroticism), and women acknowledge and express those feelings regularly; men feel fewer but often psychologically deeper insecurities that that they acknowledge and express rarely. Evidence for this is (1) that there are many more female therapists than there are male therapists and (2) that there are many more successful suicide attempts among men, even though the total number of attempts skews toward women across genders. The average woman is insecure about how she looks. The average man is insecure about whether he's worth anything at all to the world.

(A large part of this dynamic has roots in the fact that women bare children, making them inherently value able and values and useful to humanity. Men must prove their worth, lest they be a leach on society. Both men and women are instinctually aware of this.)

September 10Mystery is synonymous with femininity. If a woman is not very mysterious, she is not very feminine. Ambition is synonymous with masculinity. If a man is not very ambitious, he is not very masculine. The harmonious and well-adjusted among us are both, with one or the other attribute in the lead, at one time or another.

More evidence for my "Halloween Theory of Climaxes": Maeve and Otis finally had sex with about 6 minutes left in the penultimate episode of Season 4. The season has 8 episodes, which puts that moment almost exactly 83.4% of the way through the season. It was the start of the climax, the Halloween-moment of Sex Education's Season 4.

Dreams are immaterial experiences but experiences nonetheless.

Here's a great list of quotes on writing from writers, from Pen for Rent.

"From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put." – Winston Churchill (1874–1965)

"What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense." – Mark Twain (1835–1910)

"The two most engaging powers of an author are, to make new things familiar, and familiar things new." – Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)

I can't find the exact quote at the moment, but I've found it to be true that, for the pieces I am most proud of, I revise and edit them until I start removing and re-inserting (or vise-versa) the same punctuation mark. You know you've reached the final draft when you start arguing with yourself about minute, arbitrary changes. It means you have already identified and changed what matters. It means it's time to publish.

I have been correcting the proofs of my poems. In the morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence…. In the afternoon I put it back again." – Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

S4:E6 of *Sex Education* might be the best of the entire series. I am a huge fan of the premise, characters, writing, and here's a list of all that I can think of that makes this episode great:

• The intro scene is 2:25 that expertly establishes backstory for Otis's Mom and her sister. It adds richness to their relationship as we know it and foreshadows a significant development between them in this episode.
• In general, this show -- especially in this season -- holds many characters at once and progresses each of their arcs a little bit each episode. It feels like there are at least three main characters and two tiers of side characters of about 4 and 8 of, respectively, equal depth and importance. It's really impressive and somehow not disorienting or confusing or redundant or boring.
• The psychological commentary in this episode is deep and true and economically communicated via the characters, without the authors's voices overriding the characters'. Jean had to have her all-out conflict with Joe, where they truly speak their minds. And that helped her realize how hard things have been for her and how she's been neglecting her health and how she hasn't been there for Otis, and that whole expulsion made her able to comfort Maeve and encourage her to return to America.
• I am so philosophically aligned with the Otis–Maeve relationship struggle and resolution. When Maeve realized that the best version of herself is elsewhere -- in America, not Moredale -- Otis didn't even think to stop her. Not only that -- he was honest in saying that it probably wouldn't work out between them. He knew that she would be better off, and likely him for different reasons, if they didn't try to do long distance, especially without a plan for being in the same place again.
• There was also the whole B-plot about accessibility and advocacy, which was tasteful, and which had been expertly teased out throughout the rest of this season. From the very first episode, you can tell that Cavandish is fake-progressive, or maybe fake-inclusive. They put on the appearance of being fully happy and healthy and well but neglect what students actually need. The whole thing is tasteful and well-considered (not dogmatic in favor of or dismissive of either camp).
• Adam also had a big episode. He made a big mistake at work, which made him feel like he wasn't worthy and that he would be a disappointment to his dad. He confronts his dad about this and tells him how he actually feels, which surely liberates him and gives his dad a wake-up call to get out into the world and do something that would make his son proud, as well as finding a way to make him feel truly loved.
• Then, the episode ends with Maeve leaving Otis to return to America, but first returning to the trailer park to scatter her mom's ashes with Amie and Isaac. They say goodbye to Erin over the backdrop of the rows of campers, and it's beautiful. I cried (because I am a Maeve stan and want the best for her, even if it means leaving Otis, which you could kind of guess from how the season was going).

Like all great fiction, this episode's beats were inevitable but not predictable. It's a masterpiece. The next episode is the season and series finale.

September 8 The thesis of The Good Place: The best place is to be in The Bad Place and believe it’s The Good Place.

September 7 Quarter-Life Conundrums: The questions I will keep pursuing even if they have no answers

September 6 It's easy to change your bearing and hard to change your heading. A lot of suffering in life comes from the awareness that the two are not congruent.

I need some place to go in the morning and something to do in the evening.

September 5 Ethics Case Study:

You're waiting for a coffee, and they call your order but not your name. You just ordered (something complicated), so you know it's someone else's but grab it anyway and walk away. When the other person steps in, you say "That's mine," you dismiss them by saying "No, this is my order." You are able to get on with your day, and they have to wait.

What exactly have you done wrong, and what punishment is due to you?

You have both stolen and lied. But this would be a legal case of theft. It's a theft of time, really, not property. Are you, the due the punishment of wasting the equivalent 2 minutes that you caused the other person to wait? What are the ethical implications of an action like this — harm and dishonesty on such a small scale. It's easy to justify, but if you justify it, doesn't that make you even more morally flawed?

An Ethics of Attrition

What if you are born with grace (rather than in sin) but that you only have finite units of grace that you either hold or lose based on your actions. (Maybe you can gain them back too?) If you're born with 1,000 grace-units, let's say the murderer loses his grace completely — minus 1,000. And maybe a white lie is only -5.

Kant and Nietzsche are not contradictory but complementary.

Read Robert Pogue Harrison's book Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, which was covered in the article "Gardens," by Tulika Bahadur, which was recommended to me by David Perell.

Camus is not nihilistic. Absurdism advocates the following: (1) the fundamental characteristic of existence is the conflict between our desire for meaning and the universe's indifference; (2) the proper response to this fact is not to deny it (nihilism) or escape it by making claims to meaning you find/create (philosophical suicide / bad faith) but to revolt and live within the absurd; (3) a life lived this way is one that is honest and authentic, but it will not offer resolution or reconciliation.

I totally hear you about being bored or repulsed by Meursalt, but The Stranger (like all of Camus fiction) does not positively express a philosophical position. Rather, Camus's characters highlight the difficulty of confronting the absurd, and their flaws illustrate how one could accept the absurdity of existence yet fail to revolt. If anything, his characters' philosophies should be read as a half-antithesis to Camus's. The real value in The Stranger and The Fall, for instance, is that they enumerate the ways we delude ourselves and the many ways the absurd can eat you, what it looks like to fail to revolt.

Meursalt is an unhappy Sisyphus. Camus advocates for a way of living where, even though we're trapped within a Sisyphean struggle, we can still be happy and grateful and where we can still enjoy existence.

September 4 What does the monkey do when it sees itself?

Introspection is not an effort-full process of digging into yourself. Rather, it is a free and faithful dive inwards.

To overcome, go under. To transcend yourself, you must first descended into yourself. And if you want to go deeper, don't dig; dive.

Ansel Adam's photography is incredible. The Sierra Nevada focus and the style gave me the same transcendent vibes as John Muir's writing, so it was pleasantly unsurprising to find a gallery of Adams's work indexed on a map of the John Muir trail.

If I were to buy Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail (which I probably will do), it would be my favorite coffee-table book of all time.

In 1938, Ansel Adams and the Sierra Club published a remarkable book that reflected the incredible grace and grandeur of the heart of the Sierra Nevada and the trail that runs through it.

September 3 In my dreams, I often do one-arm pull-ups. Someday, that will trigger lucidity — hopefully before I am able to do it in real life and it stops being a dream-sign.

The most important stage of the creative act is incubation, the time between conceiving the idea and it being ready to hatch. You have to sit on it. (Just as rest is the most important step in the decision-making process. You have to sleep on it.)

That means two things: the creative act beings with spontaneous, generative action to create at least an embryo. Then, you can let the idea mature as you move about and work on other things. And if you try to go from nothing to a full-bodied something, you'll crack open the egg to realize that not only is it not ready to hatch but also that it hasn't even been fertilized. You'll just have a runny yoke, the mess of a poorly conceived idea.

Here's Marc Forsyth explaining chiasmus on HIW

Read Rupert Sheldrake's The Science Delusion. I was very impressed by his banned Ted Talk, published on YouTube by After Skool.

The primary writing lessons DFW aimed to teach his college Comp students (from "Authority & American Usage"):

(1) Do not presume that the reader can read your mind — anything that you want the reader to visualize or consider or conclude, you must provide; (2) do not presume that the reader feels the same way that you do about a given experience or issue — your argument cannot just assume as true the very things you’re trying to argue for.

Did Adam and Eve want to live in Eden? Before sin, that question would have been non-sensical. Does a squirrel want to build a family? Can a cow want to write a book? No, they are merely moved to gather and graze; they are incapable of wanting and striving, incapable of failing.

Oh, so you want to return to Eden? Does that also mean you are eager to become sub-human?

The only true form of security is the safety net you string for yourself, and that you cinch up higher, keeping it close to you as you ascend. No one thing is secure, so you can only truly be secure if you're completely comfortable and confident falling into something else (the depths of yourself) and having to climb your way up again.

E.g., "If I lose my job and can't find another I like and stop making money, I could always make a pilgrimage to Nepal and live as a monk and be happy and still until I die. So, getting fired wouldn't be so bad."

Meursault is not a moral model (like Jesus), but he still embodies a philosophy. It's an awareness and acceptance of the absurd without the revolt. In other words, Meursault lacks a primary characteristic of Camus's philosophy that would lead him to a more sound morality.

August

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct

August 30

How could you long for blissful ignorance after having divine self-awareness. How could you long for Heaven after being on Earth?

Apparently this quote is attributed to John Muir but is likely adapted or paraphrased from his thoughts on Nature and writing. Regardless, it articulates the importance of revision, as well as the circular nature and the eternal flux of the writing process (which is true for any craft, really):

"Writing is like the life of a glacier: one eternal grind."

There's an increasing number of misquotations of John Muir, likely because he didn't publish much at all. He was too busy touching the heart of the Earth and writing to himself about it. See this veritable list of John Muir quotes from The Sierra Club.

A quote that will literally move you, from John Muir:

“In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks.”

You need to mark the trail for your reader, like setting cairns along a hiking trail. Your reader doesn't know where they're going to end up or everything they'll see along the way. They just need to see where they're headed next — like walking to a cairn on the horizon.

Is it immoral of me to be more grateful to Eve than I am to God?

A reverse outline is an accounting of what's in your current draft. A revision plan is what you will change about that outline for the next draft, which can be rendered as a revised outline or as a bulleted lists of changes to make.

If Eden isn't Hell, it is at least un-American.

Healthcare is not at all human right, because it requires so many complex systems to be operating for healthcare the service to even exist. As a heuristic, human rights can only include rights requiring omission, not rights requiring action — e.g., the right to be treated with dignity and to be granted autonomy. To uphold that right, you simply must not denigrate or oppress others — to not act immorally (omission); you don't have to save a person's life (action) to uphold their basic human rights.

Your inner world is paramount.

August 29 At the highest level, you can separate editing into two parts: structural edits and style-edits. At the level of structure, you edit for cohesion, to make sure there's something worth reading. Then, at the level of style, you improve the language to make it more clear and concise, to improve the reading experience. But without it being cohesive and valuable, no amount of language prowess will make reading it worthwhile.

The fruition of introspection is self-detachment. (You must first know yourself deeply so that you know what it is that you must let go.)

In February of 2024, I had a personal reckoning. I realized I had unconsciously slipped away from myself and had started shirking responsibility for my level of fulfillment and had started avoiding what ailed me. A series of things helped me realize this, and the most notable was the fact that I successfully negotiated a raise and a promotion to six figures. I was making six figures as an editor — doing what I love! And that salary bump didn't change a thing at all about my satisfaction with the rest of my life. I started resenting work, and the work-centric environment of New York City for it making me feel disconnected from myself and from Nature. Then, there was this great ordeal on the way to Chipotle. It began as a pissed-off rant about how I'm not supposed to be here and how this place is no good for me. It ended with me taking responsibility for how I feel and to stop blaming it on my job and on my environment. That ordeal helped me make a hard and painful pivot away from my distracted, disconnected, responsibility-shirking habits, to start becoming more myself again.

August 28 Iceland is crazy and incredible. I had no idea this lighthouse existed until seeing this video from KALEO: "KALEO - Break My Baby (LIVE from Þrídrangar, Iceland)".

August 27 Philosophically, there are three moves you can make to resolve dualism. You could say that it is: (1) both, (2) neither, or (3) either.

Both is the approach of changing dichotomies into dualities, where seeming opposites become interdependent and mix within a shared whole.

Neither is where you negate the entire dichotomy and claim that truth lies outside of dualistic world that's presented to us. This would be closer to the doctrine of Emptiness in Buddhism — emptiness and no-thingness as opposed to the dualistic world of self and other.

Either is the (conscious or unconscious) decision to adhere to one of the two extremes, where you define yourself in opposition to something and deny that it has any part in you.

Examples Both: Taoism, Transcendental Idealism, Absolute Idealism, Existentialism Neither: Buddhism, Absurdism, Nihilism Either: political parties, monotheistic religions, any dogmatic philosophy, nationalism, fascism, strict materialism or mysticism

The parent duality is Feminine & Masculine, Yin & Yang. All other dichotomies and dualities can be mapped onto that frame. Any side of a true duality (mutually exclusive yet interdependent qualities) can be described as either masculine or feminine.

All dichotomies are merely concepts; nothing that exists can be attributed to only one extreme. Every thing in reality is some unequal mix of two extremes, at a certain point within the gradient of a duality. And everything in sum composes the entire gradients of all dualities, filling the space between all extremes.

[All dichotomies are illusory; everything that exists is some mix of both sides of a dichotomy, within the gradient of a duality.]

It's encouraging to see ChatGPT's interpretation of "live in the third" without any context besides the paragraph above:

In the context of the revised metaphysical claim, "living in the third" can be understood as an invitation to engage with the complexity and nuance of reality, embracing the gradients between extremes and adopting a holistic perspective. It encourages moving beyond rigid dichotomies to appreciate and navigate the interconnected and multifaceted nature of existence.

I'm trying to parse out my personal metaphysics. I think I believe that the universe is fundamentally made of some mind-substance (like awareness), or that it depends on something immaterial. Yet I also believe that the universe is independent from me and that it would persist if I did not exist and were not around to witness/perceive it. By that I mean that there is a reality independent from me and my mind but not one independent of Mind.

It's some fuzzy combination of Kant's transcendental idealism (phenomena and neumena) and the Buddhist doctrine of Emptiness. I believe that we can only access the appearances of things and not their essence, and I believe that the essence of all form is emptiness. On one hand, I believe that everything emerges from what is imminent in reality, dependent on perception; and on the other hand, I believe that there is a layer of reality — or even entire realms — that is inaccessible to us and exists independent of our awareness, perception, and existence.

I just read v4 of "The Arbiter" to Taylor and asked he what she thinks is the message of the story. What she said is spot-on — exactly what I intend to say — which was a big win:

"At the center of yourself, you know what is right. You just have to be open to confronting it."

August 26 Morality precedes existence, but existence precedes meaning. One of the things (if not the only thing) we can know rationally and objectively are the innate moral truths that define the essence of humanity. But the existence of a universal, idealized, absolute morality does not necessitate inherent meaning in existence. We have an a priori moral essence but are completely fluid and formless otherwise. Consider identity, for example. Existence precedes identity (you create and define it and change it throughout life), but no matter your identity, you are bound to some root human morality.

Does meaning precede morality?

The park ranger doesn't need the trail to be well-marked or kept up, but he tends to the trail anyway, because it's not for him. The same is true for the writer and their work. Your writing is not meant for you but for your reader. Tend to your draft during revision so that the reader's hike is simple, though challenging and demanding, and ultimately worthwhile.

The trail is not meant to be hiked by the ranger. Your writing must be made suitable for a reader who can't read your mind, just as the trail must be trail must be suitable for the hiker who doesn't share the ranger's skills or his knowledge of the wilderness.

9:57 pm It's now 3.5 hours later, and I've been working on that self-study idea for the whole time. I got to a final version of the three matrices, with the help of Chat GPT — my most useful and successful conversation with it yet. Here are the final three 2x2 matrices, along which you should be able to map any philosophy with some degree of nuance and precision.

Ethics: Relative vs. Absolute & Social vs. Individual

Epistemology: Empirical vs. Rational & Skeptical vs. Certain

Metaphysics: Subjective vs. Objective & Transcendental vs. Immanent

If you can chart a philosopher/philosophy along each of these dimensions, you can then plot them on spider graphs and compare them. (I've already done that with Kant, Hume, and myself.) Or, you could focus on one aspect (e.g., ethics) and plot a bunch of philosophers/philosophies on a 2-D scatter plot.

I am so happy with how this is shaping up. It could be really valuable to myself and others — a great tool for entering into philosophy as a student and starting with who you might agree with and who might refute your beliefs. I want to keep going with this and write an essay and build a "Personal Philosophy Test" quiz.

The inspiration for this project came in a rush after watching this funny (and not academic or deep) YouTube video by Mark Manson: "The Philosophy Tier List." It prompted me to think What would my version of that be?

The next step, besides continuing to map philosophers/philosophies along the dimensions, is to create a set of questions to help someone self-identify their personal philosophy.

August 25 Idea for a self-study project: map all the world's major philosophies on three 2D matrices: ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics (meaning).

The purpose would be to orient myself in take an account of my knowledge of philosophy and then improve my knowledge so that I can explain it all better to others without misrepresenting any of the propositional content.

The reason for ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics being the categories is that a "complete" philosophy has answers to all three of the main questions that attend them:

• What is it that we ought to do?
• How can we know what is true? (And What do we know to be true?)
• What is the nature of reality?

Here's a brainstorm for the v1 of the matrices:

Ethics: Relative vs. Absolute x Social vs. Individual

• Or Conditional vs. Unconditional (Consequentialism vs. Deontology)
• E.g., Kantian ethics is Individual & Absolute, and Ethics of Care would be Social & Relative.

Epistemology: Reason vs. Feeling x Certainty vs. Uncertainty

• Or Evidence vs. Faith
• Or Without vs. Within
• (Rationality vs. Phenomenology)
• Or Knowable vs. Unknowable
• E.g., Jain Logic would be Reason & Uncertainty, and Religious Fundamentalism would be Feeling & Certainty.

Metaphysics: Inherent vs. Emergent x Within vs. Without

• (Essence vs. Existence)
• E.g., Christianity would be Inherent & Without, and (Vajrayana) Buddhism would be Emergent & Within.

The fruition of introspection is self-detachment — to know yourself well enough that you know there is nothing within you to hold onto, that your essence is ineffable and inaccessible, and that the same is true for everyone else. If you can do all this successfully and genuinely and maintain that perspective in earnest, you can live a rich life where you find fulfillment in existence alone, and you can accept the fact of death.

In this (very good) YouTube video, Mark Manson shares the most concise version of this advice that I've ever heard:

"You cannot envy the benefits of someone's life without also envying the costs."

Anecdote to illustrate the mind of an adolescent male:

Growing up, I had a trampoline in the corner of our backyard. I'd often have my high-school friend and neighbor, Chris, to come over to jump on it together, and when my little cousins would visit, we'd play on it together too. But most of my time on that thing was spent alone just jumping as high and for as long as I could.

Our next-door neighbors were a nice family of five. I was friends with their youngest, who was a boy a few years younger than me and who was a better ball-player than me. On a couple occasions, I'd met his older sisters. One was my a year older than me, the other about three years older. Both were very attractive — not just for their physical appearance but also because of how conducive the whole situation was for adolescent-male fantasies of future fornication. I remember training in the spring so that, come summer, I would be able to jump high enough to sneak stop-motion peeks over their fence to glimpse the girls lounging at their pool (this is only slightly exaggerated — the "training for it" bit).

August 24 To overcome, first go under. And if you want to go deeper, don't dig; dive.

(This was a message from the giant oceanic manta ray that visited me during an active imagination exercise, while I was envisioning myself on the black-sand beach on the Snæfellsness Peninsula.)

A Few Principles of Pedagogy

Explain the "why" before the "how." You need to give students a reason to want to learn something; don't just take their attention for granted. Before you ask anything of them, explain why it matters and how they could benefit/use it. This usually means staring with a problem/pain statement that meets them where they are and teases what's to come as the solution.

Share an example or exercise before explaining the concept. When learning something completely new, it's easier to go from the street to clouds rather than from the clouds to the streets. Then, when you do teach the concept, it will be more memorable, because the student can relate it to their experience (in an exercise) or to a specific example.

Rather than asking "Does anyone have any questions?" ask "What questions to you have?" or "What part is still confusing?" Frame asking questions as an essential part of deep understanding, rather than making students feel like they're lagging if they don't understand it fully already.

A running list of quotes from various philosophical traditions that echo the command "know thyself":

Platonism

"An unexamined life is not worth living." – Plato's Apology

Stoicism

Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if you wilt ever dig." – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Taoism

"Knowing others is intelligent. / Knowing yourself is enlightened." – Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 33

Nietzche

"Become who you are!" – Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Existentialism

"The most common form of despair is not being who you are." – Kierkeegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

August 23 Live in the low places, where all is abundant. Do not exalt yourself; the universe will humble you.

My exchange with Ellen Fishbein on Twitter about AI and typewriters (now over a year old) is the content that I wish filled my feed.

"Park-Ranger Revision: How to see the forest and the trees"

August 22 Possibly the highest aim I can conceive for myself is to be a normative ethicist that empowers secular American's to strive for a good will — unconditionally. And possibly the greatest contribution I could make to philosophy would be to harmonize the normally dissonant ethics of Kant and Nietzsche, ideally through narrative (in the spirit of Camus).

Or, it would be to be the John Muir of Iceland.

On (Jesus's) Second Commandment

"Love thy neighbor as thyself" is either unrealistic or problematic. Either it means that you ought to provide for your neighbor as you do for yourself — food, clothing, shelter — or it means that love you could give to others is bound by your level of self-love on the day. Of course, this begs the question: How do I show love to myself? I'd argue that the primary way love ourselves is that we take care of ourselves. Is the Christian duty to take care of everyone else too? If you ask me, that dilutes your local impact, on yourself, your community, and your immediate family. It also feels communist and un-American. In the U.S., the only oughts are to take care of yourself and to not infringe on the rights of others. It is not your duty to care for or to provide for others (except those for whom you are responsible, like a parent's children or a doctor's patient, or a teacher's student).

Maybe the more important commandment would be to "Love thyself as thou art loved by the Father." This is equivalent to the commandment that Jesus gives to his disciples at the end of the Last Supper: "[As] I have loved you, that ye also love one another" (John 13:34).

August 21 New way to keep track of version history: Use whole numbers to mark the number of revisions, and distinguish that from the number of edits. There's a vision number and a version number.

v1 is the first version of the first vision. Then, you revise it to a v2. Then, you might try to edit he v2 to see if it works, doing two editing passes: v2.1 and v2.2. After v2.2, you might decide to change your thesis or restructure the thing again. That's v3.

This seems like a great way to track progress through an essay, especially how to distinguish between the processes of revision and editing.

To make this system even more granular, you can distinguish between published versions and unpublished versions by capitalizing the 'v' when it's been published. V1 is the first published version, and if you decide to revise it and republish it, that'd be V2. If you only do some line-editing before republishing, it'd be V1.1.

The equivalent of a reverse outline for the park ranger: After aimlessly wondering through the forest, he gets out a journal, a map, and a pen and asks: Where did I go? What did I see?

What if you could transmute grief into gratitude for a life?

August 20 Iceland served as my mentor and issued me The Call to Adventure. But unlike most heroes' journeys, I never refused the call. And also contra-Campbell, Iceland was not only my mentor but also my enemy and the setting for my grand ordeal. Imagine if the plot twist at the end of The Inferno were that Virgil was also Satin.

Template for Calisthenics Workouts (With sample exercises)

Warm-Up

• Wrist mobility
• Scap push-ups
• Scap pull-ups
• Dynamic stretching
• Run
• Planche Lean

(For the below: 3+ sets per exercise/superset)

Heavy Compound Exercise

• Pull-Ups
• Dips

Antagonistic Superset x2

• Rows + Pike push-ups
• Archer squats + Calf raises
• SL RDL + Tib raises
• Push-ups + BW curls
• SL squat + Diamond push-ups
• Hamstring curl + Australian pull-ups

Core/Grip Finisher

• Max dead-hangs
• Hanging knee raises
• Hollow-body hold

Idea for a calisthenics split:

Pull + Legs: Back + hamstrings Push + Curl: Chest/tris + biceps Pull + Press: Back + shoulders Push + Legs: Chest/tris + quads

• This way, every workout can have two antagonistic supersets (e.g., pull-ups + split squats and rows + leg curls on the Pull + Legs day).
• I wouldn't have to dedicate a day to legs, but I'd still work them with at least 12 sets per week — 2 exercises per muscle group, 3+ sets each, for both the quads and hamstrings.
• Every workout should have at least one set of a core exercise.

Then, if I workout more than four days in a week, the other(s) could be a lighter full-body workout, or a core- or mobility-focused workout, or just cardio (long run).

Unshaved armpits on a woman is, perhaps counterintuitively, a deep expression of femininity. It is an assertion of one's own natural beauty and has the attendant message of "Beauty does not come from conformity but from elegantly expressed individuality." And what could possibly be more feminine than that sentiment? My self-love and -acceptance are not dependent on how you perceive me. That attitude and energy makes a woman even more enviable and esteemed than any woman could ever be with physical beauty alone. She is need-less and whole. Seeing her, you might think, She's more self-accepting than I ever will be.And maybe it's that thought that makes you uncomfortable, not her unkempt armpits.

All this is even more palpable if the woman has groomed (trimmed or shaped) her armpit hair without shaving it off. (For examples, see Caroline Polachek and Aurora in certain seasons.)

There is a truly intimate yet undisclosed connection between Kant's "transcendental idealism" and the (Tibetan) Buddhist doctrine of Emptiness. Kant's phenomena are the Buddhist "forms" and "appearances," and his noumena are the Buddhist "essence": things in themselves. Where the two might diverge is at the idea of whether things share a single essence or whether things can have their own independent hearts.

They both believe that the nature of reality depends on the mind. Buddhism is an idealist philosophy but also one rooted deeply in phenomenology and sensual experience. On that last point, the two are opposite. Kant would never say that "wisdom abides in the body."

The link is probably even stronger between Hegel's absolute idealism and Buddhism.

August 19 Before I left for Iceland, I didn't have a good answer to "Why Iceland?" I just knew I was drawn there. But after trekking through the land of fire and ice for 81 days, I know exactly why. Iceland is the heart of the world. It's one of the few places on Earth where the ground hums the truths of the universe and the wind sings you stories. The island represents all the geological expressions of Nature and invites you to know Her better, all the while humbling you with Her majesty. Without words — with only the shape of its fjords, the colors of its sands, the bleating of its sheep, the warmth of its geothermal water — Iceland reveals who you are and what you value, and prompts you to pursue it. It teaches you to find harmony among the extremes of the world and that every thing exists in harmony with its opposite. At least, that's the effect it has on me. I wanted to go to Iceland because it called to me; it called me to feel fire and ice, to learn how to live in harmony.

Satisfaction, or dissatisfaction, is the difference between expectation and reality.

You can't retrieve anything from emptiness, but you can fill it. Fill it with meaning.

Take pride in being manifold.

What will I reap? is the same question as What have I sown?

What do want I reap tomorrow? is the same question as What must I sow today?

What do I want to reap? is the same question as What must I sow?

Successful people write short emails, and they fire back replies in seconds. They have stuff to do, and they keep it moving. (This applies to correspondence more than initial outreach.) I tend to think that get-it-done attitude is the egg, not the chicken.

August 18 Camus's Judge-Penitent (in The Fall) is the antithesis to the morality of Emerson's "Self-Reliance."

"Writing is rewriting." That's the proverb spoken by a whole host of successful writers. (I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere it's attributed to Plato.) But when you set out to improve at your craft, are focusing on becoming a better writer or a better editor? It's your writer-self who writes and your editor-self who rewrites. If you want to become a better writer, become a better self-editor.

"The only kind of writing is rewriting." – Earnest Hemingway

"Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with a first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing." – Richard North Patterson

"The best writing is rewriting." – E. B. White

"I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters." – James A. Michener

"Books aren't written — they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it." – Michael Crichton

"There is no great writing, only great rewriting." – Justice Brandeis

Revise until you have the right vision. Then, edit until you have a version you'd be proud to publish.

A pretty profound aphorism from John Keating (Robin Williams) in The Dead Poets Society:

"Sucking the marrow out of life doesn't mean choking on the bone."

It calls for a "carpe diem" attitude that's contra hedonism and unconscious consumption. It's not "Get all you can while you can." It's "Savor all you have while you have it."

"The editing process" is actually two processes: revision and editing. The revision process begins with a reverse outline of the first draft and a revision plan. It ends once the draft has a clear vision, logical structure, and a cohesive message. The editing process begins with changes to the language and improvements to style, and it ends with a final pass for consistency and correctness: the proofread.

Another way to frame the revision process:

1. Viz: What are you saying?
2. Re-vise: What do you mean to say?
3. Edit: How can you say it better?
4. Proof: Are you saying it all correctly?

Revision and editing are different processes. If you're revising, you're looking at the thing anew and allowing for the vision to change (re-vise: "look again"). If you're editing it, you're looking through the draft to make sure it aligns with the established vision.

Revision happens at the level of structure and logic, editing at the level of language, voice, and style.

The park ranger revises the trail when he changes the route. He edits it when he removes fallen trees and places stones to facilitate a river-crossing. Once the route is set, his job is to make it more enjoyable to hike. As he's setting the route, his job is to make the hike worthwhile.

August 17 See the world through the eyes of a lamb, but walk through it like a wolf.

To extend the trail metaphor for an essay: The grand vista is your thesis, the main message. The trail works you toward understanding and appreciating the summit.

I am a staunchly principled person. I believe that I know what is best and what is right for me. But I will not impose my principles on you, unless your actions encroach on me.

August 16 One way to describe the difference between childhood and adult friendships is that at first, you're learning and growing in the same way at the same time. As adults, you start learning and growing independently. It's no wander you drift apart.

I'm reading The Jefferson Bible. It's my first time actually reading through (a version) of the Gospels. Here's a running list of the verses that really resonate or stand out as culturally significant or especially beautiful:

• Matthew 5:33–37
• Luke 6:35
• Matthew 6:1–6
• Matthew 6:24
• Matthew 7:3–5
• Matthew 11:28–30
• Luke 7:41–43
• Luke 12:13–15
• Luke 12:47–48
• Luke 9:57–58
• Mark 7:15
• John 7:19
• John 8:7–11
• Luke 10:33–3
• Luke 14:11
• Luke 15:25–32
• Luke 18:10–14
• Matthew 21:28–31
• Mark 12:32–33
• Matthew 23:16–22
• Matthew 23:23–2
• John 13:34
• John 18:33–3

And here are some verses of note that I disagree with:

• Matthew 13:36–43
• Mark 2:17
• Luke 10:10–12
• John 10:1–1
• Matthew 19:23–24
• Matthew 20:11–16
• Matthew 25:6–12 (Parable of the Ten Virgins — why ten instead of two, and what about "love thy neighbor as thyself?")
• Matthew 25:24–30 ("with ursury")
• Mark 14:4–8
• Luke 23:39–41 ("They know not...")

August 15 Someday, publish a collected volume of "dream-inspired prose poetry."

Read Mark Strand's The Monument (prose-poetry musings on death and morality) — recommended in David Lehman's preface to Great American's Prose Poems.

Would you rather till your plot with one ox or two oxen? Which would allow you to sow more seed, get more yield from your land? To go through life holding any extreme view is to miss the world's nuance and richness, the stuff that nourishes the soul. Find harmony among all opposites and walk the middle way; yoke two oxen and wield them in tandem to work the plot of land which was given to you to till.

These two oxen are brother and sister. Love and care for them both and come to know them. Name them and praise and heal them. At the same time, decide which is your favorite and have no shame about it. Support and honor both, but give more grain to whichever of the two serves you best, so that he or she may grow stronger over time and come to lead your plow.

(Inspired by Emerson's "every man's education" quote from "Self-Reliance")

The park ranger goes off into the woods, wonders aimlessly, and gets lost. That's how you find something interesting, and that's the purpose of your first draft. Wonder without a trail, then blaze a trail for others to follow.

August 14 Season 2, Episode 6 of The Bear, "Fishes," is a freaking masterpiece. It's the most conclusive flashback of the whole show — an entire hour-long episode. The writers and actors absolutely nailed human nature. The tension was crazy throughout and built to a completely unexpected end; the exposition through dialogue was masterful; and the acting was exquisite.

Well shit, the next episode — "Forks" — might have been even better. Richie's arc is incredible, and now it's clear that "Fishes" served as his backstory more than anyone else's, especially for us to become invested in his relationship with Tiff.

A new take on the Kansas State motto and my alma mater's motto: Per aspera ad libertas. Adversity ought not serve success (traditional success: a materially upward trajectory); it ought to serve liberty, freedom, autonomy. Any hardship is justifiable and endurable if it is in pursuit of freedom. The same cannot be said for the pursuit of wealth, sex, or fame.

August 13 Before I seriously consider using a dumb phone, I should augment my iPhone to make it serve my purposes and see how well that works. This Reddit post has some pretty great resources about how to do this effectively with:

• Screen time limits
• Parental Controls
• Notifications
• Privacy settings.

The Brick app + device is another good option.

Also consider the yet unreleased Unplugged phone for privacy, security, and true off-the-grid capability.

August 12 Somnio, ergo sum homo. Homo sum, ergo somnio.

Why decry aging? You can either see your next birthday is another step toward death or a renewal of this great privilege you have: living.

August 10 Yoga comes from the same root as yoke, which means "to bring together," "to unite." The yoga we all think of (tight pants, downward dog, savassana) is yoking the mind and spirit through mindful movements of the body, in rhythm with the breath. Dream yoga yokes your mind with reality, by revealing truths through mindful observation of lucid dreams.

If I'm uncomfortable meeting strangers, I'm in dissonance with something within myself.

August 9 Keep reaching, even though you know you will never reach it.

Research Thule (originally from Greek and Roman mythology), a theoretical land at the northern-most parts of Earth, the edge of the world. Consider connecting it to my idea of dying at sea (sailing toward the horizon despite knowing that you will never reach it). The myth is that Thule was this area with cold, northern islands that were otherworldly, inaccessible in this reality.

This ChatGPT conversation has a few helpful references:

Poetry/Literature

• "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe
• "Hyperborean" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• "Thule's Land" by Ernest L. Meyer
• "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot
• "Thule, Isle of Mystery" by Robert E. Howard
• "Thule" by Clark Ashton Smith

Essays

• "The Idea of Thule in American Literature" by Allen Tate
• "Thule in the American Imagination" by Harold Bloom

There is a problematic association here with the Thule Society, which co-opted the concept of this mythical place in their beliefs that it is the home the Aryan race. The Thule Society was one of the first funders for the Nazis, and they helped distribute nationalist and anti-Semitic propaganda in Germany.

I learned to become an editor by editing my own writing. Now, I'm an editor for a living and an expert (but not a master) in English grammar, mechanics, and style. I'm a self-taught SNOOT.

Here's a Markdown cheat sheet for future reference.

August 8 Superlative vs. Hyperbole

Imagine you're walking through a new city in the morning looking for a coffee. There are two cafés across the street from one another. One has a sign that says "World's Best Coffee," the other, one that says "World-Famous Coffee." Both are pretty unbelievable claims of quality. Which one do you find more believable, more interesting, more honest, more credible? Where would you choose to spend your money?

"World's Best" is a superlative, and "World-Famous" is hyperbole. Superlatives in a context like this (comparing yourself to all the coffee in the world) are unbelievable and blatantly wrong, or at least strongly opinionated. Hyperbole is more transparent and more believable; it's exaggeration for effect, not a claim of being the best. When you're writing, superlatives are almost never what you want, unless you want to come off as preachy and dogmatic and delusional. Hyperbole you can use in an argument, to emphasize a point. Superlatives are claims that will completely undermine your argument.

"Employees must wash hands before returning to work" is not expository; it's rhetorical. It's one of the most common, everyday examples of the Ethical Appeal.

August 7 The mind moves best if the body has already.

Would you rather be a wolf or a sheep? Would you rather make your own way in the wilderness, choosing your kin, or be sheltered and sequestered and guarded in a pasture to aimlessly graze amongst strangers? Would you rather fight for your food and die trying, or be fed by the hand that shepherds you and grooms you and that will eventually slaughter you? Would you rather be a wolf of the wilderness, or a lamb of God? Would you rather your body die from starvation or your mind from stagnation?

[[Eden Is Hell Too]]

Here's a surprisingly illustrious answer from ChatGPT on the characteristics of American prose-poetry. This will be a good reference as I learn more about this form.

Characteristics of Prose-Poetry Rhythm and Sound: While prose-poetry lacks the formal structure of verse poetry, it often incorporates rhythm, alliteration, assonance, and other sound devices.Imagery and Metaphor: Like poetry, prose-poetry relies heavily on vivid imagery and metaphor to evoke emotions and create meaning. Conciseness: Prose-poetry is typically more concise than prose, with a focus on distilling language to its most essential elements. Fragmentation and Juxtaposition: It often features fragmented thoughts and images, juxtaposed in ways that might be unconventional in traditional prose. Ambiguity and Multiple Meanings: Prose-poetry often embraces ambiguity and invites multiple interpretations.

As a writer, I have a few primary mediums emerging: essays (argumentative, persuasive, and personal), short stories (including philosophical allegories), and prose-poetry (to marvel at and commune with nature). I would be happy if I mastered these forms and never wrote a novel. I would be even happier if I could master all these forms and combine those skills to produce successful non-fiction books, as well as short-fiction and essay collections.

Read some of Carolyn Froché's work to get a sense of how to write great prose-poetry.

Our Planet Doesn't Need "Saving"

The rhetoric around climate change is completely misguided — on both sides. The less obvious one, which I haven't seen criticized anywhere, is the rhetoric of the pro-environment, pro-conservation argument. Way too much of it is about how we're "killing the planet" and how we need to "save the planet." This sounds fine and dandy on the surface (complete with the familiar Christian undertones of self-depravity and atoning for sinfulness, which is odd for a largely leftist and secular movement), but it is self-cannibalizing and disingenuous. In a way, it's trying to remind us of our duty to Nature and how much greater it is than us, trying to humble us. But the very content of the message is arrogant and anthropocentric and self-aggrandizing. You think we can "kill the planet"? We puny humans? You think Nature needs us to "save" it? We could live for another million years and then go extinct, and Earth will have only blinked.

Either be truly humble and live in service to Nature, or be honest about what you're trying to do. We want to save the planet for ourselves. We want to preserve what we find beautiful and stave off global warming so that it doesn't cause infrastructural issues for our flimsy cities — cities which a moment from now will be rubble, dust, returned to the earth. And there's nothing wrong with conservation and environmentalism being selfish. The problem is the rhetoric trying to obscure that and prop up a false and more "noble" purpose. Let's start calling it what it is. We are not gods. We cannot scratch the Earth, much less kill it. We are puny humans trying not to deface the home we rent and lose our security deposit, because that withdraw would not be material but karmic, spiritual. Only the depraved deface the gift of life.

I tend to confuse these words, so here's a record of which match to which meaning (all nouns):

Epigraph: A short excerpt that appears before the body of a text, often at the top a book chapter, to offer context.

Epitaph: The inscription on one's tombstone; the words we choose to remember the life of a person who has died.

Effigy: A sculpture or model of a person or mascot, created with the intention to deface the model in protest or in opposition to the person/entity/ideology/organization/community/team it symbolizes.

Write a transcendentalist version of The Sermon on the Mount.

The ideas that have most influenced my philosophy are eclectic, but I find them to be completely compatible:

• Kantian ethics
• Christian morality
• Camus's Absurdism
• Stoicism
• The Tibetan (Vajrayana) Buddhist practice of dream yoga
• Jain logic & epistemology
• Taoism
• Nietzsche's Will to Power
• And American Transcendentalism (namely Emerson and John Muir).

Maybe the endurance of the Gospels has to do with an Enlightenment, empirical, scientific idea that we all came to value so highly: replicability. Maybe the Gospels have endured so well in Western society because they are plural, not "The Gospel." It's "The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John: An Interdisciplinary Telling of the Life, Morals, and Miracles of Jesus of Nazareth," a peer-reviewed study.

There is not a more important or valuable skill in life than the ability to hold in tension (1) a feeling of complete contentment with where you are and what you have and (2) your desire for more and better and new.

August 6 Explore David Abram's work, and consider reading his book The Spell of the Sensuous.

And definitely read Terry Tempest Williams's work, starting with The Hour of Land: A Personal Typography of America's National Parks.

I think I might be a transcendentalist.

The primary claim of transcendentalism is that you can transcend yourself by venturing into and unveiling the deepest parts of yourself, and that the main vehicle for your introspection ought to be communion with Nature. All that I believe wholeheartedly.

The author decides when it's ready to write. The editor decides when it's ready to read.

Research Barðura, and read the Icelandic saga about him, the half-human-half-troll guardian of Snæfellsjökul.

There is nothing more noble in Nature than a glacier.

An apple a day keeps salvation away.

Candidate for a daily dictum: Exercising before 8:00 (am), meditating before 10:00 (pm)

August 5 Questions of morality are questions of truth and harm. If your words knowingly violate the truth, they are, in most cases, immoral. If an action harms others it is, in most cases, immoral. We conflate moral questions with "issues" that ought to be permitted under the simple principles of personal liberty. You are free to offend, refute, opine, argue, debate, protest, defend, renounce, condemn, postulate, theorize, flirt, fornicate, ignore, bolster, profess, peach. And maybe personal liberty extends so far as to permit self-harm. Maybe self-harm is not immoral, because it does not violate truth or cause harm to others. Maybe self-harm is only tragic and misguided. If we deem self-harm immoral, then we'd have to deem excessive drinking and poor sleep and gambling as immoral. You are free to do whatever you choose with your mind, body, and mouth, as long as your speech and actions do not tyrannize truth or harm others.

All great essays have (1) a fresh & novel frame, and (2) a specific & surprising claim.

Besides writing gibberish, the most efficient way to confuse tour reader is to mix metaphors. One can only inhabit a single figurative space at once. Once you have the space (or image) established, expand on it or take it deeper, but don't change the scene altogether. It's disorienting. You'll lose your reader; they won't know how to follow you.

One of the first things that honest introspection reveals to you is that your emotions are fleeting and ephemeral and inconsequential — that they only matter to you. By understanding yourself, you learn how fickle and flimsy your idea of self is.

Sensual is a great word. It's different than physical or emotional or sexual. Somehow, it means a little bit of all three: emotional via the physical that in some contexts might be or become sexual. It's also different than sensory, which merely means "of the senses"; sensual means more like "via the senses."

What is “Your Re-Vision”? It’s when you look at the current draft for the first time through the eyes of your reader. How enjoyable and accessible and meaningful and fulfilling would it be for someone else to come along and hike this trail? How can I make it cohesive, clear, so that they don’t get lost — and concise, so that they never feel like they’re wasting their time?

Maybe there are actually four steps to Park Ranger Revision:

1. Map the forest.
2. Mark the trail.
3. Trim the trees. // Remove the rocks.
4. Clear the leaves.

It's easer to teach steps 1 and 2 as separate. One you could call the Content Edit, the other the Structural Edit. The outcome of the Content Edit is a reverse outline: a survey of what's there. The outcome of the Structural Edit is a your re-vision, or a "revision plan," as well as some cuts and re-ordering to your current draft.

Really, this depends on whether you're editing your own work or someone else's. If it's your essay, the drafting phase is when you map the forest. And by the time you go to do a reverse outline, you already know what's there, so you'll naturally move on to the revision plan, asking What should I cut, change, and rearrange to make this better? If you're editing someone else's work, you'll need to read it and get a clear sense for what's there and what it's trying to do.

You could also call these four steps the following:

1. Reverse outline
2. Your Re-Vision (which includes a revision plan and making big-picture cuts + big-picture reshuffling)
3. Line-Edit
4. Proofread

August 3 I don't want what most people want, but I have what most people want. And I don't know what to do about it.

The more you acknowledge when you do wrong and truly face it, the less wrong you will do. The only way we allow ourselves to act immorally is by ignoring reality or deluding ourselves into justifying our own depravity.

Glaciers are the most noble things in nature. They sit atop stone thrones that were once carved by their younger selves. What other monarch is also a mason? And what other earthbound creature is closer to divinity than the one composed of trillions of icy angles who have communed throughout eons to form a body that is both an immovable object and an unstoppable force?

We worry for the glaciers, that we might kill them, but that is anthropocentric and near-sighted. We are won't worried for the glaciers but, in truth, for ourselves. We wander: What is the cosmic consequence for melting a trillion angels? We fear the wrath of molecular demons that flood out of the denser ice. With any foresight we can know that no matter our fate, the glaciers will succeed us, just as they have preceded us. And if we if we do ruin ourselves, the Earth will turn for eons more, and maybe the glaciers will choose to grant some other, more virtuous beings the chance to inhabit a Her.

[What other monarch do you know whose pastime is masonry?]

The writers whose prose I admire most used typewriters. So, I bought and now use a typewriter.

August 2 "Knowledge worker" means you're a person who can work less and get paid the same — justifiably, because your time is not linearly valuable. The value you create varies by the type of work you do/complete within a day.

July

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct

July 31 According to this video by CinemaStix, John Hughes wrote Ferris Bueller's Day Off in less than a week but had the whole thing in the wrong order. The first cut was 2.5 hours, and the editor Paul Hirsch is the one who put everything into the right order, resulting in what might be my favorite movie of all time. I didn't know I owe it to him, and now I want to research the man's work. Maybe we're kindred spirits, as editors. What can I learn from him?

We're like comets hurling through space, bound at some point to fall into the gravity of some celestial body and slowly bend into the atmosphere to blaze out into dust and rain on the generations to come.

Inspired by this video and the lyrics "I am a comet, no destination."

I'm not dogmatic about the ending-on-a-preposition rule, but I'm becoming increasingly rigid on the correct use of the object pronoun whom, because the misuse of who is unbecoming.

Incorrect but cleaner: "What audience are you presenting to?" Correct but clunky: "To what audience are you presenting?"

Incorrect and clunky: "Who are you presenting to?" Correct and clean: "To whom are you presenting?"

July 30 You can choose treat any draft as a first draft — even a published piece — because any draft can always be better. Or, any draft could be revised for a different purpose or audience. The self-editing method I've developed can be applied to a draft at any stage, and it encourages this attitude of seeing whatever is in front of you as raw, rough, ready to be seen in a completely new way and improved from its face to its foundation — from the forest to the trees and the leaves.

Holy moly! I finally — just now — finished copying “Authority and American Usage,” including all 81 footnotes. The body text (sans footnotes!) is 16,309 words. This may have taken me 30 hours; I don't even know. It's 3:15 pm on July 30, 2024. I'm sitting in a WeWork in Times Square (1450 Broadway), and I feel at peace. This has been an open loop in my head for the past 58 days (yes, just checked — I created the document on June 3rd). Next step: the edit.

Just found John Perry today, a Stanford philosophy prof. who broke out of academia by writing The Art of Procrastination and coining the term "Structured Procrastination", which essay was recommended to me toady in the Readwise newsletter.

I'm not writing to teach you what I've done. I'm still learning. I'm writing to share what I've learned so far, and to reveal what I'm aiming for, in the hopes that it inspires something in you that moves you forwards, that helps you dive inwards. And what I've learned from reading philosophy far and wide is that there is at least one thing upon which all great thinkers agree — from East to West, empiricist and rationalists, absurdists and existentialists, monotheists and polytheists, transcendentalists and materialists, monks and emperors, consequentialists and deontologists. They all prescribe one common thing: know thyself. To live an examined life (the only type of life worth living) is to, first, examine yourself. As soon as you step back behind your eyes to witness the world, you start to witness yourself perceiving and acting in the world. You start to introspect, and the more you do that, the more you'll know yourself. I would argue that introspection is an end in itself and a worthy pursuit without any reward, yet there are benefits too. You become skilled in navigating emotions, congruent in your thoughts and actions, and detached from what you can't control. You learn about your nature and walk towards it. The best way to help the world is to become the best version of yourself. That's why introspection has been prescribed by every culture for millennia, and it's why it's worthwhile.

Sound ethics is not an attitude or temperament or some formal system of knowledge. Your ethics is the sum of your actions.

July 29 The best of us are head-smart enough that you would expect they would be arrogant, and they are heart-smart enough to be humble and empathetic.

I was always frustrated with myself for misspelling led as lead (to lead in the past tense), until today I realized why it feels so irregular. The past tense of the verb to read is read, and you're expected to understand its tense by context. Yet, with to lead, which is perfectly analogous with to read, we denote the tense with a different spelling.

Read less but deeper.

I'm about six pages through the first short story in the collection of Borges's, Labyrinths, called "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," and I've already stopped two times — the second one because I was deeply inspired to pen a short story that's been in my head for a couple years now. Seven months ago, I wrote a first draft of it; today, after reading Borges, the whole thing took shape in my head, and I banged it out on the typewriter within a few minutes, in the most concise, clean, powerful version I've ever conceived it.

I just finished season 1 of The Bear, and the entire time — every episode — I didn't want it to end. I wanted to linger on every moment longer. Everything was just the right pace where I could keep up and remain captivated, engaged, yet I wanted it to slow down so that I could savor it. It's analogous to the experience I've had eating a kick-ass beef sandwich. I get three bites in, realize, I'm halfway done with the sandwich, then start taking half-sized bites and leaving them to water in my mouth a little longer before swallowing.

Say what you know is unsaid. We don't give ourselves enough credit for knowing how to solve our problems. We act like we don't know what to do when the reality is that we don't know how to do it, or simply have not worked up the will to do it. Interpersonal conflict is just one example. The solution almost always begins with saying what you know — yes, you do know, if you're honest with yourself — is unsaid.

July 28 Newton's 3rd Law of Emotion: Minds at rest tend to stay at rest, unless acted upon by certain external stimuli.

Write about the symbolism of snakes, from Genesis to "Don't tread on me."

Write a parody to "Express Yourself" to prompt The Intronaut, called "Inspect Yourself." And or quote this lyric:

Some people have everything and other people don't /

But everything don't mean a thing if it ain't the thing you want – Charles Wright

"Write like you talk" is only good advice if you speak in the dialect of Standard Written English, which is true for almost no one.

July 27 The three root poisons (of Buddhism), and there corresponding "wind"-channels in the subtle body are:

• Aversion (anger, aggression) — the right, white channel
• Attachment (grasping, thirst) — the left, red channel
• Ignorance (self-doubt, fear) — the central, blue channel

July 26

Anything you write has the function of helping your readers understand better something they want to understand well. That's what it is, because that's what it does. – Larry McEnerney, UChicago Writing Program Lecture

This is only "what your writing is" if you (1) write about something you know your readers want to understand well and you (2) successfully teach them more about it. So, those are two good goals to hold in mind for any essay. At the topic-selection stage, ask: What's something my readers want to understand well? And use that as a razor. Then, throughout the writing process, make it the aim that the function of your essay becomes helping your reader understand that thing they care about.

He also says, if your readers aren't in academia, then you need to write about problems your readers want to solve, whether for themselves or others.

The more minimal the writing, the more intelligible. The more maximal the writing, the more evocative. You need both.

Prime Movers

I've had three discrete revelations recently about links between what I do and value today and events from my childhood.

When I was two years old or so, my great-great-aunt Irene told me she'd give me a dollar if I would use the big-boy toilet to go number 2 (which was in fact a squatty potty). Motivated by the dollar, like the full-breaded capitalist I am, I successfully went doo-doo on the big-boy toilet for the first time. When Aunt Irene gave me the dollar, she asked what I was going to do with the dollar, and I said, "Buy more money." Today, I have a four-year degree in quantitative finance.

My earliest memory of talking about my career, the job I wanted to have, is set in the community hall of my elementary school. Some adult was asking me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I was six or seven years old, I didn't say scientist or doctor or lawyer or athlete or author. I said, "I want to be an inventor." This was always my answer, and sometimes I'd say, "... or a spy." I am not yet an inventor; I work as an editor. But recently, I was speaking to a ew friend who's trained in seeing creative energies in people. After getting to know me, she suggested that my primary creative energy is the inventor.

Throughout my life, every night, starting before I could talk, my mom has always sent me off to bed with these words: "Sleep well. Sweet dreams." She has said that every night standing over me in my crib, every night after tucking me into my bed, every time we spoke over the phone around bedtime. It's no wonder why I've have always valued my dreams and been aware of them. I've dream-journaled for a decade now, and today, I practice Tibetan dream yoga and treat sleeping and dreaming as practice for death.

July 25

Making sense is entirely different than making you sense. One means having a rational explanation, the other evoking a feeling. The art/words/experiences that cause the most intense sensations in you are often the ones that make no sense at all.

Quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet:

To die, to sleep —

To sleep — perchance to dream.

It uses the analogy of sleep : death :: dreams : the afterlife.

July 24 Growth is never comfortable; comfort is never the arena for growth. And the best type of growth comes from voluntary discomfort: self-imposed challenges and constraints.

There's a tension within all of us: to be a bird with no nest or a bird that can't fly. The best is to be a bird that can fly, and that can come home to a nest.

July 23 One of my mantras: "Always be holding."

"Beholding" reminds me to appreciate forms as they appear, and "be holding" reminds me to — at the same time — be aware of emptiness as the essence of all form.

Honesty means being truthful, but it doesn't necessarily mean being forthcoming. Truth-telling has as its complement another method for being truthful: omission. If you are going to speak, speak the truth. If you would lie to conceal a truth, do not speak; omit it.

And when a truth is subjective, the most honest portrayal of it is to overtly condition the truth as being from one perspective or another.

Books are mirrors depicting all of us; phones are portals to parallel dimensions, distorting all of us.

Through revision, make your writing coherent, clear, and concise — in that order of priority. You don't want a clear meaning that's incoherent, and you don't want something that's concise yet confusing. Get the structure right, then the meaning/content, then the prose and style.

I could have read every word of Infinite Jest (and many of the footnotes) in the time that I spent copying word for word one essay from DFW: "Authority and American Usage."

Kant might just be the least quotable philosopher, because his writing is anti-aphoristic; you'll strain to find a single simple sentence — one that you can quote from leading-cap to full stop — that doesn't digress into long parenthetical clarifications (that often confuse, for their density and verbosity, rather than clarify) or that doesn't only make sense as the summary of the very complex argument preceding it, which context is required for the quote-candidate sentence to be valuable. Even the Categorical Imperative has four formulations, each with its own nuanced implications and complex derivation.

July 22 Don't talk to someone who has their eyes closed, whether it's for sleep, mediation, or a moment of interior peace or self-reconciliation. If someone has an extra long blink during your conversation, let that be a beat of silence. If you stumble upon someone who is meditating, take that chance for a personal moment of stillness.

Reverse Outlining Simplified A reverse outline is an outline for your next draft, informed by the content of your previous draft.

Describe:

1. What is there, and in what sequence?
2. What is the best of what's there?
3. What needs to be there, and what doesn't? What's missing?

Revise:

1. Cut what doesn't need to be there, and add what's missing.
2. Arrange what remains into the most coherent possible sequence, with a clear hierarchy: thesis, main claims, and evidence.

(Reverse outlines are most useful after a messy first draft, as part of the Content Edit.)

July 21 The least illusory part of reality is other people. When you see another, that reaffirms and solidifies the self. So, being isolated and out in the world, reality feels most like a dream.

In Hornstrandir, during my two days of solitude, there was no one to reaffirm my existence, and I was increasingly less assured of my self.

Cameron Frye is the hero of the story in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but Ferris is our perspective character. The same is true for Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby; he is our perspective character (and narrator), but Gatsby is the hero/protagonist. The difference is that Ferris's life is more like Gatsby's and Cameron's more like Nicks.

July 20 Work hardest at the work that comes most easily to you.

July 19 Personal style guide: You can insert FNs within the middle of a sentence only if it would otherwise confuse the reference if it were at the end of the sentence. If there are two footnotes within a sentence, definitely place them at different parts of the sentence. Whenever possible, add the footnote after a punctuation mark, at the end of a clause.

Dialogue for a conceded, deluded character at the sight of a celebrity (not this, but):

"I'm not going to take single second of your time, so that you can keep enjoying your day with your beautiful family. I just came over to tell you how much I love your work, and I can't imagine how bothersome it must be for people to come up and ask things of you, as if they know you just because they recognize you. I hope you don't give them the time of day."

Research how "great men" have spoken about their mothers, and use their quotes as evidence in an essay about the virtues, appeal, and impact of feminine ambition/success.

July 18 My differentiated stance: The best way to become a better writer is to become a better self-editor. Most writers don't have the skill of seeing their work as a reader. This doesn't make for a blind spot; it makes up the condition of blindness. You don't know how to improve the piece, to improve its effectiveness and clarity and value to the reader.

It's a real advantage for a writer to have an editor to get thoughtful feedback. But if you can become a better self-editor the drafts you send out will be better. You raise your floor, and any feedback you get from others will just improve you from that new starting point.

Any writer will tell you that most of writing is rewriting and revising. So maybe you don't need to spend time and take courses to learn how to become a better writer. Maybe you could wildly improve the quality of your writing by becoming a better self-editor.

I'd like to come up with a salutation that I can use in emails that is broad enough to use in every email yet unique to me and kind of playful. One came to mind today: "In prose,". Of course, I love it because it's a nerdy, self-referential thing about the fact that what I just said was written, but it doesn't convey any emotion (contrast that with something a friend of mine says, "With love,"). I could go full woo-woo and say something like "May you find stillness today,".... I have some work to do.

Lexicographical Peace

The easiest argument against the descriptivists' take on lexicography is to point out the very plain and demonstrable fact of their hypocrisy. Descriptivists vie for the validity of all demonstrated usage, aiming to describe language at is used in speech by native speakers, but when any descriptivist sits down to write, they use all of the conventions and rules and usage guidelines that have been created by many generations of prescriptivists. Why do they write this way (for n Standard Written English) and not in whatever willy-nilly way they fancy? Because they want to make meaning well and clearly; they want to be understood.

Of course, we need both camps. The prescriptivists can't be left to garter-strap language and ignore how it's changing. And the descriptivists can't be allowed to topple authority and expunge all rules of usage on the basis of their being "arbitrary," for we'd become passive observers of the entropic decay of our language rather than active stewards aiding in its development and refinement. Let the descriptivists describe usage in speech, and let the prescriptivists declare the rules for Standard Written English.

Let us bask in peace, upon the resolution of the Grammar Wars.

July 17 Words conjure images and feelings. Think of all the meaning packed into the phrase "the caged bird." Think of the feeling it evokes. And compare that to "the caged bird sings." (Also think of the typical use-contexts of words like consent [sexual], trinity [religious], alien [sci-fi], invest [financial], and propose [romantic] could undermine or distract from your intended meaning for the word.)

To wield words well, you must always be aware of the associations that attend them. If you are aware, you can play with these associations in the arena of subtext.

Scope and Depth

Harry Dry on HIW:

The strength of an idea is inversely proportional to its scope.

This is so true. The only exception, or nuance, is that you can tackle a broad scope with a sufficiently deep and thorough analysis/story/argument and make for an even stronger idea. I guess there's a corollary where the strength (or power or impact) of an idea is the product of its depth and its scope.

Direct the same energy at a narrower scope, and you'll go much deeper, making the whole thing stronger (more powerful/impactful) overall. But it's even better if you could keep the broader scope and take the whole idea just as deep. Then you're digging a hole through the center of the Earth, shaking the ground beneath our feet.

Robert Caro's The Power Broker is a narrow scope with great depth; it's powerful. The Bible is a broad scope (life and death and God and love and creation) that goes bedrock-deep (multiple accounts, multiple eras, centuries of interpretation and conversation, multiple religions in conversation); it's the most powerful.

July 16 Another all-timer from Emerson's "Self-Reliance":

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, — and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

The women in my life always seem to find the thing in the exact same moment that they announce the thing is lost (most commonly, a cell phone).

Indulging in your fantasies as fantasies tempers your desire to act on them in reality. Dreams are a great and natural and healthy medium for exactly this.

July 15 Hot take: Pay-walled media > free, ad-revenue media — it gives creators the freedom to serve their readers/watchers/listeners rather than pander to advertising partners.

Imagine if each individual strand of hair were microscopic. As they are, they are just thick enough to see with our naked eye. But imagine if you couldn't make out single strands but only clumps of strands. Would that change how hair looks at all? It would at the roots — maybe — but probably not much would be different about any part of the sensory experience of hair.

Are the strands of hairs that we see not collections of smaller strands already?

Start the day with mindful movement. End it with silent stillness.

Every organism is resilient in the right environment.

July 14 Some of the best quotes from Andrew Holocek's Dream Yoga:

Fear, and the hesitation born from it, smothers life so that it burns at a pilot-light level. Things are safe, but semi-dead. […] On a spiritual level, fear is what keeps us from waking up. This is mostly our fear of the dark. Darkness represents the unknown, or the unconscious. We're always afraid of what we don't know or can't see (pg. 19).

What we refuse in conscious experience turns in to the refuse (rubbish) of the relative unconscious mind. As the saying goes, What we resits, persists' (pg. 19).

'Illusify' the contents of your mind, regard your thoughts and feelings as dreamlike, and watch your entire world soften. Your speech becomes gentler and your acts become kinder (pg. 165).

Reality is dreamlike. It is not a dream. Reality is not an illusion. It is illusory. As the masters warn, 'Self-liberate even the antidote.' Saying that reality is like a dream is the antidote to saying that it's solid, lasting, and independent. Now release that antidote. The Dzogchen master Khenpo Tenpa Yungdrung says, 'Always remember that illusion itself is an illusion' (pg. 209).

At our core, below any superficial language, beneath any gender, race, color, or creed, underneath even the slightest scent of duality and difference, we are absolutely all the same. The practices to the night lead us to this common ground and awaken us to the universality of the human condition (pg. 265).

The Best of Surrealism

I consider three artists to have best captured the feeling of dreams visually. They are René Magritte (Belgian), M.C. Escher (Dutch), and Salvador Dali (Spanish). All of the collected paintings below are works that I love and that, to me, relate directly to dreams or evoke the feeling of a dream.

René Magritte(WikiArt) communicates how dream-like our physical world is but putting mundane objects in surreal contexts, which makes the image feel at once like a dream and reality. And he calls upon the female image and the feminine energy to do it, which I often find to lead the content of my dreams.

Magritte was prolific, and he has so many dream-like works, which were first introduced to me by Malcolm Godwin in The Lucid Dreamer. Here are some of my favorites, in a loose order:

• Attempting the Impossible
• The Human Condition
• The False Mirror
• The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe)
• Delusions of Grandeur
• Where Euclid Walked
• The Son of Man
• The Blank Signature
• The Evening Gown
• The Sixteenth of September
• The Pleasure Principle

Here's another online collection of his work: RenéMagritte.org.

M.C. Escher (WikiArt) captures the fact that dreams are fluid and ever-changing and uncanny, yet they appear to be solid and sensical. It's why we don't question what we're seeing as we dream. He does this with optical illusions and metamorphic, fractal images. My favorites in a loose order:

• Sky and Water I
• Waterfall
• Drawing Hands
• Hand with Reflecting Sphere
• Bird Fish
• Three Worlds
• Rippled Surface
• Liberation
• Spirals
• Symmetry Drawing
• Eye

Salvador Dali (WikiArt) brings the images and landscapes of dreams to life, including the erotic and dark and shameful parts, which we would normally want to keep unconscious. My favorites in a loose order:

• The Persistence of Memory
• Sleep
• The Great Masturbator
• Untitled (William Tell and Gradiva)
• Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Awakening
• Woman with a Head of Roses
• Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion
• Galatea of the Spheres
• The Sign of Anguish
• Ballerina in a Death's Head

Other great works by these artists that do not relate to dreams:

• Magritte: Black Magic and The Lovers
• Escher: Bond of Union, The Fall of Man, and Tower of Babel
• Dali: The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus

More dream-like works from other artists:

• Henri Rousseau: The Sleeping Gypsy and The Dream
• J.H. Moesman: Self-Portrait
• Richard Hess: Reflections and Man in Bottle / Bottled In, by Richard Hess
• Malcolm Godwin: Desert Dream
• George Tooker: The Subway

July 13 Non-lucid dreams are prompts for introspection that can be paired with writing for dream-journaling, as a medium for introspection. Lucid dreams are a medium for introspection in themselves, for they offer self-knowledge and -growth from the experience alone, without any additional reflection.

Dreams do not have inherent meanings to uncover; the only meaning a dream can have is one that you ascribe to it from a state of conscious awareness. To interpret a dream as if it has some essential content would be like chartering a helicopter after a thunderstorm, reaching a waffle cone out the window, and trying to scoop up part of the rainbow. You're grasping at something that is empty. You can't retrieve meaning from something that is empty, but you can fill it. Fill it with meaning.

Dream-journaling has helped me develop a posture of intellectual openness and a habit of non-dogmatic thinking, because time and again I have recalled in detail the experience of perceiving the contents of my mind to be completely solid and real.

Example of a hyphen distinguishing between a phrasal noun and a closed-compound verb: dream journal (noun) vs. dream-journal (verb).

All bad things happen by accident or because of habit. All good things happen by choice, intent, and effort.

Accident comes from the Latin verb accidere, meaning "to fall upon," "fall out," "happen." When we do bad things, they're almost always things we fall into, or that fall upon us.

Reading is leisure. Reading is education. Education is leisure.

July 9 OpenAI is an oxymoron. What could possibly more concealed and inaccessible — enclosed — than a black box?

Breadcrumbs and Pots of Gold

The best essays and novels are like a trail of golden breadcrumbs that lead you to a pot. The pot is empty if you go there first (the end), but it fills up as you work along the trail of golden breadcrumbs. The more diligently you read, the more gold you'll gather and the fuller the pot will be by the end. Then, your takeaway, the pay-off, for the journey is that you get to carry a pot of gold home with you. You can even spend that new currency to enrich your life in myriad ways. That's the value of great writing; it will reward you in proportion to how well you read.

You can go at it alone, but it might kill you. Accept help and go at it together and it will be just as difficult along the way, but the thing is less likely to kill you.

Dysphemism is a euphemism for shit-talk.

Use en dashes (not hyphens) to join a phrasal noun with another word, or words, to create a closed compound adjective or closed compound noun — e.g., "Pulitzer Prize–winner" (compound noun) or "Pulitzer Prize–winning story" (compound adjective). The most common use of this would be with proper nouns, as in this example. The en dash indicates that Pulitzer Prize is one noun-phrase. If it were a hyphen, Pulitzer could be confused for a modifier of the closed compound noun Prize-winner.

July 8 Ambition is overrated, and it is misunderstood to be a prerequisite for contentment.

July 6 Avoiding what's dark and challenging is the single best method for denying yourself what's light and simple in life. In the deepest depths, there are are kernels of clear light, like the core of the Earth bursting through the seafloor with the power of the Sun.

Every night, we set ourselves adrift at sea, floating blindly on our backs above the dark, formless parts of our minds. To not recall your dreams is to black-out to the contents of your unconscious, disconnected from the deepest parts of your self. Look down. Dream-journaling gives you the surface-level awareness of a snorkeler observing the contents of another world. Dive inwards. When you become lucid, you can submerge yourself in your inner world.

To never recall your dreams would be to live an entire lifetime on Earth without ever opening your eyes underwater.

July 3 Is "lightning and thunder" singular or plural? Should we write "lightning and thunder is" or "...are majestic"? Because lighting and thunder are the same thing. Thunder is the sound of lightning. Does that mean that lighting is only referring to the sight of lighting and not to the entire phenomenon? This is not a grammatical question but one ontological.

July 2 Your greatest strength has an attendant weakness, and it's likely your greatest blind spot. What is the shadow-side of your greatest strength, and how can you manage it?

Self-Investigative Journalism: Go out into the world to discover something about yourself, then report your findings. Go on an inward voyage and inspire others to do their own version of the same.

July 1 Sacrifice is a vice; devotion is the virtue.

Contraction vs. Openness

Contractions are the primordial movers of life. Physical, spiritual, and metaphorical — contracts are what keep us grasping on to our desires; they convince us of who we are; they keep us bound to what we think we ought to do; they are why we hang on to life; and they propel us through space and time. Contractions move us in every way, all the way down to the physics of childbirth. Contractions thrust us out into the world, and they limit us by imperceptibly erecting this illusion of a solid, lasting, and independent reality. Contract when you want to move and grasp and cling and achieve. When you want to be grateful and joyful and still — when you want to allow for reality to be other than what it appears to be— stop contracting. Open up.

The sweet spot for an editor's client: "This entire thing is my own, but there's no way I could have done this on my own."

If a concept is too steep for your reader, write switchbacks. Don't lead them straight up a sheer pitch. They'll get exhausted or give up and resent you. It is your job to escort your reader to the mind-expanding, life-enriching vista at the summit, and the only reliable, sustainable way to reach it is gradually — one sure step at a time.

[[Park-Ranger Revision]]

An excerpt from the introduction of A Handbook on Trail Building and Maintenance, written for rangers of the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks:

"This Trail Handbook is meant to be used by the trailworker. Sections of this handbook may be read and discarded, and other sections may be removed and found useful in the backcountry as a reference for project work (and starting fires!). The handbook gives the trailworker a few suggestions for solving the kind of problems encountered on a high Sierra trail system and presents standards for sound, long lasting, and environmentally compatible trailwork.

The primary standard for trail work in Sequoia and Kings canyon is one of environmental integrity. All problems and project are approached from an environmental perspective which allows natural processes to prevail. No work is undertaken or campsite used which unacceptably impacts the backcountry resource. We trailworkers, along with the backcountry rangers, are the major "stewards" of the backcountry.

If we don't set the standard, who will?"

Now, replace "trailworker" with "writer/self-editor" and "environment/backcountry" with "reader," and you have the perfect description of Park-Ranger Revision and the writer's responsibility to his/her reader.

June

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct

June 30 Revision Retreats

What writers need are revision retreats (at least that's what I'm telling myself so that I don't delude myself into thinking that I need a writing retreat to get a big project done). A manuscript of a book-length project only comes together by clocking in day after day for months at a time. You're not going to cram it out in the woods in two weeks. Imagine if, instead, you bring your manuscript to the retreat and spend all that concentrated time making better, making it more of what it could be?

Failing a writing retreat is dire and can feel terrible: I didn't get anything done. It's about output. To fail a revision retreat, you'd have to not spend enough time on the input. That's the only way you'd disappoint yourself: I didn't use my time for what I set out to do. And that's an easier failure to avoid.

Finish your manuscript before you go to Walden Pond. You'll end up with a better book.

Hitchhiking was a big part of my time in Iceland. Each road-side, thumb-out "mediation session" was a leap of faith and an exercise in detachment. I learned a lot from it and met some incredible people who got me where I needed to go.

People worry about ingesting brain-eating amoeba by drinking from a clear-water stream. Yet many of those same people grab their phones within a minute of waking to scroll social media, inviting brain-eating amoeba into their heads and beds as the first act of their day.

Embarrassment is the perfect example of the Tibetan teaching that "recognition and liberation are simultaneous." As soon as you admit how you're feeling — "I'm embarrassed" — you are relieved of that feeling, for an essential characteristic of embarrassment is that you conceal it. By recognizing and declaring your embarrassment, it morphs and dissolves and ceases to be how you feel; you immediately become liberated from it.

June 26 Amelia, the nine-year-old, said, "I wonder why I've never taken a liking to chocolate" while roasting her marshmallow on the fire for a s'more.

June 24 The masculine energy creates and destroys things in the world. The feminine energy creates and destroys worlds.

Every four years, I should declare a major. The difficulty of long-term, solo learning is the lack of structure, so it would help to give myself some structure for my self-study. If I were to declare a major now, to study intensely through 2028, it would be English Composition, and my minor would be Tibetan Dream Yoga (maybe with another minor in Calisthenics).

June 23 Nothing you want will feed you, so don't feed your wanting. And everything you need, beyond sustenance and safety, you will only find within you.

Inspiration: AURORA's "The Seed":

You cannot eat money, oh no

You cannot eat money, oh no

When the last trees have fallen

And the rivers are poisoned

You cannot eat money, oh no

Do enough good work to be rewarded without ever working for a reward.

I've never understood the fear of rain. It's only dangerous if it's cold enough to get hypothermia or if the winds are strong enough to knock you off the cliff or if the volume is great enough to flood the creeks. Otherwise, you're just getting wet.

The realist/empiricist/materialist (R/E/M) would say that what they believe is fact, because what they believe relies only on science and not at all on faith. Dreams make you open to faith, because you start to realize that we make a leap of faith every morning when we operate under the unverifiable belief that this is "reality" and that a dream. It's unverifiable because our methods of measurement — our senses and our brains — literally cannot tell the difference between the dreaming and waking states.

One of the necessary effects of dream-journaling is openness, and the fruition of openness is lucidity.

June 21 For a writer, an adventure isn't over until they have finished writing about it. I haven't finished writing about Iceland.

June 20 Anne Lamott's "one-inch picture frame" is the equivalent for fiction to David Perell's Shiny Dime.

The skeptic is not mindlessly contrarian. The skeptic is only contra dogma.

The most universally applicable insight and one of the most beautiful lines from Stephen Batchelor's Buddhism Without Beliefs:

"By meditating on death, we paradoxically become conscious of life. How extraordinary it is to be here at all. Awareness of death can jolt us awake to the sensuality of existence. Breath is no longer a routine inhalation of air but a quivering intake of life."

— wait! Here's another one that may have just trumped it (I'm reviewing my 'favorite'-tagged quotes in Readwise):

Nothing can be relied upon for security. As soon as you grasp something, it’s gone. Anguish emerges from craving for life to be other than it is. It is the symptom of flight from birth and death, from the pulse of the present. It is the gnawing mood of unease that haunts the clinging to 'me' and 'mine.'"

"Terrestrial Immortality"

This is my ideal state of being, described in beautiful words by John Muir:

"No, we are overpaid a thousand times for all our toil, and a single day in so divine an atmosphere of beauty and love would be well worth living for, and at its close, should death come, without any hope of another life, we could still say, "Thank you, God, for the glorious gift!" and pass on. Indeed, some of the days I have spent alone in the depths of the wilderness have shown me that immortal life beyond the grave is not essential to perfect happiness, for these diverse days were so complete there was no sense of time in them, they had no definite beginning or ending, and formed a kind of terrestrial immortality."

All-time advice on style and metaphor from Roy Peter Clark (packaged in a perfect turn of phrase):

"Use subtle symbols, not crashing cymbals." – Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools

Personal style guide rule: In the spirit of Bryan Garner and what seems to be the convention in meta-writing, I will resign my ways of using quotes to refer to single words (e.g., "'meta-writing' includes anything lexicographical or literary-critical or English-pedagogical"). Starting now, I will dress my reference-words in italics and see how it lays. I'll reserve the word-reference quotation marks for phrases, clauses, and full quotes. The italics should just make my meta-writing cleaner.

Example: "Buddha": "the awakened one" vs. Buddha: "the awakened one"

My main concern with this change is that all single-word references will take the same format of foreign words (ergo), which I also italicize to indicate their non-English nature. But the differences here should be clear by context; I must make it clear whether I am referencing a foreign word or whether I am using the foreign word for its meaning.

Another benefit: This will reduce the occurrence of a common exception for quotation marks, where I place the end punctuation outside of the end-quote if the quote is a reference, rather than a quote used in a sentence of its meaning.

Possible alternative to "he/she" (in the common effort to avoid using the masculine pronoun as the gender-neutral, singular subject: "(s)he"— David Foster Wallace used "s/he" in "Authority and American Usage" (as it appears in Consider the Lobster).

The Negative Sixty

Next time you're on public transit or in an airport, slowly scan around you and notice how many people have their heads bowed down into their laps. They have not dozed off. They are not praying. They're scrolling. You'll see tens or hundreds of heads hung at around -60º. It's the same shameful gaze-angle that men assume during masturbation. It's interior and self-isolating; the posture alone resigns you from the world.

This ubiquitous posture is a sorely overlooked effect of our devices and one that has an undeniably negative impact on our psychology. We are all but literally absorbed in our devices. We fixate on them, looking toward ourselves — but not into ourselves — as we peer through a rectangular portal into wherever: anywhere other than here. You hear this common progressivist argument that "Before people scrolled social media on their commutes, they would read a the paper. The 'Good Ol' Days' weren't so different." — as if those two activities aren't entirely different. Our devises are black holes for the laser-light of attention, oppressors of awareness; our phones are weapons of mass distraction. If you're reading the paper or a book, you are holding a physical thing and focused on that one thing for a significant amount of time. The whole point is to focus and learn, or to entertain yourself. The point of scrolling on your phone is to dis-tract yourself — literally "to pull you away" from where and when you are in the world — even if that intention is unconscious.

If someone across the bus from you is reading a book or the paper, you can see what they are doing. The only mystery is what article they're reading or what page they're on. You are welcome and invited to see the day's front-page headline or the title of the book on its cover. If you're curious and human enough, you might even strike up a conversation about current events or ask for the stranger's review of their book. But how are you supposed to engage with someone who is scrolling on their phone — someone who is entirely resigned, distracted, disengaged: absent? You are not supposed to. And what are they looking at? They don't want you to know. Leave them alone. They are not here. They don't want to be here. They don't care that they are sharing this space and time with you. Why aren't you looking at your phone? How miserable this bus is — and you don't have anywhere better to be? Go there. Leave this wretched place and draw your gaze away from me. Assume the position: "Negative sixty!"

June 19 Hot take: Every book needs its own bookmark. When you finish a book, move the bookmark to the start of your favorite chapter, or to your favorite page, and leave it there in your library.

It's okay if the bookmark is a receipt or a scrap of paper. But it's better if it's from your local bookstore (or the book's store of origin). Or, maybe you're an author yourself and you have your own custom-branded bookmark like me.

Indirect vs. Direct Objects

The direct object receives the verb (answering "What?" or "Whom?"). The indirect object receives the direct object (answering "To what/whom?" or "For what/whom?").

"Ferris gave Cameron the best day of his life."

Direct object ("What did he give?"): "the best day of his life" Indirect object ("To whom did he give it?"): "Cameron"

(Pardon the ambiguous pronoun "his" in the example. I left it in because it was likely the best day of Ferris's life too.)

This quiz on EnglishClub.com will teach you all you need to know about indirect objects.

Indirect objects are usually people — proper nouns or pronouns (or pets/animals, as in "Gave the dog a bone"). Direct objects are as varied as the dictionary of verbs and are often things, not people: "edited the essay," "cooked a meal," "rode the lift".

Make sure that, for both direct objects and indirect objects, you only ever use object-pronouns (me, them, him/her, us) and never subject-pronouns (I, they, he/she, we). This is easy for native speakers because it just sounds weird to the ear otherwise. But now you know the grammatical justification for it.

All object-pronouns can either serve as direct or indirect objects (e.g., "Our ancestors secured us peace" [indirect object] or "He helped us pay off our debt" [direct object]).

June 18 Every non-lucid dream is a psychotic break. This happens many times a night, every night, to almost everyone in the world.

Somnio, ergo non sum ("I dream, therefore I am not.")

Epistemology is the study of what truths we can know. Then, there are methods and competing philosophical camps for how we can learn truths, among them: rationalism and empiricism.

Personal Style Guide Rule: Delimit initialisms with periods but omit them for acronyms, to indicate which one it is and how to say it (e.g., REM, not R.E.M, and NAFTA, not N.A.F.TA.; F.B.I., not FBI, and U.S., not US).

The most important work we do for ourselves doesn't happen 9–5. It happens 11–7, or whenever you personally sleep and dream.

The phrase "family drama" is redundant.

June 17 If you want your reader to remember your ideas, they must be rendered in two ways: abstract and concrete. You really need both. You need the abstract to set the frame and give a grander meaning to the concrete visual you conjure in the mind's eye of your reader. The abstract context, whether it's given before or after the concrete example, turns the image into a symbol. A memorable idea has an abstract frame (e.g., moral perfection) and a concrete image/visual/story (e.g., the character and story of Jesus).

An editor as a butcher: Trim the fat without taking any meat off the bone.

June 16 Lucidity as a concept extends beyond the dream-state. It's the ideal form of conscious awareness. In a lucid dream, you realize that you are creating what you experience, and therefore, that you can change what you experience. The same is true for the waking state. You create what you experience in life, and that means you have the power to change it. Becoming lucid mens realizing the inherent malleability of reality and the power you have to change — realizing that you are free. As Andrew Holocek says, "dream yourself awake."

June 14 Self-Oughts Only

I have a personal rule that I never utter or write the words "you should." In place of that, I use commands framed as suggestions. And those two constructions come off as wildly different. One says "I know better than you what's best for you" and the other says "I suggest you change in this way, but you can do whatever you want." I've found that it's a simple way to avoid a preachy tone and any tinge of superiority (but it's not an exhaustive method). Imagine if Nike's slogan were "You should exercise." It means the same thing as "Just do it," but it sounds pretty moralizing, right?

The Craftsmanship of Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart'

Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" is a masterpiece. I didn't appreciate it in middle school like I do now. It nails all the essential elements of the short story and then exceeds them and throws in surprises. It's supremely economical, suspenseful and gripping, memorable.

It is a prime example of three main things:

• In fine rerum* (starting at the end of things): From the very beginning, you know that the narrator has already killed the old man; that's not the source of suspense; there is no dramatic irony. It's not a cheap trick. It's straight, and it gets you to focus on the main thing: the narrator's madness and how he justifies what he's done, as you hear the depraved story of the murder from the mouth of the murderer.
• Clear motive: Not in the murder-mystery sense — I mean in the "your reader needs to know what your character wants" sense. In the case of this story, you know it by the end of the first paragraph. The narrator wants to prove to you that he's not mad, by how he tells the story: "How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story."
• Unreliable narrator: From the jump, you know that the narrator is mad, and you know that he's telling a biased version of the story, trying to paint himself in the most sane possible light. So, the whole time, you're forced to stay vigilant: "What actually happened? Does the old man actually have a 'vulture-eye'?" It makes for even more tension and suspense. It has an eery effect, because even though he's trying to convince you of his sanity, he fixates on things like a mad man and, ultimately, hears the blaring beating heart of his dismembered victim.

Refs:

• TedED Video about Edgar Allen Poe's Short Story Style: "Why Should Read Edgar Allen Poe?
• "The Tell-Tale Heart" read aloud, by The Poe Museum

Make your life a meditation. Retreat in order to advance; stop to start again.

The path towards whatever lies beyond is through the pitch-dark abyss at the core of my center-less self, within which there is a kernel of clear light.

If you are not in a self-improvement phase, you're in a self-destruction phase.

June 13 So much of what we communicate is non-verbal. This is good news. It means that sometimes the best way to say what you mean is to shut up and pay attention. You can make someone feel understood by looking calmly and openly into their eyes.

I just re-read DFW's obituary in The New York Times. The whole thing isn’t amazing, but this paragraph has the elements of what I think make for a great obituary:

• Duality of the soul (neither good nor evil, righteous or depraved)
• ⁠Specific visuals and an image of how the deceased would act in certain scenarios
• ⁠An interior view that most people could never have of the deceased, from the perspective of a loved one.

"In contrast to the lively spirit of his writing, Mr. Wallace was a temperamentally unassuming man, long-haired, unhappy in front of a camera, consumed with his work and its worth, perpetually at odds with himself. Journalists who interviewed him invariably commented on his discomfort with celebrity and his self-questioning. And those who knew him best concurred that Mr. Wallace was a titanically gifted writer with an equally troubled soul.”

The best phrase in here is "consumed with his work and its worth," and it should have been placed at the end of that sentence for emphasis.

The illusory nature of form is like that of a rainbow. The rainbow brings you to a pause because you think it is beautiful and worthy of your attention, and you also know that the rainbow is fleeting and ephemeral — ultimately, empty. In the next moment those waves of light will change to a different frequency. There is nothing in the appearance of the rainbow that reveals its essence. It has the same essence as the light that moves through the air around it; it's formless and clear — empty. The same is true for all forms and appearances. They are beautiful and worthy of your attention, but only as long as you don't get swept up by them and forget that what appears to be solid, lasting, and independent is in fact fleeting, ephemeral, and relative.

June 12 Reflecting on the dream retreat at Beyul:

The free time felt like Iceland, alone in beautiful Nature with my thoughts; the lecture-sessions felt like a mix of my favorite philosophy classes in college and the best church sermons I've ever attended; the food tasted like we were on a resort vacation; and the conversations were as deep and therapeutic as I've had with anyone I've ever known for less than a year.

You couldn't possibly offend me with thoughtful and considered feedback. As an editor, if I were offended by feedback, I'd be the biggest hypocrite on the planet.

If you are giving a card to someone, read it aloud to them (or say part of it aloud). Spoken words are powerful. They are even more powerful if those words are first written (and revised).

If you thirst, do not climb. Go the spill-way.

Just as I co-create my dreams with an imperceptible part of my mind, I co-create the waking world with an imperceptible part of the collective mind that abides in Nature.

The only way to get over something (on top of it) is to go through it. If you don't see a way through, knock until the world splits open for you.

Truth lies ever beyond the horizon. Aim for it but know that you will never reach it. If you say "Land ho!" and run aground and settle, you have strayed from Truth and have chosen to dwell in self-delusion.

v1 of "The Creature of the Air and Sea" allegory

Before there was earth to walk, our world was only sky and sea. These infinitely vast domains are ruled by two creatures: the albatross and the manta ray. The albatross soars to whatever heights it pleases, for however long it likes; and the manta ray jets beneath the surface, diving as deep as the seafloor. The sky and the sea are infinitely vast and could never be fully explored, yet the two intersect. The creature of the air preys on the creature of the sea, and she humbles him with her grace and beauty. The two are not enemies; the albatross and the manta ray are kin and co-creators of our world. It was the albatross's hunger that kept him tethered to the sea and the manta ray's curiosity that drew her to the air. The manta ray taught the albatross how to dive, and the albatross taught the manta ray how to leap from the sea. The albatross and manta ray lived in harmony and engendered our ancestors, all the creatures of the air and sea. Now that there is earth to walk, we are witness to the albatross and the manta ray existing in harmony. And there is much wisdom to learn from them, if we look closely.

June 11

How and why you do are undeniably more important than what you do.

My top-3 values:

• Autonomy
• Stillness
• Connection

Stillness is the bridge; it's how I take care of myself, and it's how I learn to connect with others. The ideal to which these jointly point is Lucidity.

June 10 The essence of all form is emptiness.

Always Be Holding

Always be holding, never be holden.

Explanation:

Hold

• The root (dhr) of the word dharma, meaning — among many things — "divine duty" and "the path of righteousness"
• A reminder to pause and retreat and be mindful and still — being a witness of your experience
• Creating space to acknowledge the reality of emptiness and formlessness, not getting caught up in mere appearances

Behold

• While holding space for emptiness, appreciate forms as they appear, while they appear, exactly as they are
• Live in awe of the world and in gratitude for life
• Pay attention and look closely

Holden

• The archaic past particle of the verb "to hold," meaning to be restricted from action, limited, unable to see
• As in Luke 24:16 (KJV), after the resurrection: "But their eyes were holden that they should not know him [Jesus]."

Beholden

• Obligated and/or indebted to someone else for their service to you
• Not autonomous, tethered to the past, unable to live freely in the present moment

Reference:

"This is a dream. I am free. I can change." – Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Meditation is not clearing your mind — thoughtlessness. It is opening your mind — acknowledging your thought-fulness — and recognizing each thought as empty.

You want it? Too bad — you can't have it. It's all min(e)...d.

Wanting to impress someone is a burden on that person. It is the same as wanting them to be impressed by you. It's unfair and counterproductive to have that expectation, because the outcome is entirely out of your control.

June 6 Remain ever-open to receive the truth when it is presented to you. That means remaining ever-open to the likelihood that what you know to be true is not.

"Should I stay or should I—" "Go."

What's the most stable environment on Earth? The bottom of the ocean. What is the most volatile environment on Earth? The top of the mountain.

There's something to the fact that the symbol of Catholicism (Christianity), the crucifix, depicts God as immutably stable, static, and suffering. The message is that He suffered for us, and that we ought to remember that, and that the way to survive and succeed is to remain faithful as you endure suffering. For all Eastern deities, the symbols are much different. Everything is fluid and unstable, and gods like Shiva are depicted dancing atop puny humans. Or, the god is depicted as seated in meditation, which is a voluntary stillness unlike Christ's on the cross. The message in the Eastern symbolism is that this world is a mix of order and chaos, and you need to look to God to find your way through it all, and that the solution involves both play (dancing) and stillness (mediation).

"How much barbecue sauce would you like?" "More."

If you want to remember something, write it down. You don't have to re-read it later; just write it down. By writing it down, you enrich the experience, expand the idea — hacking your brain into giving it priority storage. You will remember the best of what you write down. And of the things you fail to write down, you will forget the best.

June 5 Steinbeck's Sentence Structure

"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good"

This well-known quote from Steinbeck's East of Eden is an example of how sentence structure can help meaning-making. There's an implicit meaning here that adds richness to the explicit message: "Don't be perfect; be good." The implicit message comes from the corollary of this statement, which is: "You can only be good once you no longer have to be perfect." Or, in other words, "Perfect is the enemy of the good." Or, in some French words by Voltaire from 1772:

"Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien" ("The best is the enemy of the good").

Within a single, short sentence, Steinbeck gets both of these messages across: (1) "Don't be perfect; be good" and (2) "We fail to be good because we are trying to be perfect" ("Perfect is the enemy of the good").

The cliche thing to say would be "And now that you don't have to be perfect, just be yourself" or "...just try your best." "Be good" is different from "be yourself" or "try your best" in a crucial way: it's more objective. It's normative, moral; it has to do with how you treat other people, rather than how you see yourself.

Our pursuit of a perfect self-image causes us to overlook how we treat our fellow man. It's not about you. Don't be perfect (for yourself). Be good (for the world).

Get creative.

Have a problem? Get creative. You'll find a solution. Have some free time? Get creative. You'll be energized and full. Think you have it all figured out? Get creative. You'll realize all what you've yet to learn. Want to improve yourself? Get creative. You'll discover some new truth about your nature.

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."

– Francis Beacon (via Cissy Hu on Substack)

[[On Meaty Hooks]]

June 3 The best part about Grammarly is its blog, because it's written by contributors who are talented writers and editors (not AI-generated suggestions on your prose with a surface-level explanation like the tool itself). These blog posts are more valuable than the tool, because they actually teach you about grammar, mechanics, and style. I just read a post on polysyndeton by Anthony O'Riley that was clear, direct, and memorable.

Here's an all-time, custom compound adjective (courtesy of the hyphen, my hero) from DFW's masterpiece, "Authority and American Usage (Or "'Politics and the English Language' Is Redundant"):

Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a near-Lewinskian scale?

This is also a wonderful use of a rhetorical question as a hook (this the first sentence of the essay) — and a wonderful use of polysyndeton.

I want to be loyal, like a dog, but in every other way a wolf.

There are either three or four stages of editing (depending on whether you do stages one and two in a single pass):

1. The Content-Edit: "What doesn't belong here, and what's missing?" (Also: "What is this actually about?")
2. The Structural Edit: "What is the hierarchy of information, and in what order would the content flow best?" (Editing for cohesion)
3. The Line-Edit: "What reads wrong; comes of confusing; or feels clunky, verbose, repetitive, tangential, or misplaced?" (Editing for clarity and concision)
4. The Proofread: "What did I miss?" (Editing for semantic/lexicographical/visual perfection — grammar, mechanics, usage, style, formatting and typesetting, footnotes, indexing, citations, etc.)

Note: In the ideal case, the Content Edit happens in the outlining/planning phase. This is more difficult for book-length works and for any works of fiction. (Of course there will be feedback on the content during the structural edit, but hopefully it's not so far off that it warrants a rewrite-pass before restructuring.)

These can either be the stages for a writer doing self-editing or the stages for an editor, suggesting changes, between each round of the writer's revision.

June 1 Writing is an act of the ego. Editing is the opposite.

Ref: William Zinsser in On Writing Well:

“Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it.”

“The Creature of the Air and Sea” is possibly the thing I’ve written that’s most important to me, because it (1) describes the way I want to live and (2) expresses what I believe to be the most fundamental truths of human reality.

May

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct

May 31 Please, someone — please! — explain why people write in all lowercase (even Emma Chamberlain's name is lowercase in her podcast's metadata — huh?). What is the vibe I'm supposed to feel from it? I probably don't read any of the all-lowercase prose long enough to feel the vibe; I click away because of painful editor-brain overload. Do you want me to struggle to understand where each sentence starts and ends? Are you intentionally disrespecting all the capitalization-worthy nouns, like your own name?

May 30 Anything will work, as long as you do.

The most beautiful places in conservative towns are individual homes. The most beautiful places in liberal cities are public spaces, like parks and libraries. No matter the political bent, places of worship are the most beautiful, especially in places with more money (like New York City). This is indicative of a few things: (1) conservatives want money to stay with private citizens, whereas liberals want money to serve the collective; (2) we use excess money to create beautiful things; (3) we believe that creating beautiful things will bring us closer to God.

May 29 Dreams are at once the most private and the most universal part of the human experience.

May 28 The most fruitful introspection involves three stages:

1. Honest self-reflection ("Am I headed in the right direction?")
2. Diligent self-projection ("Where is it that I truly want to go?")
3. Action ("What is the next step I can take between who I am and who I want to become?")

Are you a cartographer (compass-person) or a conquistador (telescope person)?

There are mediums and catalysts for introspection. You need to find at least one of each that works for you. For me, the primary mediums are writing and conversation, and the best catalysts are silent stillness and mindful movement.

The truth will set you free. My truth will keep you caged.

The hyphen joins words into one. The en dash links words but keeps them separate. The em dash separates words, using as much space and distance as possible — without divorcing the two clauses with a period.

The hyphen conjoins. The end dash connects. The em dash appends.

There are only two ways you'll stop learning: (1) believing that you have it all figured out or (2) believing that you won't ever figure it out. The trick, if you want to keep learning forever, is to always be aware of how much you don't know and believe that you can figure it out. It's a paradoxical blend of intellectual humility and confidence: "I know nothing; I can learn anything."

May 27 "Nor"

"Nor" is the latest addition to my list of favorite words. But it's not because of how it sounds or for a curious etymological history. It's because of what it literally, logically means: not "or." This word is rare, because it has a perfect analogy with formal logic. Rather than writing !A & !B ("not A and not B"), you would write !(A | B)("not either A or B"), for simplicity and clarity. That second notation is like a logical contraction; it cuts out superfluous symbols to communicate the same meaning.

The word "nor" is the logical and linguistic opposite of "or," and it's a contraction: "not or" == "n'or" == "nor." And like all contractions, it makes meaning quicker, makes clauses more dense and simpler. Would you rather write/read:

1. "Not A and not B"
2. "Not either A or B"
3. "Neither A nor B"?

I don't know about you, but I would not use option 1 or option 2. (Notice that the previous sentence doesn't use "nor," because of the preceding negative "not," and for the absence of "neither." Never use "nor" after "not," because "not" plus "nor" means "or": !(!A & !B) ("not either not A and not B") == A | B ("A or B"). That'd be the opposite of what you mean to say.

May 26 Your sleep and dreams are a measure of the path. "How far are you from the person you want to be?" is the same question as "How well do you sleep at night?"

May 23 Why are we obsessed, in The West, with knowing why things are the way they are. How much better would our lives be if we spent a little less time learning why things are pleasurable, or how to optimize a morning, and more time feeling the pleasure and enjoying the morning?

Derek Thompson just asked on Twitter for theories explaining why relaxing by large bodies of water lowers your blood pressure. Maybe, instead of reading those scientific papers, he could drive to the beach and hang out with some friends in the sun — just an idea.

There are two types of non-duality. Most simply, they are: "both" and "neither." Either, both sides of the dichotomy are true, in some portion. Or, the entire dichotomy is an illusion, and truth only lies outside of it.

May 21 The voice of Van Nestiat: He's somehow both emphatic and self-conscious, calculated and authentic, reverential and grumpy.

The rules of grammar and mechanics are less like traffic laws and more like normative ethics. As a writer, you have a duty to make meaning with your words, and to do it as coherently, clearly, and concisely as you can. The rules of the English language equip you with all the tools you need to uphold your duty to your reader: effective meaning-making.

Ignoring the rules is wrong. Overriding the rules is only right if it is in the name of more effective meaning-making. Follow the moral law (the rules of English), if you want to do your duty the world (your readers).

On Meaty Hooks

Give the reader something to chew on right away. If your first sentence/paragraph goes down like a gulp of water, there's no reason to keep reading. Give your reader the sense — immediately — that there is more of this good-tasting thing to come.

"Call me Ishmael" (from Moby Dick) is such a good opening line for this exact reason: you instantly have a whole character to chew on, someone who is talking directly to you, someone you'll come to know deeply over the course of the story. You no doubt want to read on.

A good hook is like a bite of steak precisely as big as what you can fit in your mouth at once. You have to gnaw on a bit and salivate before you can break it up and get it down. By the time you swallow, there's another chunk of meat on the page ready for you to devour.

Compass vs. Telescope

There are two types of people: those who navigate with a compass and those who use a telescope.

The compass-people look down at their feet and peer into their hands and navigate life by asking, "Am I headed in the right direction."

The telescope-people peer through the looking glass into the distance and navigate life by asking, "Am I headed toward my destination."

Both types of people veer off course, sometimes losing their way and sometimes changing their heading, or choosing a different destination. When they lack direction, in the midst of aimlessness, the each recalibrate; the telescope-people ask, "What's the best way to get there?", and the compass people ask, "Which way should I go from here?"

May 20 The goal of a relationship isn't to be together forever. The goal is to be together every day, in a certain way: where you help each other grow more into yourselves. The goal is to grow through each other every day, into a version of yourself that is ever closer to your nature.

That goal is a little more difficult to achieve than not breaking up for as long as you shall live. And if you can no longer be together in that certain way, every day, it'd be better for both of you to part ways.

May 18 Hyphens are Heroes

"I went through it with a fine tooth comb."

"I've never heard dental floss described that way. What is this 'fine' brand of 'tooth combs' that you use?"

"My apologies, I miss-wrote and neglected the most versatile punctuation mark of them all. 'I went through it with a fine-tooth comb.'"

May 17 Warren Buffet's investment philosophy (in my words): Buy the cheapest eggs (as long as they're intact), and don't sell them until they hatch.

Anne Lammot in Bird by Bird:

"The one thing I knew for sure was that if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans."

May 16 The ideal ought not to be that two become one flesh but that the two create a third flesh. Marriage is more about mating, building a family, and propagating the species than it is about two people melding into one bond through some conceptual promise. May the two create a third flesh and rear him/her to be capable of ten thousand things.

The tension in our society between the values of material success and homemaking can be summarized by how people misunderstand the message of The Wizard of Oz. Everyone quotes "You're not in Kansas anymore" as a way to say, "Congrats, you made it out!" But Dorothy's entire journey is one about getting back home (not just metaphorically but literally). The most important quote from the movie, its core message, comes at the climax: "There's no place like home." Dorothy wants to get back home, because there's no place like Kansas (for her).

The internal conflict is about how she sees her home and the people in it. She hates them at first and sees them as evil, restricting her and limiting her in life. But after going on a grand adventure with these characters' dream-equivalents in Oz, she learns that they love her, and that they will care for her and make sure she always finds her way back home.

May 15 Be careful confusing your subjects and objects. Your reader needs to know intuitively how your phrases/clauses relate to one another. You don't want your reader to stumble; you want them to cruise.

Take this example:

"The most western point in China is closer to Germany than the most eastern point in China."

This is an interesting fact, especially with a map, as in the original post. But the meaning is not clear from the language alone.

Here's the ambiguity: are we measuring the distance from Germany, for both the westernmost point and the easternmost point of China? Or, are we measuring the distance from the westernmost point of China, for both Germany and the easternmost point of China?

In other words, you could read this and think "Of course the westernmost point of China is closer to Germany than the easternmost point of China, because Germany is west of China!".

(Not to mention the confusion of "most western point," which is a sort of misnomer — it could be confused for "the most Western part" of China, which would make the entire sentence a commentary on culture rather than geography.)

Here's the best way to resolve this:

"The westernmost point of China is closer to Germany than it is to the easternmost point of China."

May 14 One of the best parts about being at altitude is seeing the shadows that clouds cast. From up there, you can see that a sunny day is just hours away. On the ground, though, you'd be in the midst of the dark or the rain, unaware of the light that surrounds you. This perspective-shift is a ripe source of gratitude and acceptance/detachment. Sometimes, you'll have the privilege of seeing a storm-front roll toward you, like a molasses-wave. It's a perspective that we're rarely afforded in life: accurate foresight. It's one that requires great effort; that perspective is a reward for great effort.

False summits are some of the toughest moments in life. The Universe makes you pause and ask: "Is this the mountain I really want to be climbing? If it is, do I have the will to make it to the summit?"

May 13 What Is Meta-Modernism?

In this stellar video essay, Thomas Flight explains meta-modernism, with the context of modernism and postmodernism in art and film. These cultural trends have never gone away; they just keep evolving in response to one another. And meta-modernism is a response to postmodernism that injects some of the sincerity and optimism you'd find in traditional (modernist) narratives.

Modernism: explicit values, duality of good and evil, straight-forward narrative structure

Postmodernism: self-conscious and -referential, ironic and cynical, morally ambiguous (e.g., anti-heroes), fragmented structure, subversion, often lacks clear resolution

Meta-modernism: self-aware, morally nuanced, winding and subversive structure but lands on a clear resolution, sincere and earnest on the whole

I've been thinking about Nolan's The Prestige a lot lately, and I'm not quite sure if it's postmodern or meta-modern. It's non-linear, definitely meta (with commentary about filmmaking through the metaphor of magic). It has a definitive conclusion with no mystery, but that resolution doesn't advocate for any certain values, really (rather than proving the way to tell a good story / do a good magic trick). It's probably postmodern for that reason: there's really no winner or loser except for the viewer, who no doubt enjoyed the ride of the movie.

Schrödinger Deadlines

As a teacher/professor, make it a feature of your class that for big assignments (papers/essays), the deadline given is true only half the time. Set a deadline, and then on the day it's due, reveal whether they have extra time to work on the piece of writing. This counteracts, and leverages, a feature of the human psyche: procrastination. It also opens up the opportunity for a rare outcome in an English class: if you extend the deadline by a week and the entire class already has a draft they were prepared to submit, then maybe they'll spend the week revising, making it an even better piece of writing.

May 12 We need to declare the meanings of these important Buddhist/Hindi terms. Sorry, Taylor, karma is not "a boyfriend" or "a relaxing thought."

Karma = The immutable, universal law of cause and effect

Dharma = Your divine duty (good karma comes from following the dharma)

Samsara = The cyclical world of death and rebirth, perpetuated by grasping and clinging to desires

Nirvana = The world liberated of craving and the illusions of appearance; the fruition of dharma and the realm of the awakened/enlightened

May 9 There's work, and then there's meta-work. Meta-work is higher leverage than what you do and get paid for day to day.

Meta-work is:

• Cold-emailing the recruiter to get an interview
• Rehearsing your speech 10 times ahead of your pay review
• Busting it after hours on a side-project to build out your portfolio
• Or distributing your work so that more people know about it, people who will surface new opportunities for you.

Meta-work is good for anyone to do, no matter your industry or your occupation. It's the type of work you don't get paid for, but it's the type of work that improves your pay. It's the kind of work that reveals to others what you're worth.

Don't just work and get paid. Give effort, energy, and time to the meta-work, so that you eventually get paid more for your work.

Use en dashes for salutations and quote attributions, not the em dash. Most style guides would suggest the em dash, but here's why that makes no sense:

• The em dash, with its many uses, is on the whole about interjecting with supplementary information. In the case of a quote attribution, the information is essential and not an interjection. It's the next logical step, whether it's the final line of an email ("– Garrett Kincaid") or attributes a quote to an author ("Speak your latent conviction..." – Ralph Waldo Emerson).
• The en dash in its normal function serves to join two things, visually and conceptually ("Did you see the McGregor–Mayweather fight?"). In other cases, it takes the place of linking words, like "to" while linking two things ("He rode on the London–Paris line."). That's its typical function, whereas the em dash is meant to separate one clause/phrase from another. The em dash visually and conceptually separates, whereas the en dash links.
• The author of a quote, for instance, is not an aside, as an em dash would suggest; it is the next logical piece of information your reader wants to know. Who said that? your reader asks immediately. "That quote is attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson," you render concisely with an en dash: " – Ralph Waldo Emerson."
• The en dash takes the place of the words "attributed to," in the same way it does for "London to Paris line."
• In the case of both a quote attribution and a salutation, you are certainly linking two pieces of information: either a quote to its author, or the body of an email/message to the sender. You don't want these pieces of information to be more separate — visually or conceptually; you want them to be closer, to indicate that they are inextricably linked.

An all-timer from Emerson's "Self-Reliance":

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried."

Writers don't write to get rich. If they have any financial motivation, it is to make enough money from writing so that they continue to do it until they die, meanwhile living a lifestyle they love.

I really appreciate and admire people who give specific compliments. It's a form of eloquence and a sign of empathy. Not only do they understand how their feelings well enough to articulate them in detail but they also choose the details that would elicit the most positive possible feelings in the recipient of the compliment (quelling their insecurities, validating their effort, affirming their values).

May 8 Introspection and a growth mindset in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

"With my tears go into your isolation, my brother. I love him who wants to create beyond himself and thereby perishes." – Nietzsche

May 7 One definition of enlightenment: it comes after the cessation of the desire to be otherwise or elsewhere.

"This craving to be otherwise, to be elsewhere, permeates the body, feelings, perceptions, will—consciousness itself. It is like the background radiation from the big bang of birth, the aftershock of having erupted into existence." (Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs)

May 6 I have the morals of a "good Christian boy," but I'm agnostic.

Monks are intronauts; shamans are psychonauts.

There's only one reason to give up something good: to go for something better. The problem is that you don't know how good it is until it's gone.

Spend your effort and resources on prevention, to avoid spending them on treatment. This goes for both mental and physical health.

May 3 Always returning to the still mind and subtle body...

May 2 Rush and hurry are modern inventions, not any older than the wristwatch. They are fabricated emotions. Urgency is innate, the motivational counterpart of hunger. But once the masses become well-fed and hunger turns figurative, you manufacture counterfeit forms of urgency, among them: rush and hurry.

(I always seem to have this brand of thought when I commute to New York City. Today, I happen to be 30 minutes early for breakfast with no tight deadlines for work, so I'm feeling especially zen and emotionally accomplished in contrast to my fellow commuters.)

May 1 Too often, writing feels like I'm trudging through a thick swamp. Words drip out slowly, like a waterfall in eternal winter — never to flow again. But after sitting with it long enough, the page springs to life. I start surprising and delighting myself with my words, and I wonder why I ever dreaded the work of writing.

Compression is not a measure of length but of density. It's the ratio of meaning to words, just as density is the ratio of mass to volume. That means there are only two ways to make a piece of writing more concise: either (1) fold more meaning into the same number of words or (2) express the same meaning with fewer words.

On the Horseshoe Effect

Opposites are closer than we think. It's easy to go from joyful in one moment to sorrowful in the next, from utter bliss to debilitating anxiety. It's easy for a society to go from authoritarianism to anarchy. That's because both extremes are farther from truth than they are to each other. Possibly the best example of this is "stank face." Disgust is one of the emotions that most influences behavior. If you are disgusted by something, you will avoid it at all costs. It's visceral; we can all recognize a look of disgust, and we never want to receive one. But "stank face" is an expression of disgust that means its opposite. Look at a jazz bassist mid-riff or B.B. King during a guitar solo, and you'll see a look of disgust in appreciation of the sound they're hearing. It's so good, so pleasurable, that it's disgusting. That face, that emotion straddles both ends of the horseshoe.

April

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct

April 30 Figurative comparisons are like sandcastles. They're small, rough versions of the concept you want to convey. You give your reader something they know, something they can see and allude to something similar but different, something that's still unfamiliar to your reader.

The ego is the part of you that is deluded. The clear-light mind is the part of you that eludes you.

April 29 Only make goals about inputs and habits, which are within your control, never goals about outcomes, which are out of your control.

A Michelin-star bowl of rhythmic, rhetorical, phonetic soup from Hozier's "Nina Cried Power":

It's not the wakin', it's the risin' / It is the groundin' of a foot uncompromisin' / It's not forgoin' of the lie, It's not the openin' of eyes / It's not the wakin', it's the risin'

You and I are neither the albatross nor the manta ray. We will never be able to fly or to breathe underwater, but we can learn to glide and to dive. We can find harmony among the sea and sky and live among those two worlds, which are now three. You and I have the opportunity to become the Creature of the Air and Sea.

One gives you a stick; Two gives you stilts. And Three is a tripod.

At the sentence-level, think in clauses. At the paragraph-level, think I'm sentences. At the essay-level, think in paragraphs.

Words are hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Clauses are H2O molecules. Sentences are little clusters of water-atoms. Paragraphs are droplets. Essays are consumable portions, usually served in a half-full glass.

April 28 Complex idea? Use a simple sentence structure. Direct, active language does not mean simple language. Actually, it is only with direct and active language that you can clearly communicate nuance. If you have a simple idea, flip the subject and predicate, add dependent clauses; get funky. But otherwise, be direct, so that you can be clearly understood.

April 27 On the Market for Meta-Writing

Most writers make their money by teaching writing. This used to be a mystery to me, but now it's clear why that is. The value in writing is in the writing, not in publication or recognition. The value is in the practice itself, which enriches your experience of the world and depends your understanding of yourself and others. The value in writing — more than anything, for any serious writer — is being able to do it well. That's why people pay to learn writing more than they pay writers for their writing.

There's a corollary here too, which is that words and books only have immense value when they are accessible. If books weren't affordable, they wouldn't be valuable, because their value is revealed as they are read. And a book's value can't quit be quantified, because it will vary dramatically by reader.

It makes sense why great writers teach writing. The people who really want to be great writers are already reading as much as they please and won't be spending any more money on books (giving more money to writers for their writing), but they will spend a lot more money to create something worthy of being read by others.

This is the model for many crafts — painting, carpentry, masonry — or any sport. People pay to learn these skills for their own sake, because they know how much value it will add to their lives (yes, at the level of the individual). What portion of little-league ball-players go on to play in the MLB? Probably the same as the portion of writers who become full-time authors.

The contents of my ideal everyday:

• Writing
• Reading
• Moving
• Meditating
• Conversing.

Two questions to gauge how close you are to a friend:

• Do you know how many siblings they have?
• Do you know their siblings(') name(s)?

April 26 You've been diagnosed with a terminal condition; you will surely die, and you don't know how much longer you have to live. That condition is not an illness or disease — nor is it a curse. At birth, you were diagnosed with life, which inevitably ends in death.

In every moment, you are living and dying, so choose to see this moment for what it is: a gift.

Make your own myth. We all live according to grand narratives, whether we know it or not. The step beyond knowing it is creating a myth yourself and then living it out, like a lifelong lucid dream.

The ego is truth-averse; it seeks only comfort.

April 25 I'm only willing to do evermore work for myself. As for the work I do for others, I'm only willing to do as much work as I am compensated for.

April 24 Dreams are private experiences, but they are not unique. Dreams are universal.

April 23 Karma is amoral — like the laws of physics. Rather than "you will get what you deserve," it means "you will reap only what you have sown."

Karma is the spiritual name for an immutable law of nature: cause and effect. The main thing that's colloquially misunderstood is this: karma refers both to the cause and effect, describing the inextricable bond between them. The meaning of "good karma" or "bad karma" is more like "good habits" or "bad habits" than it is like "reward" or "punishment." If you want good outcomes (effects), you need to change your habits (causes).

Karmic traces are the residue of your thoughts, speech, and actions. If you want good outcomes, reverse the effects of bad karma by dedicating yourself to good thoughts, speech, and actions in the present — and into the future. If there's something you want to reap, you must first sow its seed.

Whenever possible, do it in "one take." That doesn't mean you ship the first take. It means that you redo the whole take, rather than just splicing in a new part. This could be a paragraph in an essay, a scene in a story, or a recorded monologue. The closer you can get to doing it in one take, the more authentic it will feel to the audience. You still need to edit it, to polish it, but by re-doing it take by take, you preserve the spirit.

The ultimate examples of this would be a stand-up comedy special or a Broadway play.

Someday, I want to be so well versed in language that I can detect a writer's native tongue by the subtle differences in how they write in English, as a second language.

Round-About Language

You don't want your writing to read like you're doing laps in a cul-de-sac; you want it to feel like cruising down a two-lane freeway, or a quiet country lane.

April 22 When one of my greatest mentors, Joel Diffendaffer (my HS choir teacher), suddenly died, I was distraught and upset. One of the first things I said was (something like) "there are certain people who should be guaranteed a full life because of how good of a person they are."

I was thinking in dichotomies: good and evil, deserving and undeserving, fair and unfair, long and short, full and empty.

The reality is a duality: the fullness of life doesn't depend on how long you live but on what you do with your time. It's not about life or death but about living.

Life is the whole cake. Living is the icing.

Remember: People don't know what they mean to you. You have to tell them.

Research Wabi-Sabi: "a worldview centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection."

April 20 Here's how I hope to look at all stories — from mentors, movies, friends, strangers, and celebrities: use stories to learn how to avoid great ordeals, how to change yourself before the world forces the all-is-lost moment upon you, and you enter the Dark Night of the Soul. Stories remind us that life is change, and they help us learn to make change less painful. Characters learn deep lessons by going through terribly painful ordeals. From these characters, you can learn the lessons without the ordeals.

[[Transformation Without Trauma]]

The Prestige: Short-Story Structure

For short stories — especially allegories, parables, or myths which are more about ideas and insights than characters and plots — it's helpful to simplify the story structure to three specific parts (down in scope from the eight- or twelve- part frameworks like Harmon's tory circle or Campbell's Hero's journey).

These are entirely poached from Chris Nolan's The Prestige, a film that expertly demonstrates the overlap between good narrative structure and an effective magic trick:

Part 1: The Pledge — Demonstrate the ordinary nature of the ordinary thing, and promise that you will make it disappear.

Part 2: The Turn — Plunge the audience — and character(s) — into uncertainty by making the ordinary thing disappear.

Part 3: The Prestige — Deliver what the audience feels is inevitable, but do it in a way that they couldn't possibly predict; bring the ordinary thing back with the flair of a great showman, making it feel extraordinary.

The most culturally significant short story (parable, myth) to use this structure is Christ's passion in the Gospels. The pledge: He is the begotten son of God. The Turn: He was crucified and died on the cross. The Prestige: On the third day, He resurrected.

My favorite framework for fictional stories is Dan Harmon's story circle. And from what I've learned about the archetypes of stories, these are the five essential beats for a character's arc:

1. Establishing the character's flaws and desires, in the context of their ordinary world
2. Inciting action and the call to adventure (often via a mentor)
3. Journey through the unfamiliar world, facing trials, growth, and a major ordeal
4. Success/revelation and self-transformation
5. Return to the ordinary world, a changed person (think of Odysseus returning to Penelope)

It'd be interesting to explore story structure that isn't character-focused. There are definitely a meta-structures to narratives that are more subtle than the hero's journey. The simplest example of this is non-linear storytelling or spliced A and B plots, where there are two characters going on their own journeys through the story circle. Their combined journeys and the chronology of the narrative create the structure of the story, which transcends the protagonist's death–rebirth cycle.

There's story structure from the perspective of the protagonist (or the perspective character), and there's story structure from the perspective of the audience.

Correcting Our Cultural Misunderstandings of Stoicism and Skepticism

Skepticism and stoicism have gone the same way in our culture, reduced to colloquial definitions of "stoic" and "skeptical." We take them to be these simple attitudes of stubborn, selfish people who are apathetic and disengaged ("stoic"), or doubtful and untrusting ("skeptical"). But these are both rich philosophical traditions that have more merit today simply because they are misunderstood and overlooked (and not practiced).

At the heart of stoicism is the concept of the dichotomy of control (or the locus of control), where with all particular events of life, you acknowledge whether you have control over the outcome or not. The stoic sees this clearly and only gives time and energy to what is within his control. They are not detached or apathetic; rather, the stoic limits his expressions of passion to those things over which he has agency in life. He is detached from all outcomes (because no one can control outcomes, only attitude and effort/action) and from issues and worries and potential events that he cannot control — including the fact of death (memento mori).

Skepticism is a complex, intellectual attitude that makes you impervious to blind faith and bolsters your psyche against self-delusion. The skeptic doesn't believe what he doesn't feel is true, and he practices the mindful clarity required to see truths when they are revealed to you. It is a subtle practice, like trying to apply the scientific method to the unanswerable questions of Nature, God, and Death — accepting or rejecting, on feeling, answers that you can't verify. The skeptic develops an immunity to the trap of dogma by welcoming discomfort as a preferable alternative to ignorance.

Aimless wander always bares fruit.

I'm making six figures in a remote job, yet the only place I have that's dark and quiet enough to meditate is my 4'x4' closet. Maybe I ought to be elsewhere.

April 19 Editing is a craft that most writers don't consciously practice or study. It means that they're overlooking the skill required for at least half of the writing process. Writers who are skilled self-editors have an edge on quality, especially concision.

Dialectic of Seven-Fold Predication (From JainWorld

These are the seven necessary and sufficient perspectives from which we can perceive truth.

"I shall next refer to the actual text in Sanskrit of the dialectic of sevenfold predication (saptabhanginaya) :

(1) syndasti = may be, it is.

(2) syatnasti = may be, it is not.

(3) syadasti nasti ca = may be, it is, it is not.

(4) syadavaktavyah = may be, it is indeterminate.

(5) syadasti ca avaktavya sca = may be, it is and also indeterminate.

(6) syatnasti ca avaktavyasca = may be, it is not and also indeterminate.

(7) syadasti nasti ca avaktav-yasca = may be, it is and it is not and also indeterminate."

Here's an all-time use of an adverb from the Tattvārthasūtra, the central text of Jain philosophy:

"The ultimate truth is not one-sided; it is manifold. The wise describe it variously."

Here's a concise example for one main difference (in usage) between the hyphen and the en dash.

"I'm tired of the 9–5 grind." The en dash here denotes a range, literally the duration of time from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. If you read it aloud, you're saying "the nine to five grind," which are the exact same words as the next example, though their meanings are different.

"I'm tired of the 9-to-5 grind." Here, hyphens string together these words into a compound adjective, modifying "grind."

The differences in meaning here are subtle, and I'd argue that only the hyphenated one is correct. In the en-dash example, you really have to objects for the verb-phrase "tired of": "9–5" and "grind." That's because both are nouns. Are you tired of working from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm? Or, are you tired of the feeling that it's a grind? With the hyphen, you can resolve this ambiguity. "Grind" becomes the only noun in the sentence, which makes it undoubtedly the object of "tired of," since "9-to-5" is an adjective modifying "grind." "I am tired of the grind." What kind of grind? "I'm tired of the 9-to-5 grind."

April 18 In a way, the albatross and the mantra ray co-created our world, co-created you and me.

S4:E9 "Beyond the Wilds" is so far one of the best episodes of Legend of Korra. It has a special resonance because it's so dreamlike, and it hits on an important psychological/philosophical truth: you must accept what has happened to be released from it; denying and ignoring it only strengthens it's grip on you and reifies it as part of your future.

April 17 If you're proofreading, always read the piece aloud. If you're at the structural-edit stage, never read it aloud. And for line-edits, read aloud the bits that don't quite seem right. It will give you insight. It will let you feel the words and how they fall, one after another.

Anecdote to link to a lesson and use in an essay someday:

During the summer before college, I was working as a velvet at the Hotel Phillips in Downtown KC. By that time, I'd been committed to play tennis at Stevens for almost a year. I was proud to have found a place that felt like such a great fit, and I celebrated by belting Sinatra's "New York, New York" I'm every airport rental car as I whipped it around the block and up the levels of the parking garage. I'd belt it on my walk back to my post, benefiting from the acoustics of the concrete wafer layers: "Start spreading the news / I'm leaving today / I'm gonna be a part of it / New York, New York."

I sang that song non-stop for the whole summer, doing my best to improve with every rep. And during my first semester as a Stevens Duck, I used "New York, New York" as my audition song for Quackappella, one of the two a cappella groups on campus (the other being the "Floctives"). I got every note, with vibrato and no voice cracks on the sustained "These little town blues" line (you know, the key-change, cut-time bridge). It felt phenomenal, and I got the part as a tenor in my first-ever a cappella group.

April 16 Is life-long monogamy natural? Show me a species that mates for life, and I'll show you 25 that don't. Of course, it's evolutionarily beneficial to have both parents involved in child-rearing, and the nuclear family is the atomic unit of community, which every human needs. Monogamy is also a beautiful thing. What I'm really asking is this: Is there a biological desire that humans have for life-long monogamy, or is it a cultural one? The biological desire may only be about having and caring for children and not about a life-long bond with a partner — just a strong bond with a co-parent, to ensure the propagation of your genes and the sustenance of the species.

Do things in life that make you more comfortable with the fact of death.

Is the Glass Empty or Formless?

Imagine you are a glass of water. The psyche (the default, gross level of awareness), identifies with the cup: "I am solid. I have this shape. I have a place in the world." The substrate (the intermediate level of awareness) identifies with the contents of the cup, the water: "I am not just the form that contains me; I have a vast inner world that is private to me and useful to the world." Finally, there is the deep, most subtle level of the clear-light mind, and there are two goals here for the ideal level of awareness. There is one of emptiness and one of formlessness.

The Buddhist teachings would say that the cup and its contents are illusory. In fact, you are empty. The glass is not full, and the form of the glass could be any other at some different time. The reason you will remain water in a glass, life after life the cycle of samsara, is because you perceive the glass and its contents to be solid, lasting, and independent. In fact, that is not you. You are the source of the water in the glass, the clouds and the rivers and the glaciers. The glass will be poured out tomorrow, but water is everywhere forever. You are empty, because you are the vapor in the air, not water in a glass.

My preferred teaching would be formlessness. Rather than denying the reality of your earthly form, learn to live in the paradox of it: "I am the water within the glass. If I were in any other container, I would still be me, the water." You recognize the container as illusory, that you are in fact fluid and formless, without structure. You can morph yourself. You aren't bound by the world as you tend to think. Everything is more malleable than it appears, because you yourself are formless water; it is your essence and character to flow, not to pool and stagnate with in a single container.

The illusion is not the self but the form of the self, any container of the self. The self is not empty but formless. At your imperceptible core is an ineffable essence. It's ineffable, but you still have an essence, an essential part of you that is unique and distinct, an instance of "human" in the world.

If you become empty, you convince yourself that you are not of this world. If you become formless, you start flowing through the world with agency and intent — lucidity.

Unless you're proofreading, read the full paragraph before suggesting edits. If your edits are at all structural (beyond the sentence-level), read at least one paragraph at a time, so that you understand all the elements before your make your edit. Crucially, you do not have to read the entire piece before making edits; you can edit as you go, just go paragraph by paragraph.

April 13 The editor is like a mediator — simultaneously vying for the best interests of the writer and the reader.

April 12 I essentially want to be a practicing counselor without a degree or an LMHC. That's because I want to serve people through a different medium than talk-therapy: writing. So many things can be therapy. And some of the best self-transformations happen when are doing something you care about, before you know you wanted to change yourself (e.g., paying for writing coaching because you want to master the craft).

In stillness, all is abundant. There is more than what's beneath your feet and more paths available than the one you're trying to follow.

Emptiness is not the right solution to the problem of the ego. Instead of becoming empty, the void beyond the world, become formless and flow like water through through the world.

Clarity means understanding how you feel, what you ought to do, and what you truly want. Congruence means having the will to follow through.

The albatross is completely free; it soars to whatever heights, wherever it pleases, and for however long it likes. The albatross is light. The manta ray is heavy; from our perspective, she sinks. She lives under this opaque blanket, but she too is free. It's just a freedom that we can't see. It's an inner freedom. While the albatross traverses the world, the manta ray travels deeper, diving inward.

[[Live in The Third]]

Almost no decisions are "Should I do this or that?" Two choices, all binary decisions, are illusory. Most decisions are truly "How should I do it?" But to get to that point, you have to go through a process of honest self-reflection? What is it that you know you should do? What is it that you deeply want to do? Once you do all that thinking, the true decision reveals itself — not "This or that?" but "How should I do it?"

Should you ask out the girl? Of course! The question is how to do it. Should you cheat on the test? Of course not! The question is how much you're willing to study.

We're naturally uncomfortable being submerged underwater or suspended in the air. But the reality is that there is no other option, no solid ground to stand on. Stability is an illusion. If you become The Creature of the Air and Sea, you can dive without the fear of drowning and glide without the fear of falling.

The darkest moment is not always before the dawn. It's in the dead of night. Is it not?

April 11 Maybe Eve is my God. After all, she is the mother of man. Would I rather worship the being who created our inhuman ancestors and wanted to trap them in Eden, or the woman who seized the knowledge of the gods on behalf of our species? Eve is like the Christian Prometheus.

The Sun and sky are masculine (Yang); the Moon and ocean are feminine (Yin). The Sun and sky provide energy and protection. We can see the Sun in the sky, yet it is inaccessible. The masculine engenders our aspirations. The Moon and ocean are sources of comfort and mystery. We want know the Moon and ocean, because they are here for us to explore. The feminine engenders our questions.

Masculine/Feminine is the primordial dichotomy. Or at least, that's how we see it. That's how we understand it, but it's not true. Masculine–Feminine is the primordial duality, meaning everything has both within it, and both are defined by the other. Everything that is masculine is also feminine, and everything that is feminine is also masculine. Nothing is only either feminine or masculine, and nothing is equally feminine and masculine. Everything is some imperceptible gradient between.

Meme (noun): A culture-wide mind-virus

April 9 The highest-leverage improvements for writers happen at the level of the paragraph. If can improve the structure of a paragraph and improve how you string paragraphs together (how you transition between ideas), you suddenly make strides in all the most important dimensions of writing: cohesion, clarity, and concision.

The Third is a new brand of non-duality. Rather than two things resolving into one (the self and other resolving into emptiness in Buddhism, for example), both things combine to create a discrete, individual thing (the self-aware self co-created by, inspired by, in communion with the other).

We need to change our culture around conversation. Too many conversations are just a series of monologues, yet you can only unlock the magic of conversation in dialogue.

One of the innumerable benefits of mindfulness is that you realize the positive thoughts and feelings you have about others. You notice the thoughts as they pass, and you can reference them to give very specific, memorable compliments. Pair that with a keen empathy and awareness of what other people value and what they're insecure about, and the combo can make for a compliment that single-handedly levels up their self-esteem.

April 8 I just played the first few levels of Samsara by Poki Games, which I found while searching for images of the wheel of samsara — an ironic instance of complete mindlessness and distraction.

In her album, The God's We Can Touch, AURORA echoes my sentiments about Original Sin, and our misguided self-perceptions as humans.

And in this random interview I just found, she puts it so well, and so concisely:

Yes. I think it’s very rooted in us, that what makes us human is evil, and we have to distance ourselves from the human in us and approach this perfect God, who we can never become as perfect as. Because we are not meant to be perfect. And I find our obsession with perfection very disturbing. Because it’s not real! Nothing is perfect. And we shouldn’t believe that we have to be, either. And blame ourselves for not being perfect. Perfect is just a meaningless word that doesn’t make sense to me. To beg for forgiveness, just for being born — it’s very absurd. It’s clear that we need something. We need faith, we need some answers to these impossible questions. To create meaning in our struggles, so that it’s not for nothing. But I think we could find meaning without tearing ourselves down and tearing each other down. It would be nice at least.

Man's pathology is self-delusion, and the only treatment is introspection.

April 7 Every moment is a bardo; we are always between. The introspective path does not have as its aim to escape the gap. The path, instead, is to acknowledge and accept the gap, to learn to live within it — to feel ever sturdier without ever having solid ground on which to stand. Don't try to escape to one side of the chasm or the other; both emptiness and attachment are illusions of stability. Remain suspended above the infinite chasm on a swaying bridge, that "dizzying crest." Spend your energy reinforcing the bridge, so that you can become comfortable in the gap. Focus your attention on the fog, so that you can burn it off and see deeper into the chasm, and across the entire breadth of the bridge.

To be The Creature of the Air and Sea, you don't need to fly or breathe underwater. That would resign you to one world or the other; instead, move between them both. You need only the abilities to glide and dive to exist in harmony, within the duality.

You were born as a creature of the earth. Don't deny your nature, but strive to become The Creature of the Air and Sea, and you will wield the world within.

With introspection, you can transform yourself without the common catalysts of trauma and crisis.

April 6 The albatross preys on the creatures of the sea, and the manta ray leaps into the air, humbling him with her grace and beauty.

We make the mistake of looking for the "one true," when we should be looking not for the one or two but The Third that is most true to you.

Dualism is decried by the Buddhists in favor of monism and emptiness. Monism is decried by the psychologists who see the self in relation to the unconscious. But better than either dualism or monism is living in The Third, where you recognize the duality and fuse two extremes without ignoring or denying either. You can acknowledge the dualism and resolve it into a harmony among the two extremes. Don't choose just one; it would take you further from reality.

Truth before bros, bros before hoes

April 4 "Hunch-hucking": My made-up verb for a solipsistic writer

If you reimagine Yin/Yang as division between the realms of the air and sea, the creatures of the air and sea are what bring the two worlds into harmony. Yang is the albatross and Yin the manta ray. Both are huge creatures — kings and queens of their respective domains; the albatross has the most endurance of any bird and a massive wingspan, and the manta dives deep into the ocean and moves more efficiently than any other marine mammal.

The albatross dives into the sea to feed on fish, and the manta ray breaches the surface, leaping into the air to play. Despite their worlds being infinitely vast, they intersect. They are interdependent, creating the duality, the harmony.

The Creature of the Air preys on the Creature of the Sea. And the Creature of the Sea humbles him with her grace and beauty.

Other details:

• Mantas are gatherers, albatrosses hunters
• The etymology of manta is from the Spanish for blanket and cloak, which is in line with the feminine trait of mystery — the dark side of the moon

See ChatGPT convo

April 3 No thing is ever easy. But life is easier in the long run if you do what feels hard at first. If it feels easy in the moment, it's usually wrong — a choice lubed up by the temptation of chaos, to undermine the order for which you are striving.

Some of life's greatest pleasures have the prerequisite of rigid principles and a strict personal morality. If you are not steadfastly honest, you will not have the pleasure of being completely trusted by those you love. If you waver on your commitments, you will not have the pleasure of pride and self-assurance that come from keeping your word, even against an immediate desire to do otherwise. If you do not intently pay respect and attention to others, you won't ave the pleasure of people longing to be in your presence. There are some pleasures you can harvest from the world. The deeper pleasures demand that you first become worthy, and sensitive enough to feel them.

Platonic love for the opposite sex is entirely possible, and if you aren't capable of it, it's something to work on. It means valuing someone for more than the physical pleasure they could bring you. It means recognizing the immaterial, energetic things that attract you to them.

"Platonic" is a synonym for "ideal," which comes from Plato's concept of the world of forms. "Platonic love" is the ideal form of love, which transcends sexuality. You can feel different types of love for the same person — sexual, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, familial, fraternal. And you can feel sexual love for someone without wanting to act on it. (E.g., you are in a happy relationship and don't want to act on your sexual desires toward other women, even though you would if you were single.) You know what the key is? If you don't flirt or fornicate, then you have a platonic relationship (in the sense that it is non-physical, sans sexuality).

See the Etymonline entry for "Platonic," and this quote therein:

The bond which unites the human to the divine is Love. And Love is the longing of the Soul for Beauty ; the inextinguishable desire which like feels for like, which the divinity within us feels for the divinity revealed to us in Beauty. This is the celebrated Platonic Love, which, from having originally meant a communion of two souls, and that in a rigidly dialectical sense, has been degraded to the expression of maudlin sentiment between the sexes. Platonic love meant ideal sympathy; it now means the love of a sentimental young gentleman for a woman he cannot or will not marry. [George Henry Lewes, "The History of Philosophy," 1867]

I don't want my relationship to women to be confined to my sexuality. I want it to be spiritual and deep. Sure, I want my spirituality and sexuality to interface, but I want control over both so that I can feel them separately and think clearly.

April 1 Freedom and commitment compose one of the main dualities of life. Everyone needs to know which is better suited to their nature, and everyone needs both in their life, necessarily. Are you an Icarus- or an Oedipus-type? Do you long for freedom from obligations, or do you embrace obligation as a source of meaning?

When you have "freedom from" something, you are uncommitted, but as soon as you decide to do anything, that is a thing you are committing to. Also, commitment requires freedom. No involuntary obligation is a commitment. If you were not somehow, or at some, free, you could not commit to anything.

March

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct

March 31 Are you telling me it's a coincidence that the resurrection of Jesus happened at the very beginning of Spring? How ultimately fitting — seems kind of pagan to me.

March 30 The lyrics to Hozier's "Sedated" are a perfect summary of how substances aid the cycle of self-delusion and serve as refuge for the self-important, fragile ego.

Just a little rush, babe / To feel dizzy, to derail the mind of me / Just a little hush, babe / Our veins are busy, but my heart's in atrophy.

Any way to distract and sedate / Adding shadows to the walls of the cave.

You and I, nursing on / A poison that never stung / Our teeth and lungs are lined / With the scum of it.

Somewhere for this, death and guns / We are deaf. We are numb. / Free and young, and we can feel none of it.

Trying to control your future is like playing sudoku with a pen. You're making life unnecessarily harder on yourself. Give yourself an eraser; allow yourself to pivot.

I agree (etymologically) that we are sinful, insofar as we "miss the mark," but I disagree that it's a problem. Sin is a gift. If we always hit the mark, we would stop striving, and without striving, life would be sapped of all meaning. We would not long or love or wish or dream. We would be stagnant creatures devoid of life, even if we were immortal. Adam and Eve were not human until they became sinful. And I say, thank God for that.

Somehow the smell of celery is more intense than its taste.

Life is rich. Work is work.

March 28 Tree skiing is a metaphor for life.

March 27 On a personality test, I'm a 95th-percentile extrovert, but I spend hours of my weekends alone to write or read or play video games. No extreme is the right way. Find harmony among both extremes.

[[Live in the Third]]

March 26 For most people, the night provides cover and makes it easier to hide from yourself. It's the ego's respite, its native arena. But if you have a spiritual dream practice, the night becomes a time to face yourself, and you deny the ego of any refuge from the clear mind of your formless self. Persistent lucidity — throughout all modes of consciousness — leads to the most possible self-knowledge and the least possible attachment to the self.

March 23 This lyric from the White Stripes frames Kansas as a refuge from the materialistic, urban mindset: "I'm go'n to Wichita // Far from this opera of forever more." I never noticed that, and it's pretty profound. Over the past year or two, I have become swept up in "the opera of forever more." It's simply not healthy. I miss seeing sunsets over flat plains, rather than trying to catch a glimpse of them between skyscrapers.

Masculine energy is in the world. Feminine energy is of the world.

We remain in samsara because we are afraid of the dark. We run away from it, toward artificial lights, and away from ourselves. We cling to ignorance of what's within for an unconscious fear of what we might learn if we looked.

Lucidity is the ability to see in the dark, because you kindle the spark of awareness within you. And why would you ever be afraid of what you can see? Without ignorance, there is no fear. Without fear, there is no mindless avoidance of the dark. To practice lucidity, practice sitting in darkness and paying attention to what you see.

The reason you can feel so lonely in New York with surrounded by so many people is because none of the people acknowledge each other. To their credit, if they did, it would be all they do all day, every day — nodding at passer-bys. You can feel lonely in the midst of the crowd if you feel like the crowd would be the exact same size and spirit without you.

March 22 Witnessing the Aurora Borealis is like shining a blue-light to reveal the Sun's airborne thermonuclear ejaculate.

March 21 In the West, we err on the side of rationality and fail by forgetting to feel. In the East, feeling leads at the expense of clear answers and systems.

The greatest danger of Western thought is in thinking that you know the answer, that you have discovered the truth, whether through science or careful, analytic philosophy.

The greatest danger of Eastern thought is in thinking that you must deny yourself worldly achievement to live spiritually.

The best way is the middle, where you search for answers, knowing you will never fully know, and where you achieve in the world without forgetting what truly matters.

One thing we definitely need to overcome in the West is our tendency to see things as just one or two. Our thinking lacks nuance, which leads us further from the nature of reality. We search for the "one true" God/answer, and situate ourselves on one side of a dichotomy in opposition to the other extreme. In reality, everything is a duality: Yin and Yang, One and Two — Three.

[[Live in the Third]]

The One is female, the Two male, for order can only come after chaos. Three arrises from the movement between One and Two, from their harmony. And from Three comes the ten thousand things.

(The One is the inhale, Two the exhale. And Three is the breath. The breath powers life.)

This is a different view than the Chinese Yin/Yang separation, though. Sometimes the Yang is chaotic. The Yang is anything that is strong, bright, that comes from the Sun. The Yin is dark and mysterious, like the Moon. According to Taoism, a forest fire would be yang and a blizzard yin, but Yin is the female. I would call the forest fire female (Yin) and the blizzard male (Yang), because the first is chaotic and the second ordered, structured.

The blizzard is predictable and doesn't come from the unknown. It limits possibility, slows change. The fire engenders possibility through destruction, which is often required for new life. Any sort of rebirth is the female, the Yin.

[[Live in the Third]]

On the origin of Yin/Yang and its relationship to the Tao (Britanica):

"The Daoist treatise Huainanzi (book of “Master Huainan”) describes how the one “Primordial Breath” (yuanqi) split into the light ethereal yang breath, which formed heaven; and the heavier, cruder yin breath, which formed earth. The diversifications and interactions of yin and yang produced the Ten Thousand Things."

The warm breath of yang accumulated to produce fire, the essence of which formed the sun. The cold breath of yin accumulated to produce water, the essence of which became the moon.

The Tao is Yin and Yang moving in harmony.

Also, this TED-Ed video is great.

March 20 We dread the feeling of being caught in the middle, suspended in air, so we try to escape it. We fall to one side or the other so that we can stand on solid ground. But that's a fallacy. The middle comprises all that is real. Everything rests on uncertainty; everything is suspended in air. The best path through life is one in keeping with reality. The best mindset is one without the self-delusions of being on one side or the other. You are always somewhere among the abundance of what could be.

[[Live in the Third]]

Most of life — and everything that matters in life — is immaterial. It's not in the world but within yourself. If you chase numbers and possessions and surface pleasures, you will get lost. You will fall away from yourself.

I thought a key to maintaining work-life balance would be to separate my professional and personal to-do lists, but the unexpected result is that I only ever look at my tasks for work and, therefore, only ever check those off.

Volcanoes are feminine. Glaciers are masculine. Volcanos create in chaos, bringing up a river of formless material from the unknown depths of the Earth. Glaciers shape what comes into being and give it form, applying order and structure as best they can. Both volcanoes and glaciers are unstoppable forces and immovable objects. Together, they exhibit the primordial duality of Nature.

Or, maybe volcanoes and glaciers are both masculine and feminine. Maybe the part of the volcano that you can't see is feminine (the womb) and the flowing lava is masculine. Maybe the rigid, static ice on top of the glacier is masculine and the dark, flowing underbelly of the glacier is feminine.

[[Feeling Fire and Ice]]

Tell the story of why/how we lost to Houton my freshman year (a team much worse than us). Use it as a microcosm of not taking something seriously when you think you're guaranteed success. The best way to guarantee failure is to expect easy success.

Good opening group discussion prompt for a popcorn-style icebreaker: What's something you love about life?

Introspection repels self-delusion.

March 19 Three out of every 10 hatchlings never make it into the sea (study). And only one in 1000 sea turtles grows to adulthood. Predation is ruthless, and so many ancient species have lossy reproduction. They spray and pray that some survive.

The danger of loving your job is that you might make it your top priority in life.

You are always choosing among, never between. Any decision that seems to have only two options is an illusion. You may think, "No, I either choose to do a thing or I don't — two options." To that, I say, what about the myriad ways you could do or not do the thing? More than anything, you are deciding how to do the thing you know you want to do, or that you feel you ought to do. It's rare that you know exactly what to do and are only deciding whether to do it.

March 18 Oversimplification and generalization of a broad cultural dissonance in America: Our women want to achieve what men have always sought, and our men don't know what to seek other than what they have always sought: material success. We've overcorrected. In the next phase of this, there will be more harmony and opportunity — a place for the minority of women who want masculine success and a place for the minority of men who want feminine success.

March 17 Being in a relationship is the best way to improve yourself, as long as you're not using the relationship to avoid yourself.

March 16 Everyone's journey through life is turbulent and chaotic. Only in hindsight does a person's trajectory appear smooth and calculated.

You can either use your mental energy during a conversation to remember what people say or to think of the best possible response. I would rather do the latter, because it is more impactful. But it leads to poor conversation recall, where all I can remember are the emotions and outcomes of a conversation, rather than its contents.

March 15 "Coffee-shop writing session" includes both a closed phrasal adjective ("coffee-shop") and an open phrasal noun ("writing session"). That's cool.

March 14 The future is not just unwieldy; it's unwieldable.

Another phrase for living within dualities in life: Have a bifocal mindset.

Here's what "detach from outcomes" doesn't mean: having unprotected sex. It is not an attitude of giving yourself up to chance or ignoring consequences. Detaching from outcomes means taking complete ownership of everything within your control and resting in comfort that you have done all you can... and only then do you allow things to unfold without your intervention. Only then do you assume an attitude of openness, to receive reality. You start by manipulating the future, and then move into accepting what arrives. It means wearing a condom and pulling out, and then in the event of a miraculous conception, you can receive that outcome with grace, because you know you did all that was in your power to achieve the desired outcome.

Detachment (from outcomes) is not about absolving yourself of desire. Pursue what you desire — fervently — for only after giving it your best effort will you be able to rest in comfort with whatever comes. Do, do, do, then detach.

Only by detaching from outcomes and sitting in darkness can you become open to possibility.

March 13 You know what's a great title? The Devil Wears Prada. There's so much there. You know it's about fashion and that there's a "Devil" character at the center of the narrative (Meryl Streep). It's surprising and punchy, and the specificity of "Prada" makes it super memorable.

Glaciers rule the Earth. Glaciers were here billions of years before we existed and will live long after we are gone. Their reign goes in waves, but they are sure to dominate the Earth again. They move in silence yet shape the world. And there is wisdom in them, if you can be still enough to listen.

Work is not *the* work. I should subordinate my entire career and the demands of every job I ever have to the next step of my journey inwards. I must live without needing anything from the world, and that means knowing myself before anything else.

March 12 There's a difference between danger and insecurity. It's the difference between getting mugged and getting robbed. Iceland never felt dangerous, but after getting robbed, I felt insecure.

Amor Towels on HIW:

"History is not good at capturing all that is great in art. But history is very good at discarding all that is mediocre."

My take on Atomic Habits: Everything is completely clear, but it has none of James. Every chapter follows the same template, which (1) distances me from the writer as a person and (2) makes me feel like he thinks I need to be led along like a toddler on a crosswalk. The preface is the only part you get to learn about James, with the whole baseball story. All the other stories in the book are about Olympic cyclists or — actually that's the only one I can remember because they're forgettable anecdotes. The examples are trite and repeated. Are there no habits a person would want to develop besides eating healthy and working out? James Clear has great ideas, and he's a great thinker, but by the way he writes, I don't get the sense that he knows it.

March 11 I remember being in fourth grade in the boys' locker room before gym class, and I think that was the moment I fell in love with words. I didn't act on it until later, but that might have been the moment. We'd all changed into our gym clothes, and we were sitting on the floor, lined up along the wall, waiting to walk out to class together. I wasn't talking to anyone. I was in my head repeating the opening lyric to my favorite song: "Hey there, Delilah, / What's it like in New York City? / I'm a thousand miles away / But tonight you look so pretty." Today, I would call that economic storytelling. Then, I just knew how the lyric made me feel and how it felt to sing. Words can move.

Carbon-Based Writing: Don't over-engineer prose. You must preserve the spirit of the first draft as you apply structure, clarity, and polish during revision. But your your edits risk killing the spirit; your prose can become mechanical. And metal lacks life.

As a highly analytical person, this is a struggle for me. My goal has been to have no darlings. While that's a good rule for paragraphs, sentences, and phrases, it's disastrous to kill the darling of the spirit behind your words. Edit the words while preserving the spirit.

Susbtack Comment:

I find we are more likely to meet expectations than we are to do wrong. So, let’s expect each other to do the right thing, and support each other so that we can all strive for that ideal: moral perfection. As soon as you start deferring to the culture or the Church or your friends to decide what you ought to do, it’s easier to make excuses and rationalize immoral behavior, as if the fault for your actions lies anywhere other than with you.

March 10 You must start with the feminine: intuition, chaos, formlessness, discomfort, uncertainty. You cannot start with structure, purpose, or a plan. This is a fact of nature: we come from the Mother. The unknown, the womb, is the source of all things real. That is the feminine; the masculine is giving form to what comes into being, to make it something intelligible and valuable and lasting.

Keep this in mind as you define what success means to you. Understand that you can't start with worldly success, and understand that success in the world is not the only kind of success. Before and after you achieve anything, success is a feeling. You can feel success within yourself (feminine success) on your way to achieving success in the world (masculine success).

You cannot measure the quality of your life by what you have accomplished — only by how you have lived.

The bardo of public transit: There is an operator who decides when the train is ready to leave. Yes, you don't know when exactly the doors will close, but you can safely assume that it won't leave until everyone has exited and until everyone who is waiting has boarded. If we were all more in tune with the transitory nature of life, we wouldn't crowd passed each other through the narrow threshold of the train doors. Those waiting to board would wait until everyone in that car who wanted to exit had done so. Only then would you transition from the platform to the train.

We crowd on to the train because we have this unconscious anxiety and insecurity that we'll be left behind or caught in transition. You can dissolve this debilitating fear and align yourself with nature by letting go of this attachment: getting what you want, when you want. Long for nothing but to experience reality as it is. Do not long for reality to bend to your wishes, because you will remain perpetually anxious and disappointed.

If we were intelligently designed, created for a purpose, it was not to do something in the world — like helping people start businesses with your podcast. It would be simpler than that and more universal. If we were made for a purpose, it would be to enjoy life and be grateful for it and love people and accept the fact of our mortality before we die.

Substack Note: I often make a "stank face" reading Yehudis, like a blues singer admiring his band-mate's guitar solo. It's an expression of disgust and admiration, an anomaly of body language. It's like walking into a room and catching whiff of a strong smell you didn't expect, and in the same moment realizing that you dig it.

March 9 I'm not sure I've ever identified with a comic-book character more than I do with Councilman Tenzin in The Legend of Korra (Aang's son). The Martian Manhunter is a close second. They're stoic leaders with strong powers who practice stillness and mediation, and they're principled and opinionated.

I want to be fond of everything I publish and forget most of what I write.

March 8 Emulate your current best conception of your ideal self.

March 7 Recreation is the same word as re-creation. It comes from the Latin recreare: "to refresh, restore, make anew, revive, invigorate." To recreate is to re-create yourself, to make yourself anew through some refreshing, regenerative action (Etymonline entry).

You are your own judge. When you fail, the only means of expiation is to do better in the future, to bring yourself closer overtime to the ideal. You can't use confession to wipe away the week's sins on Saturday. You are the source of your own salvation. (Why? Because you are also the source of your own depravity, which comes both from your actions and your self-perception.) Only you can make yourself worthy of grace, by pursuing moral perfection as if it were your religion.

My struggle in life will be to find comfort in the fact that I will die at sea, and that I will never be able to reach as far as I can dream. No matter how far I go, I will always be the same distance from the horizon.

[[Die at Sea]]

Human = Dying Dreamer + Meaning-Maker

We dream up the furthest but can only reach so far. Despite the reaching being futile, we make it meaningful.

The Dying Dreamer is mortal yet has divine knowledge — the ability to conceive of what he will never attain. He has clarity about himself, his dreams, and his inevitable death. And he is detached from what he knows, knowing it will change; detached from what he dreams, knowing it may never be.

The Meaning-Maker is detached from ordained meaning/purpose or prescribed values. By acting in congruence with his chosen values, he imbues life with meaning.

Without detachment, the equation changes: Human = dreamer + maker. We convince ourselves that our dreams will come true, or that they must come true to be worth pursuing, and we make things that may not be meaningful to us. We need an attitude of detachment to correctly orient our reason and consciousness — to unlock the contradictory composite that is our true nature — that of the Dying Dreamer and Meaning-Maker.

(Did the (inhuman) Adam and Eve dream?)

March 6 If there are things you want to do in this world before you die, start doing them today, because you could die tomorrow. At the end of life, you won't feel any guilt or regret for not achieving your dreams, as long as you were on your way.

Skills I Want to Master in Life

• Writing
• Editing
• Skiing
• Lucid Dreaming
• Calisthenics
• Rock Balancing
• Handpan
• Public Speaking
• Backpacking/Mountaineering

It's wrong to harm people, disrespect people, degrade people, endanger people, or lie to people. But it is not morally wrong to disobey people. If by disobeying you do not harm, disrespect, degrade, endanger, or lie, then at worst what you're doing is illegal. Your duty is to uphold the moral law. If a legal law neither serves neither you nor the moral law, disobeying it is not immoral.

March 5 Here are the three steps to upholding "your half of the covenant" as a writer:

1. Choose a topic that you know will be valuable and interesting to others.
2. Write the first full draft and first revision for yourself.
3. Finally, project yourself into the mind of your reader, and revise again and again as a service to him.

Dependent clauses are like little, opaque containers. You have to untie a bow to see their full contents. So, only put extra surprises in there — bonus items. Don't conceal what matters. Put all essential info in independent clauses, and resign supplementary info to dependent clauses, to create an intuitive hierarchy for your reader.

If you have the choice between nominalizing and using a weird adverbial phrase, choose the noun (in most cases). Neither are great options, but the noun will likely be shorter and less confusing.

Weird Adverb: “Today, that insight resonates more profoundly than ever.”

Noun: “Today, her insight has a profound resonance.”

Even better, though, would be to keep the verb and cut the weird adverb. (A “weird adverbial phrase” is one that comes after the verb or one that includes an adverb you’ve never heard before — coerced into one from another part of speech.)

Verb: “Her profound insight still resonates today.”

March 4 Ask for what you want until you get what you want, get fired, or quit. With that approach, you'll avoid the worst outcome, which is to continue working a job you resent.

People complain about a job for years and then finally muster the "courage" to quit. I'll never understand it. Try to change your job into something you love first (by either doing different work or improving your pay). And if that doesn't work, quit.

Framework for the dichotomy between concrete examples and concepts in writing (related to RPC's Ladder of Abstraction):

Anchor: Ground a heady concept or philosophical lesson in a story or concrete example.

Elevate: Relate a particular example or story to a larger concept, to give the particular thing more significance and resonance.

These are the processes that help you move up and down the Ladder of Abstraction, between the conceptual and the concrete. Anchor ideas and elevate examples.

The sooner you start doing something you love, and at which you are talented, the less you'll have to grind to achieve success. Since you love it, you'll be willing to do it indefinitely without achieving success. And since you're talented, you'll get better quickly, and you'll get good enough to earn enough money from it. The trick is to keep practicing, keep improving no matter how much success you have, because the success can disappear but not your skills. "Get so good they can't ignore you." That is the best path to lasting (worldly, masculine) success.

March 3 On my logging practice (from this Substack exchange:

I write down many of my fleeting thoughts as digital notes. And the most important part of my practice is that I render each idea in the best prose I can manage in the moment, as if for an audience. And I revisit and revise the notes. I find it improves my craft, adds clarity to my good ideas, and cements them in memory.

March 2 I am steeped in this boiling concrete.

Kant in Religion:

The original good is *holiness* of *maxims* in the compliance to one’s duty, hence merely out of duty, whereby a human being, who incorporates this purity into his maxims, though on this account still not holy as such (for between maxim and deed there still is a wide gap), is nonetheless upon the road of endless progress toward holiness. When the firm resolve to comply with one’s duty has become a habit, it is called virtue.

One long quote from Kant's Religion that summarizes the fallacy of an ecclesiastical faith:

"The courage to stand on one’s own feet is itself strengthened through the doctrine of atonement which follows from it. For this doctrine represents what cannot be altered as wiped out, and opens up for us the path to a new conduct of life; whereas, when the doctrine is made to come first, the futile endeavor to render undone what has been done (expiation), the fear concerning the imputation of expiation, the representation of our total incapacity for the good, and the anxiety lest we slip back into evil, must take the courage away from the human being,* and must reduce him to a state of groaning moral passivity where nothing great and good is undertaken but instead everything is expected from wishing for it. – As regards moral disposition, everything depends upon the highest concept to which the human being subordinates his duties. If reverence for God comes first, and the human being therefore subordinates virtue to it, then this object [of reverence] is an idol, i.e. it is thought as a being whom we may hope to please not through morally upright conduct in this world but through adoration and ingratiation; religion is then idolatry. Thus godliness is not a surrogate for virtue, a way of avoiding it, but its completion, for the sake of crowning it with the hope of the final success of all our good ends."

Kant, Immanuel. Kant: Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) (p. 209). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

The narrower your scope — the more micro it is — the more likely it is to map to the macro. To reveal something about the forest, write about a leaf.

"Rationalize" is a more accurate word than "confabulate" when referring to someone who has deluded themself into thinking their actions more ethically sound than they are.

To rationalize is to offer probable justifications for your actions that actually aren't true. To confabulate is to do a similar process unconsciously but believe it as truth, without the intent to deceive or appear more ethical to others.

Below is more context, from a chat with ChatGPT.

Prompt: "Talk to me about the subtle difference in meaning between these three verbs, as they relate to moral action: 'confabulate,' 'justify,' and 'rationalize.'"

Answer: Confabulate: This term often implies the creation of fabricated or imagined explanations without conscious intent to deceive. It can suggest that the person is filling in gaps in their memory or understanding with false information, often due to a cognitive disorder or to protect their self-esteem. In the context of moral action, confabulation might involve inventing reasons for one's behavior that are not based on actual motivations or ethical considerations.

Justify: To justify something is to provide a valid or acceptable reason or explanation for it. This can involve explaining why an action was necessary, reasonable, or morally right based on one's beliefs or values. Justification typically implies a more conscious and deliberate effort to defend or explain one's actions, often in a way that aligns with ethical principles.

Rationalize: Rationalization involves providing logical or seemingly reasonable explanations for behavior that may not actually be the true motivations. It often involves self-deception or an unconscious attempt to make one's actions seem more logical or acceptable, even if they are not morally justified. Rationalization can involve distorting facts or beliefs to make them fit with one's actions or desires.

In summary, "confabulate" suggests an unintentional or non-deceptive fabrication of explanations, "justify" implies a conscious effort to provide valid reasons for actions, and "rationalize" suggests a more self-serving or deceptive effort to make one's actions seem reasonable or moral.

The concept of Original Sin is the result of species-level confabulation (to fill in gaps of memory by fabrication). We do not know from whence we came or how we were made, only how it feels to live. Since we perceive evil and pain and suffering in the world and within ourselves, we have confabulated an origin story to justify our depravity (a false depravity that comes from an avoidably low level self-esteem): Original Sin.

Glacial Parenting

The glacier engenders the river that erodes the valley.

The river thanks the glacier and gives it credit: "You shaped this valley and gave me life. All I have accomplished I owe to you."

The glacier objects: "The marks you have made on this earth are all your own. All I did was give you enough to get going. You have done the rest, and you could have done it without me."

This is the best and simplest model I've conceived of for good parenting. And really, both are true; the river could not have done it without the glacier, and the river is due credit for what it has done.

There is an island too small to stand on at the center of the infinite sea. That's what you're searching for: Truth within the fabric of reality. That's what you're searching for, but you will never find it; you must rest in comfort with the pursuit itself. And if it suits you, hope that the afterlife may reveal what you sought in life.

We humans are constantly translating the ineffable to the physical, and back again. Every spoken word is made flesh. It begins as a formless thought, then crystalizes into an idea, then it becomes matter in the world through speech. The friend who receives your words-on-air, does the reverse process — from the physical to the ineffable.

As a writer, you want to make the reverse process as smooth and satisfying as possible for your reader. They perceive your words as ink or pixels and transmute them into some immaterial thing that we can't understand. Good writing is easy to transmute from the physical into the ineffable, from words to memory.

February

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct

February 29 An editor helps you improve a pice of writing. A writing coach uses each piece to help you improve as a writer.

February 26 Life was simpler when we didn't have the ability to make ourselves extinct.

The only consecutive numbers that sum to the next consecutive number are 1 and 2, with their sum as 3.

February 25 Here's a unique example of a euphemism, and like many euphemisms, this one is for sex: "Moondance," Van Morrison.

Examples of Dichotomies vs. Dualities

Dichotomy (the two things) :: Duality (the two things in harmony)

• Good and Evil :: Human
• Black and White :: Grey
• Day and Night :: Dawn/Dusk
• Light and Dark :: Dim
• Birth and Death :: Life
• Heaven and Hell :: Earth
• Mind and Body :: Soul
• Suicide and Blind Faith :: The Dizzying Crest
• One and Two :: Three

[[Live in the Third]]

Maybe there are two types of insecurity: social and personal (and maybe a third, existential). Think of hitchhiking.

• The personal insecurity is "I don't have a ride, and there's no guarantee I'll get where I want to go."
• The social insecurity is "What are these people thinking and saying about me as they drive by?"
• (And existential insecurity is always there: "Everything in life is fleeting and ephemeral, and someday, I will die.)

February 24 Superlative vs. Hyperbole

A superlative places the object at the top of a hierarchy. Hyperbole exaggerates an aspect of the object. Hyperbole is more effective as a rhetorical device because it's more specific and convincing. Superlatives are almost never true. They are only useful in satire, sarcasm, or humor.

Superlative: "World's Best Coffee" Hyperbole: "World-Famous Coffee"

The most common use of superlatives are as the frame for a question, whether in casual conversation or official interviews (or in high school yearbooks — "Most likely to get married"). Too often, people ask about your favorite book, favorite trip, favorite meal, or maybe your greatest accomplishment or your #1 hidden talent. All these are superlatives, and they'd be better questions if they weren't. Get specific. It makes the question easier to answer, and it leads to a more interesting, substantive answer for the audience.

Know the difference between superlatives (the best, the most, the favorite, the only, the greatest) and hyperbole (stronger than an ox, light as a feather, better than sex). Then, whenever you have a choice, opt for hyperbole over a superlative.

Note: Both superlatives and hyperbole can be negative descriptors too (worst, least or dumber than a doornail).

Birth is a leap; death is a landing. And living can either feel like falling or flying.

We long for safety because we know we're fragile and that life is fleeting. We know it every moment, even if we aren't always conscious of it. All of our decisions are colored by it.

It makes sense to value and seek safety, but where we go wrong is clinging to the idea of security. We are perpetually insecure. And the more comfortable you are with insecurity, the more you acknowledge and address it, the more capable you are of thriving in the world.

There's a difference between danger and insecurity. Avoid danger; approach insecurity, and overcome it.

February 22 Writing advice that applies in almost every case: Finish your first draft before you start revising. That's not a hard-and-fast rule, but you'll have the best results if you keep those two processes distinct. (And before computers, that was really the only option. The invention of the Delete key was the invention of mid-first-draft revisions.)

You must start with feminine chaos and end with masculine structure. You can't start with order or finish with chaos and still produce excellent writing. You need that harmony: the muse and the sculptor.

Quack This Way was written because of a book review that brought two snoots together: David Foster Wallace (DFW) and Bryan A. Garner (BAG). I read the brilliant, 60-page review in Consider the Lobster and, following DFW's glowing recommendation, hunted for my own copy of Garner's Modern American Usage (second edition) in the basement of the Strand. After learning from and referencing GMAU for a few weeks, I discovered that DFW and BAG had a friendship and that BAG had published an interview with DFW as as a booklet. I ordered it immediately. Now, holding this thin, little thing, I may be the most excited I've ever been about a book. Time to quack on with it.

One of my open questions as a writer/editor is "How can I write with the linguistic control of DFW without getting an MFA?" My working solution: Study DFW and BAG.

February 21 Don't use journal prompts. Journal about what's on your mind. If there's truly nothing interesting or pressing or heavy or challenging on your mind (almost never), don't journal.

It's important to have a sense for big moments. Not every day, not every decision has the same impact on your life. Duh — yeah, that's easy to know; it's harder to know when one of those big moments is upon you. If you can develop a sense for these, you can do the work to prepare and guarantee that the moment's effect is as positive as it could possibly be.

The truths of lucidity (as a concept):

• The world you experience is one you create.
• Self-awareness gives you the power to recreate your world.

February 20 All writing is magic realism because structure is magic. It's the invisible force that transmutes what you see and hear and experience in the world into polished, stone-etched prose. Everything written is beyond what is spoken and heard, because what is written has been revised and restructured.

This quote summarizes why I say I want to write with the perceptual layers of Joan Didion. Her words are new lenses, her paragraphs microscopes and megaphones.

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." – Joan Didion

"Round-about language" = a useful euphemism for editors, instead of calling a section of a writer's prose "weak."

Ironically, "round-about language" is round-about language in place of a phrase like "weak language," but it's intentionally weak to soften the blow of the word "weak." Round-about language without purpose is a burden on the reader and often leads to confusion.

February 19 This 2-minute MasterClass trailer is a master class on its own. Margret Atwood drops knowledge-bombs about creative writing:

"Let's start ['Little Red Riding Hood'] a different way: 'It was dark inside the wolf.'" "Your goal is to keep your reader believing in your story, even though both of you know it's fiction." "If you really do want to write and you're trying to get started, you're afraid of something. Remember, it's only you and the page. The waste-paper basket is your friend. It was invented for you by God." "People are always coming up with new theories of the novel, but the main rule is: hold my attention." "Any form of human creativity is a process of doing it and getting better at it. You become a writer by writing. There is no other way. So, do it. Do it more. Fail. Fail better. Somewhere out there are the readers for your book."

Deliberate, then decide; don't just do one or the other. Think, think, think, until you feel whether it's the right thing to do. Then do it, or don't.

(Note: This applies to haircut- and tattoo- decisions, not to ball-cap decisions — ref: James Clear's framework. For ball-cap decisions, feel free to decide without much deliberation.)

Theory: Monotheistic religions have no more a basis than the pagan believes of the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, or Aztecs, but the monotheistic metaphysics is widely adopted and enduring because it appeals more to reason. Jesus was a real person in history. God is an anthropomorphic being, but he does not control the harvest or the weather. The ethics is to love your neighbor, based on reciprocity and compassion. All of that appeals to our "higher parts," because it doesn't connect the divine to the earth (the body) but resigns Him to heaven (the mind). There is one Creator, one source of things, one arbiter of things. All that "makes sense" more than the Sun god and the Moon god and the god of the harvest or the sea.

We want to believe in a unifying narrative and give ourselves up to a higher power. We humans have a religious instinct. Monotheistic religions, Christianity especially (because of the "true" life of Jesus), are constructed so that we can "rationally" justify the same types of beliefs that pagan and polytheistic religions have had forever. The monotheistic metaphysics is adopted and endures because those who believe it feel elevated, enlightened, not outcast or blindly hopeful.

Sex is amoral, just like eating, sleeping, and shitting. Sex is sustenance on the scale of a species. The sex-related ethical issues are consent and social contracts and dignity and infidelity. If this natural, amoral thing weren't so taboo in Western culture, maybe we'd have better cultural norms for the ethical issues, because we'd spend less time sneaking about and talking around sex.

February 17 What's the difference between wanting to be elsewhere and feeling like you're not at home? Can elsewhere be an adventure, or is it always an escape?

The best growth mindset is a glacial mindset.

By nature, we are distractible. Focus doesn't come easily. And reading requires a singular focus — your eyes and mind targeted at one thing. Reading has fallen to other media not because it's less entertaining or engaging but because it requires more focus. Movies and podcasts and TV shows and audiobooks enable multitasking and don't punish a lack of focus as much as a book.

Films, no matter the genre, are dreams for the waking mind. Video games, especially those in VR, are lucid dreams for the waking mind. We revel in these forms of media because they let us slip into that ever-so-pleasurable dream state that otherwise discard and diminish. Every night, you create movies and live inside video games. Yet, because you've forgotten the power of your own mind, you reach for your phone in the morning and cleave yourself from your subconscious. Make your dreams real by recalling them, writing them down, storing them like memories.

The horizon's taller here. The morning sky is bright before you see the Sun peak through Midtown's skyscrapers. And the sunset you can only see as a reflection in the windows of the same. The only way you can even glimpse the evening sun is if you're looking down a straight, downhill street facing due west. In the city, we shield ourselves from the light.

February 16 Reverse Outlining

A reverse outline is an outline for your second draft. Or, you could think of it as a revision plan. Free-write for your first draft, and dump everything on the page. Then, take a sober look at what you have and decide what you can cut.

A reverse outline helps you identify your main ideas and put them in an order that makes sense. Here are the steps:

1. Read through your first draft, maybe leaving notes to yourself as you go, like “Important” or “Cut this.” But don’t edit your writing for clarity or style. Just focus on the structure. What do you need to keep, and what should you cut?
2. Open another document or grab a piece of paper, and write a draft of your Shiny Dime. What is the most specific and surprising idea from your first draft? Then, list out your main ideas, omitting any that don’t support your Shiny Dime.
3. Add evidence to each of those ideas as bullet points, and arrange your ideas in an order that makes sense. Remember: Only add enough detail to give you a clear direction for your second draft.

Once you’ve finished your reverse outline, it’s time to write your second draft. Keep the best parts of your first draft, and cut the rest. Follow your reverse outline, and make sure that you’re making a clear, compelling argument for your main idea.

One of the most dangerous forms of self-delusion is a feeling of false safety. Don't strut or sprint across a tightrope. You'll fall.

A close second is a feeling of false danger (debilitating neuroticism). Don't cower and tremble on this side of the chasm if there's a sturdy bridge that you could cross to get where you want to go.

Even some very experienced writers, if they aren't also editors and English mechanics nerds, think that punctuation only serves to pace their prose. No — rather, punctuation serves to organize phrases and clauses into a hierarchy and within relationships so that the reader can effortlessly glean what your mean.

February 15 The rules of grammar mechanics serve meaning-making. When you can make meaning more easily and more clearly by breaking a rule, do it.

When you're writing anything — whether nonfiction or fiction — err on the side of specificity, while filtering out what's irrelevant to your reader (don't go too niche to make the whole subject a bore). Reveal universal truths through particulars, and ground heady concepts in concrete examples.

Every writer's style is somewhere on the spectrum from sober to psychedelic.

The writer can stay in his head. Then, the self-editor must project himself into the mind of his reader.

Chapter headings, section breaks, and H2s are all like cairns along a trail. You see it ahead and are reassured that you're headed in the right direction, and you commit to hiking at least until you reach that next checkpoint.

Mark Manson is one of the only modern, male Internet outlier-successes who seems to be completely healthy and well-adjusted and intrinsically motivated. He's not a fitness influencer who was fat and bullied and who is motivated by not devolving into the former version of himself that he hates. He's not a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who derives all his self-worth from the sum of his investment portfolio. He's not a lonely genius who's convinced that God has ordained he write for the sake of the world. Rather, he's a thoughtful guy who's contemplated life's toughest questions and sought answers in psychology and philosophy, and then he's shared what he's learned in the most entertaining way he knows how, without sacrificing accuracy. It's accessibility for the sake of impact. He's always still trying to learn, always trying to make an impact on others through his work, and he'll humbly be proven wrong and delight in addressing his flaws. Oh, and he's a savvy businessman and marketer who works hard to build a business he believes in, while doing work that he enjoys. I will never understand the hate.

Every morning you have free admission to the museum of your mind, if you recall your dreams. We blink too early into the theater of the world and forfeit what we could see from our subconscious.

Think of yourself as a god. Not as an omnipotent or omniscient being or someone worthy of worship or the creator of the world — think of yourself as an all-seeing moral judge because that's what you are, to yourself.

February 14 "Rhythm" is one of the weirdest-spelled words in the English language. There are five consonants, one vowel; and that vowel is a 'y', which barely qualifies. The second syllable is all consonants: "thm." It may be the only word in English language where "thm" comprises an entire syllable; it's at least the most common word with that characteristic. The final syllable of both "algorithm" and "logarithm" is "rithm," which includes a vowel, as you would expect from a syllable. But in "rhythm," the 'y' serves as the vowel for both syllables somehow, yet it can only belong to one.

(After writing the above, I checked with ChatGPT, which corroborates my suspicions that "rhythm" is unique: "Yes, that's a safe assumption. 'Rhythm' is likely the most common word in English that includes a syllable made up of only consonants.")

Getting lost is how you develop a sense of direction. Sitting in boredom is how you become in-distractible. Lean in to discomfort to promote growth.

Let the first draft be for you, and revise as a service to your reader.

Keep editing until everything hangs on a single thread. Shift your thesis if you have to, and if you do, cut what's not longer relevant. That's the responsibility writers have to their readers — to ruthlessly revise.

February 13 We understand that life moves in phases, fits and starts. But we treat that as a design flaw instead of a feature. We strive for perfect balance between our professional and personal lives, friends and family time, mental and physical fitness. But never at any point will both sides be at equilibrium. Balance is the wrong goal, and it's not even optimal if you could achieve it. Life is a series of seasons. Let one side of the scale dip down, let one part of you take the lead for a while. Instead of trying to achieve perfect balance, just make sure that what you're doing with your time is healthy and promotes personal growth. Go for harmony, not balance.

February 12 Computers are counter-evolutionary. Our minds and bodies are evolved to move around in 3-D space and do things in the world. At a desk, behind a computer, we sit still and move a phantom appendage in digital space. The self-reliant human-animal is now less of an animal and more of a machine, and more reliant on machines.

We have this unquestioned value of ease, comfort, and convenience. And it leads to default thoughts and decisions — like "Why would I write emails when an AI assistant can do it for me?" or "Thanks to social media, I'll never have to be bored again!". We have these values that contradict a fundamental truth: it is the things that are difficult and boring and aimless and tedious and slow that uniquely add depth and breadth to life. There's value in doing hard things, moving slowly, and being bored. These states are nothing to escape but are parts of life to embrace.

The world is not flawed but rather how we think of the world. Nature is always right.

February 11 Find harmony, not balance. Balance suggests everything in equal portions. Harmony requires, at any one time, for one aspect of you to be in the lead. And that's what's realistic. That's how you best function, by letting different aspects of you take the lead at different parts in the song.

February 10 So much just comes down to how you package and frame what you offer. You can be a polymath and do 10,000 things, but if you want to be known by anyone or be understood or stand out to anyone, you need to be okay with them only knowing you for one thing. Make that thing very clear, and deliver on it, and that will give you the freedom to pursue the 10,000 things.

You don't have to be the Drunk or the Dork. You can be the Social Soberman. This is true for everything. Don't identify with one side of the dichotomy. Live the duality.

Mechanics magic — an en dash plus a hyphen to create a phrasal noun made up of a range of numbers:

"Are you free tomorrow for a 30–45-minute meeting?"

Life is your line in the snow, and how you live is how you turn.

February 9 I don't want a slow life. I want a dynamic, spontaneous, ambitious life that rests on a practice of stillness.

David Perell got his first job with this Twitter thread in 2016. It's a microcosm of the Internet's potential for serendipity.

As you self-edit, remain aware of what you're going for. Try to project yourself into the mind of your reader, someone who doesn't know what's coming and hasn't labored over the previous and the proximate paragraphs. If you forget what you're going for and only evaluate it from your perspective, you'll end up making the thing drier and less alive than the first draft.

You want the final draft to be just as alive but less disheveled. You're performing the service of a tailor or a barber, not a surgeon.

Raise your floor with your ceiling. That'll temper how far you fall (when you inevitably do).

Between an essay and a film, these are the analogies for pacing:

• Each sentence is a shot, each period a cut
• Paragraphs are scenes
• And sections are acts.

Faith and insecurity are always playing against each other, the one always within the other. You can't have faith without insecurity because within every belief is the real chance that you're wrong. And you can't feel insecure without a nugget of faith, because any insecurity requires you to know what you're lacking and feel that your worries has some chance of being assuaged.

You need faith to overcome insecurity, and you can't be faithful without feeling insecure.

February 8 Listen to the rhythm of this sentence (from DFW in an interview with Elle magazine): "Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase loneliness away by making me forget that my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know."

In just the second half of that sentence, there's so much phonetic goodness. First, there's the rhyming: By, my, I, by. Then, there's the alliteration: making me, one-by-one box of bone, party can penetrate. And then there's the subtle wordplay: no other party can... know. Just read it aloud and dance to the meter of it. He's a word-magician.

Suffering is a fact of life, and life is how you respond to the fact.

The Duality of Passion

Love vs. hate is one of the most common illusory dichotomies. We forget that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference.

Maybe you'd never say that you hate your partner, but you sometimes resent them and don't want to be around them and wish they were different and feel like you don't love them as much anymore. But then maybe you realize something like "I only hate my partner when she reveals a part of myself that I wish were different. I only hate her when what she says reminds me of a painful truth." So even the hate you feel is borne from love; you love your partner because he/she helps you grow.

Love includes hate and hate love. They are inseparable and compose the duality of passion.

If the depths pose you no threat of drowning, then you can effectively breathe underwater.

Don't wait for the world to serve you rock-bottom. Instead, decide that rock-bottom was yesterday.

A cardinal rule of fiction: Make it inevitable but not predictable.

"Satisfied" Is *Hamilton*'s Best Song

Why did I tear up listening to "Satisfied" on my walk to work this morning? I'll tell you why. The love-triangle B-plot of Hamilton is better than the A-plot. I've seen the show twice — once in Chicago and once in New York. In both casts, the best singer (and performer) was Angelica, and "Satisfied" is the climax of her internal conflict. Her sister, Eliza, is marrying the man she loves: Alexander.

The song is a masterclass in economic storytelling (especially with the spinny stage they have for the set). It's Alexander and Eliza's wedding. Angelica is giving a toast to the groom and bride: "May you always be satisfied." But most of the song is a series of flashbacks through Angelica's love for and loss of Alexander. The flashbacks end at an a cappella bridge, where she says, "At least my dear Eliza's his wife / At least I keep his eyes in my life." Angelica knows she will never be satisfied.

Back to the toast: "To your union and the hope that you provide / May you always be satisfied."

Arguably the most interesting part about it all is that Angelica denied her self the satisfaction of being with Hamilton. Angelica took on the role assigned to her by her father and family, and she saw her sister, Eliza, as "helpless." If she had gone after what she truly wanted in life and trusted that her sister and her family would be okay without her sacrifice, she could have been satisfied.

This song is her realizing all that at once. It's full of regret and remorse and tragedy, and it's a feat of undeniable vocal greatness.

Also, Angelica is Hamilton's intellectual equal, and they both have equal weight in the overall narrative. Lin Manuel Miranda definitely intended for her to be the focus of the story. He'd probably say that the B-plot is actually the A-plot.

February 7 The male's god is a woman, the female's a man.

Make each thing you do the best it can be, for the time in life you're doing it. Then forgive your past-self for not being as talented and capable as you are today.

I'm pretty well convinced (from personal experience) that having any healthy daily habit will completely change your experience of life. I've had streaks of writing, meditating, reading, and exercising. And those have all done the trick. The too common mistake of ambitious, growth-minded people is that they try to do it all at once and burn out within a few days. Choose one thing you value, and do it every day for a week — even better if it's the first thing you do in the day. It will change you, and you'll want to do it for another week straight. When you stop doing it, choose a different thing to do every day.

There are only two options: either exceed expectations or subvert them. This applies to writing, work, and life.

Quote from Grandpa, from Paul's opinion column in the Springfield Daily Citizen:

“Most things have been said and done already, so to stand out and be memorable, you have to find a different way of saying and doing things.” – Leon Kincaid

The COVID lockdown was authoritarianism without sufficient justification (analogous to taxation without representation) — no wonder Americans' first instinct was rebellion.

I love death-loop movies and games. It seems true to me. A day is a life. And how awesome would it be to have the chance to iterate on one day and make it perfect (or save the world), as your life? These include:

• Groundhog Day
• Edge of Tomorrow
• Source Code
• And Outer Worlds (video game).

February 6 POP Writing is the antidote to boring writing. You need personal stories to relate to your reader, surprising observations that add value, and playful language to keep your reader entertained. Distinct and memorable writing combines all three pillars of POP; it's personal, observational, and playful — not boring.

How many times has the park ranger hiked and trimmed the trail he cut? Before you share what you've made with the world, walk through it yourself, and make sure you've set a clear path that others can follow.

[[Park-Ranger Revision]]

Euphemisms and Dysphemisms

Most people have heard of a euphemism, which is a more palatable word or phrase to stand in for something unpleasant, inappropriate, or uncomfortable. E.g.:

• "Passed away"
• "Put the dog down"
• "Bumpin' uglies"
• "Powder my nose"
• "Between jobs"
• "Lady of the night"

I just learned, from Bryan Garner (via Modern American Usage) about dysphemisms, which are the opposite of euphemisms. They are more raunchy or rude ("disagreeable") words or phrases substituted for otherwise mundane, neutral ones. E.g.:

• "Jock" for "athlete"
• "Bible-thumper" for Christian
• "Tree-hugger" for "environmentalist"
• "Grease monkey" for "mechanic"
• "Knocked up" for "pregnant"
• "Turd herder" for "plumber"
• Or "plumber" for "urologist"

Euphemisms elevate writing and couch spoken words in comfort. Dysphemisms you wouldn't see in any serious writing, unless it were a morally ambiguous character's dialogue in a novel.

I pity those who measure their worth by outcomes.

The musical interval of the third is the simplest possible chord — two notes separated by two steps, ringing in harmony. Emulate the third in life, by striving for simplicity and harmony.

[[Live in the Third]]

I don't live in a neighborhood. I live in an outpost of New York City.

I don't like the idea of spending time tracking how much time I'm spending on a thing. I'd rather just do the thing or do something else. The tracking only makes sense if it significantly increases the time you'd spend doing something that you really value.

The only intellectually honest position is uncertainty. Any other position is a form of self-delusion.

The Third is an interval between extremes. It is a conditional, liminal space, where questions reign and answers change. And it's the arena for everything real.

[[Live in the Third]]

February 5 Well shit, this is the best answer I've received in my very limited use of ChatGPT. I was testing it with something I know, and I likely would have failed to summarize it more concisely myself.

Prompt: "Explain what Kant means by an 'ecclesiastical faith' in his book Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.

Answer: "In his book Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Immanuel Kant distinguishes between two types of faith: ecclesiastical faith and moral faith.

Ecclesiastical Faith: Kant defines ecclesiastical faith as a form of religious belief that is based on doctrines and teachings provided by a specific religious institution or authority, such as a church or religious organization. This type of faith involves accepting and adhering to the dogmas, rituals, and practices prescribed by the religious community to which one belongs. Ecclesiastical faith often includes adherence to specific theological doctrines, religious ceremonies, and hierarchical structures.

Kant criticizes ecclesiastical faith for its reliance on external authority and dogmatic beliefs that are not subject to rational scrutiny or moral evaluation. He argues that ecclesiastical faith can lead to religious fanaticism, intolerance, and the suppression of individual freedom of thought and conscience.

Overall, ecclesiastical faith, in Kant's view, is characterized by adherence to religious doctrines and practices dictated by external authority, without critical examination or moral autonomy.

Moral Faith: In contrast to ecclesiastical faith, Kant proposes the concept of moral faith, which he considers to be the essence of true religious belief within the boundaries of mere reason. Moral faith is grounded in the individual's rational and moral autonomy, rather than external religious authority or dogmas. It involves a commitment to moral principles and the pursuit of moral perfection based on the dictates of practical reason.

Kant argues that moral faith centers on the individual's inner moral disposition and commitment to ethical principles such as the moral law, the categorical imperative, and the principle of autonomy. Moral faith does not require adherence to specific religious doctrines or rituals but rather emphasizes the moral autonomy and responsibility of the individual.

Kant sees moral faith as compatible with rationality and moral autonomy, providing a foundation for ethical living and the pursuit of the highest good. He considers moral faith to be the true essence of religion, transcending the limitations of ecclesiastical authority and dogmatic beliefs.

In summary, Kant distinguishes between ecclesiastical faith, based on external religious authority and dogmas, and moral faith, grounded in individual moral autonomy and commitment to ethical principles. He critiques ecclesiastical faith for its reliance on external authority and advocates for moral faith as the essence of true religion within the boundaries of mere reason."

I'm not sure whether to be reassured or concerned. Regardless, I'm impressed. (Archive of the full chat)

Learn from others. Lead yourself.

What is philosophy worth if it isn't practical? Why would I want to publish anything that didn't warrant that modifier: practical philosophy?

The Hypertrophic Mindset

• Go slowly through the hardest part.
• Put yourself in disadvantageous positions to potentiate growth.
• Pace yourself so that you have nothing left by the end.
• Give full effort to the object of your focus.
• Build a plan, and stay consistent.

(Inspired by Renaissance Periodization)

I'm way more interested in being a successful editor than I am in being a successful writer. My main goals with writing are to:

• Always write what I'm interested in and not rely on being assigned projects
• Get better with every piece and challenge myself with big projects on my way to mastery
• And never stop writing.

Editing will help me accomplish all three of those goals, because I won't have to sacrifice anything as a writer. It can be detached from what I need to make money, while the thing I do to make money (editing) helps me master the craft of writing.

Starting any writing project is like drawing up a bucket from a well of interminable depth. The bucket is heavy enough that you know it's filled with water, but you have no idea how long you'll have to work at it to bring the fruits of the spring to the surface.

It's deeply rewarding to create something deserving of italics.

My two favorite genres of film are doomed romances and psychological thrillers. (An honorable mention is m allegorical dramas, like The Truman Show and The Prestige.) Here are my favorites in each category, in no particular order.

Psychological Thrillers:

• Parasite
• Silence of the Lambs
• The Shining
• Get Out
• Se7en
• "Beyond the Sea," Black Mirror
• "USS Callister," Black Mirror
• "The Entire History of You," Black Mirror
• Severance
• The Menu

Doomed Romances

• Past Lives
• Marriage Story
• 500 Days of Summer
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• La La Land
• "Hang the DJ," Black Mirror
• "San Junipero," Black Mirror

"Everything works out" is something I believe. But it doesn't mean that every thing (read: "all of the things") works out; it means that everything, the singular thing that refers to all things, works out. On average, it all works out, even if there are many important, painful things that do not.

Is it "in the water"? Or is it just in the water where you are? Find your valley.

Liberally share your nascent ideas and your full drafts. Keep your partial drafts to yourself.

February 4 The main reason people become patrons of creators is because they want to support the artist and give thanks for their work. Exclusive content perks are just how a patron justifies his purchase. Takeaway: Only give them enough to make it feel more valuable than the price, but don't promise so much that you end up under-delivering.

Robin Hood is ethically deluded. He has convinced himself that because he is stealing from the rich and giving to the poor that his thievery is morally permissible. In his head, he truly believes that what he's doing is justified. Yet, there is a primordial part of him that knows otherwise. Surely, Robin Hood's conscience torments him for being a thief, no matter how steadfastly he believes his crimes to be good deeds.

February 3 We don't think of a puny ice-cap as the mother of the valley. We forget that it was once a mighty glacier and that it reared this land. The glacier moves in silence and doesn't seek credit, yet it shapes the world — like all good parents.

January

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct

January 31 If you feel like you have to get everything done, you won't be able to give your all to anything.

No matter how crowded the morning commute is in New York, there's always a line for the escalator and an open lane on the stairs. I don't think it's because people are lazy; most of them are about to walk a half a mile to finish their commute. I think it's because we can't resist the temptation of ease and comfort. I mean, why would you turn down a free twenty seconds to check your favorite social media feed while magically descending two flights-worth of stairs?

The practice of meditation is not clearing your mind but filling your mind with a singular focus.

January 30 This is why I love and align with Kantian ethics: Kant argues for a a faith borne from morality, a "religion of good life-conduct." It empowers me and you as autonomous moral agents capable of discerning right from wrong and endows us with the responsibility to religiously uphold what we reason to be good life-conduct. It's beautiful.

One of the greatest insights from Camus's The Fall:

"God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. You were speaking of the Last Judgment. Allow me to laugh respectfully. I shall wait for it resolutely, for I have known what is worse, the judgment of men."

It has an uncanny kinship with possibly my favorite quote ever from Kant (which I have memorized):

"The pretension that the depraved go unpunished in the world is ungrounded, for by its nature every crime already carries with it its due punishment, inasmuch as the inner reproach of conscience torments the depraved even more harshly than the Furies" (Religion).

Camus argues for the severity of man's judgment as being worse than God's. Kant argues for the severity of our own self-torment as being worse than any consequence man could endure in the world. The synthesis of the two reveals that man is his own moral authority.

A dream is a cryptic message from your past life, the you of yesterday.

January 29 We humans are sensitive to shock: sudden drops, noise from silence, anything that subverts our expectations. But we can manage any outcome and not be immobilized by shock, as long as the outcome isn't so far from our expectations. We are adaptable, but it's not the things that change; it's our expectations of and reactions to the things. At the turn of winter, the cold is a shock and keeps us indoors. Even a week into winter, we change our expectations and brace for the most likely outcome. Warm weather would be a shock.

Remember: You are writing for a reader — someone who exists outside of your head. Make it clear to them and make it matter.

January 28 Live Like a Glacier

• Be in the low places, where everything is abundant.
• Chart a path and gradually move in your chosen direction.
• Value stillness.
• Acknowledge your own majesty.
• Make your mark on the world.
• Grow slowly and consistently, season by season.
• Be noble and reliable, impenetrable.

You are not the boxes people put you in, and you're not how you see yourself. You are an amorphous, obscure thing — always imperceptibly changing.

Our cosmic insignificance is important to remember, as long as it doesn’t lead to us forgetting the agency we have on Earth. We matter in this universe because we matter to ourselves and each other, and because we have the unique ability to decide what is meaningful in life.

Cherish the middle-moments, because most of life happens between where you were and where you're going. Very little of life is arriving.

January 26 I'm not religious, but I am principled.

A great example of riffing on cliches: "Everything in moderation, even moderation"

January 25 It's immoral to cut in line, unless the person in front of you moves more like leg-less reptile than a bipedal mammal and lacks urgency in the most un-American way, where you would otherwise waste your ticket to ride. Then, it's morally permissible to cut in line.

On the Rose Reading Room, in the Rose Reading Room:

Surrounded by beauty and bathed in silence, I hear the thoughts that would otherwise be drowned out by city-noise. There is silence in the city; it's just scarce. It's sacred and must be protected.

January 24 Do you agree that our awareness of death is the source of gratitude? Could you be grateful for what you have if everything in life were not fleeting and ephemeral, if you knew you could have it all forever?

(Revised Springboard from "Majesty and Mortality")

When I am journaling, exercizing, and meditating, I have a negligible amount of stress in my day-to-day. (Of course, there's a chicken-or-egg question here: Do you do those things when you are not stressed, or by doing those things, do you relieve stress?) If I can just do those things consistently, I can operate at a higher level of energy and enjoyment in life.

Duality is one of the oldest pieces of philosophical knowledge: Adam and Eve, salvation and sin, Sun and Moon, Heaven and Hell, predator and prey, Good and Evil, Yin and Yang, Life and Death. The idea is that nothing exists as one or the other but always both, that two extremes mix in unequal portions to create each thing. It's easy to know this conceptually and hard to know experientially.

Careful with your prepositions — they change the meaning of what you're saying.

Don't: "She is untethered to precedent."

Do either:

• "She is not tethered to precedent" (my preference for this example)
• Or "She is untethered from precedent."

On Whether to Capitalize an Independent Clause Following a Colon

There's a debate among grammarians: whether to capitalize an independent clause when it follows a colon. And here's my verdict: only capitalize that clause if what precedes the colon is a phrase. If both sides of the colon are independent clauses, do not capitalize the second, so that the two appear more closely related.

Don't capitalize when it's a phrase. "There were only ever three kinds of flowers in Nana's garden: tulips, daisies, and red roses."

Do capitalize when the first is a phrase and the second a clause. "My revelation in the valley: There is nothing more noble than a glacier."

Don't capitalize when both are complete clauses. "The E-News panel was malnourished after the Academy Awards: only one woman had a wardrobe malfunction."

Exception: When using a colon to introduce a quotation, capitalize the first word of the quote regardless of whether what precedes the colon is a complete clause.

"I'll think about this idea at least once a week until the day I die: 'The pretension that the depraved go unpunished in the world is ungrounded, for by its nature very crime carries with it its due punishment, inasmuch as the inner reproach of conscience torments the depraved even more harshly than the Furies'" (Kant, Religion).

(Also, don't use a colon to connect two phrases. "My fatal flaw: being too good-looking." In that case, add a verb: "My fatal flaw is being too good-looking.")

On Formatting Bulleted Lists

The most important thing with bulleted lists is parallelism. Whether you use:

• lower-case elements separated by semicolons;
• Capitalized fragments with a period after each item.
• Or capitalized fragments with a period only after the final item.

keep it consistent through the entire list.

My preferred method: Treat the bulleted list as if it were a list within a sentence or paragraph, just formatted differently. Capitalize and punctuate it as a normal list with a few exceptions:

• Capitalize the first word of each item
• Omit commas and semicolons, for readability (and let the bullets serve as those marks)
• And if each item is an independent clause, end each line with a period (otherwise, only add end-punctuation to the final item).

(Note: Bryan Garner says to place the and (or whichever conjunction) at the end of the penultimate item, but then you'd have to add a comma or semicolon before the conjunction. I say, put the and at the start of the final item and capitalize it to avoid commas and semicolons altogether.)

The Paleolithic Psyche

The masculine insecurity is about how well you provide for others. The feminine insecurity is about how well you care for others. And both are insecure about how they appear to others.

You could call these the 1) hunter, 2) gatherer, and 3) tribal insecurities, respectfully.

Then, there are three possible ways to respond to whichever source of insecurity you feel:

• Prey: Assuming guilt, internalizing the pain, feeling fragile, and being non-confrontational
• Predator: Casting blame, lashing out with aggressive language, being dismissive and stubbornly disagreeable
• Sage: Acting from acute self-awareness and radical self-honesty; owning your genuine shortcomings and working to correct them; disregarding the hateful attacks from others that come from places of malice, pain, and jealousy

In a capitalistic society, we get to thinking that what's scarce is what's valuable and that what's valuable is expensive. And that's all true — for material things. Yet, there are things in life that are abundant and valuable but free. In a capitalistic society, we lag in our ability to appraise these immaterial things, these things that cannot be bought or sold and that don't follow the price-and-value laws of the free market. These abundant, valuable, and free things include: community, laughter, silence, sunrises and sunsets, love, and the breath. If you are not rich in life, you can still have a rich life.

How to ski type III: Use your edges to turn while keeping your shoulders square down the mountain, and make your turns longer to slow down, shorter to speed up.

Trade in Your Generic Verbs

Example of nondescript, passive, wordy verbs vs. apt, active, descriptive verbs:

Don't: "My team and I celebrated our championship win as we were handed a huge, heavy trophy."

Do: "I hugged my teammates and hoisted the championship trophy."

Hoisted alone replaced this entire phrase: as we were handed a huge, heavy. I hugged my teammates is more descriptive and three fewer syllables than my team and I celebrated. Whenever you have the chance to swap nouns or adjectives for verbs, do it (e.g., hoisted). And whenever you have the chance to upgrade your verb to one that is more descriptive or visual, do it (e.g., hugged).

When you read the first sentence, you have at least one question: How did you celebrate?

The second sentence answers that question without losing the answer to: What did you win? (the championship). I hugged my teammates and hoisted the championship trophy.

January 23 "A 'mondegreen' is a misheard lyric, saying, catchphrase, or slogan." – Bryan Garner, GMAU

Example:

• "The answer, my friends, is blowin' in the wind." – Bob Dylan
• "The ants are my friends, blowin' in the wind."

(Also an example of how comma placement can change the meaning of a sentence — compare the misheard lyric to "The ants are, my friends, blowin' in the wind.")

The Etymology of Editing

If you're a writer and want to become a better editor, start by understanding the full etymology of these words: concentrate, compress, revise.

• Concentrate: verb: to bring to a common center; to intensify (some action of the mind); noun: that which has been reduced to a state of purity or intensity
• Compress: to press or pack together; to force or drive into a smaller space; to put under pressure
• Revise: to look again, visit again (with the intent to improve or amend)

A talented editor has a practice of revisiting a piece of writing, each time with the intent of bringing it under pressure and scrutiny, so that the whole piece can come to a common center, until it has been reduced to a state of purity or intensity.

There's a level of comfort that makes life easier but makes it harder to do what you want in life. Doing what you want requires growth, and growth requires discomfort.

A microcosm of the greater-New-York attitude: If the lane in front of you is backed up all the way to the intersection and you have a green light, you will go ahead anyway and block the intersection for everyone else who is about to get a green. "If I can't get where I want to go right now, then no one can." Actually, it's not so malicious; rather, it's unconscious. Tri-state area people on the road seem to be blinded by a chronic self-centeredness.

Dreams give you free, daily admission to the museum of your mind.

Why is it that our default state is to delude ourselves and deny ourselves what we truly want in life?

There's nothing more noble than a glacier.

January 22 When to Hyphenate Compound Adjectives

A compound adjective must be hyphenated if it is made up of two or more parts of speech.

Examples:

• "She furnished her home with low-brow art." (adj. + noun)
• "Finger-lickin' good" (noun + present participle)
• "He was the best-fit candidate." (adj. + noun)
• "This establishment offers deep tissue massages, hot-stone (adj. + noun) rubs, and the highly-recommended (adv. + adj.) foot reflexology treatment."

Exception: Some compound adjectives are colloquially written as two words, called "open compounds." These are very few and include phrases like "high school" or "pro bono." You are not wrong to hyphenate these open compounds when they serves as adjectives, but it confuse your reader. (Although, it is incorrect to hyphenate these words as nouns, since they are naturally open compound nouns, like "no one.") If the adjective-phrase* is colloquially common enough, you can omit the hyphen. Otherwise, hyphenate.

• Don't get confused, now. "Adjective-phrase" is a compound noun, made up of two nouns. It's hyphenated because the individual nouns would have different meanings if separate, and if separate and consecutive, the nouns' relationship would be ambiguous.

If a compound adjective is made up of two or more adjectives, you must decide whether those adjectives are coordinate or hierarchical. If they are equal and independent (coordinate), separate them with a comma (and in that case, they in fact do not form a compound adjective). If the adjectives are unequal and dependent on one another (i.e., hierarchical –– see "deep tissue" in the example above), do not use a comma and leave a space between the words (to form an open compound adjective, made up of adjectives).

[[Coordinate and Hierarchical Adjectives]]

Attention is like uranium-235; it's a scarce and delicate commodity — hard to obtain and easy to lose.

January 21 The editorial *we*: I should only use we when staying an opinion about us humans. ("We are autonomous moral agents"). And us only has its place for the same: when I'm making a claim about our species or about the human experience. Otherwise, I need to use singular personal pronouns, since I am one writer sharing his thoughts, not speaking on behalf of any group.

Summary: Never use "we think" — only ever "I think we are" (the collective we, never the editorial we).

Don't use periods or paragraph-breaks for emphasis; use them for their true purposes: to separate clauses and ideas and arrange them in a meaningful sequence.

The best and worst part of being an editor: It adds a meta-perceptual layer to everything you read. The pro is that each word and clause has more depth and nuance as it passes through your mind — making for a richer reading experience. And the con is that those meta-thoughts about the words and clauses distract you from what they mean to say — interrupting your act of comprehension with cerebral (and often overly picky and inconsequential) commentary.

Not goes with or, neither with nor. You can use either without neither or not, but not plus nor means or.

Man, grammar-nerds are all punsters and word-players. Check out these books on style and usage:

• Roy Peter Clark's The Glamour of Grammar
• Ellen Jovin's Rebel with a Clause
• Patricia T. O'Conner's Woe Is I
• Eric Partridge's Usage and Abusage
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves

January 20 A rule of English grammar and mechanics is only as valuable as it is relevant to clear and concise meaning-making.

There are few rules I've found in our language that aren't necessary for clear and concise communication. But, in some instances, the language can be clear while breaking a rule. The trick is to know when you're breaking a rule and to adhere to that rule when it would otherwise confuse what you mean.

I am one of a million tech-enabled rats scurrying beneath the city. I am a patron on the NYC subway.

"Beyond the Sea" from Black Mirror is so well written and such a mind-fuck (like most episodes in the series) and a horrific tragedy. The narrative beats hit, and there's a satisfying circularity to the whole thing. But it's so sad. In a way, it plays out the defect-defect scenario of The Prisoner's Dilemma. Also, the Chekhov's Guns and foreshadowing in this one are great, namely the first and last space-walk — where the camera lingers on the tray, showing the process of Cliff removing his tag and giving it to his partner, David. Also also, the ending is such a twist. I thought David was going to kill Cliff and live out life as his replica on Earth. But instead, he kills Cliff's family to render him as lost as his David is, so that they have a chance of finishing their mission. Wow!

A day is a life. Sleep is practice for death. Dreams are analogous to the afterlife. And each morning is a resurrection.

We're obsessed with morning routines for the same reason we're obsessed with superhero origin stories: we long to understand the context of others' successes/failures. What can I emulate? What should I avoid?

The events of the morning are the prequel to the narrative of the day.

Have you ever watched an episode of TV that sounds like a table-read? I have — too many.

Great example of a Shiny Dime: The Second Mountain – David Brooks

Core Idea idea: Success is a feeling.

The key to transformation without trauma is to live in the valley of life. Let yourself be constantly aware of the ways you are missing who you aim to be. Don't climb the mountain with your wares on your back. Leave what you love in the valley, knowing you will return when you fail to or successfully summit the current mountain.

(Ref: David Brooks – The Second Mountain)

January 19 You'd think it'd be easy to be ambitious in New York. That's the default attitude, the background radiation of the city. But it's not easy for me, I think because my true ambitions include living elsewhere.

Be careful making judgement taboo (e.g., "You're too judge-y" or "That was so judgmental"). Good judgment is the foundation of a good life. It's how you decide what to do (ethics) and what to spend your time doing (values/decisions/ambitions). It's not wrong to judge. It's wrong to act like you know better than other people what is better for other people. Judge what you see — for yourself, not for others.

I believe that we humans are the sole source of meaning in the known universe, and that our ability to ascribe meaning to life and to things in the world is a divine power. When we decide something matters, we are manifesting our inherent divinity in the world. (And I believe that there is no meaning given to us by something outside of us; rather, what we inherent from some primordial source is the ability to decide what is meaningful.)

(On hitchhiking): To get where I needed to go, I had to overcome insecurity.

One of the most overused cliches: "in the middle of nowhere"

If you're not sore, you're not growing.

January 18 A dense, high-quality writing prompt (from Yours Truly): If you had a billboard on the tallest building in your hometown, what would it say?

My answer: "Say what is unsaid."

Sleep is practice for death, and dreams are analogous to the afterlife.

Say "hi" to everyone with whom I make eye-contact.

[[Experiment: Micro-Dose Discomfort]]

The Predictive Power of Convergent vs. Divergent Thinking

One of the most descriptive cognitive traits is one's capacity for divergent thinking. Convergent thinkers value security and want certainty and are more comfortable deferring to an authority, and they make up the majority of traditionally "successful" people. Divergent thinkers are rebellious and skeptical of norms, more comfortable with uncertainty and unlikely to defer to an authority. They make up both tails of the "traditionally successful" distribution. The ones who change the status quo are the success-outliers, and the ones who refuse to change in accordance with the status quo and who have not made the change themselves are the failure-outliers.

Of the Big Five personality traits, Openness and Agreeableness are most impacted by convergent/divergent thinking. The most convergent thinkers are high in Agreeableness and low in Openness (more analytical). The most divergent thinkers are the opposite: disagreeable and uniquely open to ideas/experiences (more creative). The corresponding political extremes are authoritarianism and anarchy for convergent and divergent thinking, respectively.

The most sustainable way of thinking, for individuals and nations, is a healthy mix of both — unequal, though, according to your preferences, skills, and cultural/moral values.

My favorite way to measure this in yourself is to do a word-association exercise. Have someone give you a random word to start, then go for a full minute jumping from word to word, saying the first next word that comes to mind. Record the whole thing. Afterwards, write out all the words you said, and sort them into buckets. The divergent thinker will have more buckets and cover a wider range of topics, making many surprising yet personally intuitive connections. The convergent thinker will go deeper within fewer buckets, compiling extensive lists of closely related things.

Example:

• Convergent: Tree, apple, pear, grape, gourd, fall, Halloween...
• Divergent: Tree, bee, bird, sex, abortion, democracy, Maoist China, Marx...

Note to self: Do the test with myself and friends, count the buckets, and come up with a benchmark ratio of words/bucket as a heuristic to delineate convergent and divergent thinkers along a spectrum.

The easiest way to motivate myself would be to convince myself that I'm special, that I have some divine purpose and that the little things I do have ultimate importance and that it would be a crime to keep my gifts from the world. It's hard to disobey a divine mandate. But I don't believe that.

Another way would be to give in to the idea that I am worthless if I'm not achieving what I want or not remaining disciplined or not always doing hard things. But I don't believe that either.

It would be dishonest and delusional to source my motivation from either the idea that I am "meant to do" great things in the world or that I am worthless if I fail to do great things in the world. Somehow, I need to give time and effort to the things that I value for their own sake — without some delusional self-belief or delusional self-hatred. The things I do are important to me. They are not special and are not important to the world. My ambitions and values should be enough of a motivation. But a lot of the time, they're not.

It's going to take a long time to break this habit of spamming Backspace as I type. But I just discovered that option/ALT + BKSPC deletes one full word at a time. Try it! Instead of hitting BKSPC seven times to delete the word "instead," I can do it in one keystroke. (I also just realized that there's an option on the right side of the keyboard too, which I never hit. But now I can press it with my thumb as I hit BKSPC with my ring-finger.)

We are endowed with inalienable rights — among them, life, liberty, and the pursuit of purpose. Happiness is an unworthy ideal. It's too easily attained and lost. Purpose is unattainable and is found in the pursuit itself — a worthy ideal. A purposeful life is one lived in an unending pursuit of purpose.

Unless you want a twist for a specific and intended effect, maintain parallel structure.

January 17 It's funny how surprised we are when the winter brings cold weather. If it's below freezing, you can't talk to a single stranger without a comment on the temperature. But this happens every year. It isn't a notable event. The fact that we don't feel the winter's wind in July is a measure of humanity's resilience and adaptability. Not only do we forget how the wind feels but we live as is it won't come again.

(As I type this, my right hand is numb.)

Music taste is one of the best predictors of compatibility for people and places. There are exceptions. Your taste could clash entirely with someone you love. But if your music taste matches a person or place, you're likely to feel at home with that person, in that place. Bwé, my favorite coffee shop, plays Florence + The Machine and Of Monsters and Men and Lorde and Mt. Joy and The Lumineers. At least once per week, I'll work here from 9–5, and only about once per week, I'll hear a song I like that isn't already on my playlist.

(After writing this, I SoundHound-ed three songs within 20 minutes. Honestly, it's even better if your music tastes intersect and overlap with enough variety where you can introduce new songs/artists to each other.)

January 16This may be my favorite Van Neistat video, despite steep competition, and it's not even public (Patreon-only).

• The three-act structure, open question about his 2007 BMW and the satisfying resolution
• His DIY map setup that orients you within the video and geographically on his ride
• The introspective, personal, philosophical voiceover that ties it all together
• The audio add-ins during the edit (commentary that clearly wasn't in the original script), talking about the playback being at 340% speed to simulate the feeling of floating on a bike, etc.

January 15 We so easily forget the fact of death because it is never our reality. The closest any of us can get in life is seeing someone else die, or falling sick and coming close to death ourselves, or maybe even being revived. But the character of life is that you are not dead, so it remains a challenge to imagine death as an inevitable reality.

January 12 Transformation Without Trauma

You don't have to hit rock-bottom to turn your life around. If you have enough self-awareness about where you're headed, where you want to go, and how to get there, you can detect rock-bottom and decide to swim to the surface.

This type of change is gradual, and it's on average more painful, because you're constantly looking for ways to be uncomfortable and challenged and always forcing yourself to do hard things — because you know they are the best things you could possibly do to become the best version of yourself.

No one has ever built massive quads by breaking their femur. But that's how we talk about life transitions: "My attempted suicide helped me find meaning"; "Cancer gave me permission to live the life that I've always wanted"; "My divorce was the reason I developed healthy habits." In the same way you wouldn't wait to break your femur before you started doing sets of squats, don't wait for the world to smack you before you start changing yourself toward who you want to become.

Develop a practice of introspection. Make a habit of doing hard things, when they are true to who you want to become. You'll never have to hit rock-bottom because you'll make every morning a resurrection.

Coordinate and Hierarchical Adjectives

"Long _ lasting flavor" —

how would you punctuate this tagline for your favorite brand of chewing gum?

A. "Long, lasting flavor" B. "Long lasting flavor" C. "Long-lasting flavor"

My first instinct would be to hyphenate, but it's not required. And after I learned what a "hierarchical adjective" is, I've decided for option B.

"Hierarchical adjectives do not have equal rank to the other adjectives in the phrase, i.e. the adjectives exist in hierarchy. This means that changing the order of the words or placing the word and between them would not make sense. For example, the cold December wind could not be the cold and December wind or the December, cold wind. Hierarchical adjectives are used without a comma." – ProWritingAid

— —

This little insight is a perfect microcosm for how I've learned so much about grammar and mechanics without any formal education in it: I've just been curious.

My pack of Wintergreen Extra actually does have that tagline on it: "Long lasting flavor." I scoffed, angry that I had encountered yet another example of a compound adjective (great Grammarly article) that didn't have a hyphen. But then I wondered, "What part of speech is 'lasting'?" Turns out, it's an adjective. "Okay, I'm wrong about the hyphen then."

Next question: "Is it still a compound adjective or something else?" I did a quick search about when to put commas between two adjectives and discovered a mechanics concept I've never encountered: coordinate and hierarchical adjectives. "Long lasting" is, in fact, a pair of hierarchical adjectives and an "open compound" adjective (meaning there's a space between the words, like "high school").

I've also just now decided that a rule for my personal style guide is to hyphenate all compound adjectives except those that are adjective-adjective pairs, and to leave spaces between hierarchical-adjective pairs.

That's how curiosity can quickly turn into learning. Iterate on that model a few hundred times, and you can develop a 95th-percentile understanding of just about any subject. (Note the compound adjective "95th-percentile," comprised of (note the correct use of "comprised" rather than "composed") a number and a noun.)

In Eden, Adam and Eve were inhuman. (To wish for "Heaven on Earth" is to wish you weren't human.)

Potential Buckets for My Core Idea

• The Benefits of Introspection
• The Significance of Dreams
• Platonic Editing
• Original Sin as a Gift
• Transformation Without Trauma
• Closed Loops and an Open Circle
• Intellectual Nomadism

You don't have to hit rock-bottom. Instead of transformation being trauma-motivated, it could be a way of life, where every day is a resurrection.

The disruptive technology of the 60s was birth control.

Why commit to "Inbox Zero?" All that means is that anyone with your email can add an item to your to-do list.

January 11 Writing (composition) is an entirely different skill from editing (compression).

An editor helps a piece of writing improve. A writing coach helps a writer improve, through a piece of writing.

From a Yogi tea bag tag:

The unknown is where all outcomes are possible; enter it with grace.

January 10 Why philosophy is more true than religion:

• It is fundamentally not dogmatic. The primary mode of philosophy is propositional and interrogative, whereas the mode of religion is prescriptive and declarative.
• It's concerned with uncovering what is rather than dreaming of what we wish to be.
• It rests and relies on perpetual uncertainty, but religion's appeal is certainty (assuming a leap of faith).
• No philosophy claims to be the Truth.

I am more apt to worship Prometheus than Jesus.

What do the world's collective genesis stories reveal about how we humans see ourselves?

You are incapable of evil. You have no concept of the future or the past. You can only speak of what is before you, devoid of any insights. You exist without self-consciousness. You have nothing to strive for, yet you are never disappointed. Your only impulse is to subsist. You have no concept of success.

Does this existence sound to you like Heaven or Hell? I assume it's the same answer as the question: Do you aspire to be a sheep or shepherd?

This is what it would be like to live in Eden, otherwise known as "Heaven on Earth." But if you would rather be a shepherd than a sheep, Eden is Hell too.

Revised 2024 Imperatives

Close open loops. Smell your tea. Live your dreams.

Thank Eve for the gift of sin.

January 9 My ideal reader is my future-self. An essay is an astounding success if it would impress the writer/editor I will be ten years from now.

Writing prompt for English nerds: "Argue in favor of your favorite cliche."

How many doors stand between you and what you value? Is your reading chair in the foyer or in the basement? To get outside from my apartment, I have to pass through five doors — and then another 75 yards if I want to touch real grass. I lament that fact. It's a signal that this is not the long-term place for me.

January 8 "Fewer than five minutes" and "less than five minutes" are both correct, but they are not equivalent. The former refers to a specific number of minutes that is fewer than five. The latter refers to any duration of time that is less than five minutes.

January 7 The Big Bang didn't happen 13.8 billion years ago. In a way, for you, the Big Bang happened the moment you were born. All of human and cosmic history collapsed into a singularity, compressed into a file cabinet called The Past. In it is more than you could ever know, yet it's contents comprise the context for your existence, like the prologue for a book you haven't fully written. By living, you are writing it, but you will never publish it. Upon death, it — like all books before — will be subsumed, as it becomes part of what has been. It will become part of the Collective Prologue, to help engender the books of the future.

Man is poisoned by the habit of self-delusion. The only antidote is introspection.

The nicest cars have the fewest miles on them. And this is true for so many things in life. We deny ourselves pleasure of indulgence to preserve purity and to pay homage to beauty.

Try to imagine what it's like to be a fish out of water. Imagine having never felt the force of gravity, never having seen a human, only to have a human yank you from the only world you've ever known and drop you onto the deck of a boat — a sensation you have never felt.

The exact equivalent for humans would be for you to be yanked out of your seat by an alien tractor-beam in the middle of a meal, brought into a space ship, measured, tossed around by giants, and either murdered, dissected, released back to Earth, or ejected into the vacuum of space (the equivalent of a fish being tossed into a cooler). That's horrifying.

January 6 Every morning, when we wake, we make a leap of faith; we assume that this is reality and that a dream.

Core Tenets of My Personal Philosophy

Expect nothing from the world and the world of yourself.

Reality is my perception. Changing my perception means changing reality.

Everything I know to be unconditionally True will change. Nothing is absolute.

Man's pathology is self-delusion, and the antidote is introspection.

A life lived in pursuit of Truth is one lived unreconciled. So, be an intellectual nomad; don't dwell in dogma.

Stagnation is evil, but stillness is essential.

I dream because I am human. I am human because I dream.

Endeavor to understand, not to be understood.

God is the self idealized, and I am God unrealized.

Say what you know is unsaid.

There is no best way to go, but there is a worst way: to follow.

Nothing is absolute. Everything I perceive to be True is conditional or, in fact, completely uncertain: a matter of faith, not inviolable knowledge.

January 4 If you're using metaphor to develop or explain an idea, choose one main metaphor, and return to it throughout the piece (like a theme). Too many comparisons and disjointed figurative language will muddy the message and prevent your reader from having any concrete takeaways (partly because each new metaphor carries a context-load).

To omit the truth is not a lie. But if you're asked a direct question about the truth and aren't willing to reveal it, the only honest answer is to decline to answer. As soon as you prevaricate, you compromise your honesty.

prevaricate (v.) to avoid giving a direct answer or deviate from the truth (The child chose to prevaricate when asked who had broken the vase.)

Passing interactions and long-term relationships both have great potential, but relationships have a different degree of effect. At best, a single interaction could lead to a revelatory conversation or an unforgettable experience, or it could lead to a relationship. At best, a relationship is the medium through which you approach the best possible version of yourself. One is day-changing, the other life-changing.

I don't prioritize myself above all else. I prioritize my future-self above all else.

January 3 Life gets exponentially harder the more energy you spend avoiding hard things. Life gets easier the more readily you do hard things.

You can't control how you feel, only how you respond to how you feel.

January 2 A few great examples of economic writing/storytelling in song lyrics:

Sexting, sonnets / Under the tables – Caroline Polachek, "Billions"

I overheard that she was nineteen / She's got a fake ID and a nose ring / Those kind of girls tend to know things / Better than I do – The Backseat Lovers, "Kilby Girl"

Bathroom towels were cool against my head / I pressed my forehead to the floor / And prayed for a trapdoor / I've been here many times before / But I've never made it to Graceland – Florence + The Machine, "Morning Elvis"

All of these lyrics lean into words that are dense with meaning and visually rich. They create a scene and imply something about characters. The dense words: "sexting," "sonnets," "Graceland," "trapdoor." The visuals: "fake ID and a nose ring," "Bathroom towels were cool against my head / I pressed my forehead to the floor," "Under the tables."

And this is what you need if you want to write economically: careful, purposeful word choice and rich, immediate visuals.

There is not time for everything, but there is time for everything that you value — only if you don't let your time be consumed by what you don't.

January 1 "It's a long way to the top (if you want to sells some books)." – Angus Young

If you want your ideas to have the most impact, do the work to entertain your readers. Humor and narrative pull eyes down the page — not insights and takeaways. No matter how valuable or mind-blowing a concept is, delivering it without a joke or a story will stall any reader's progress through your essay.

The more you have thought about an idea, the more you'll have to say about it and the fewer words you'll need to communicate it.

There's a slippery relationship in life to find among doing what you must, doing what you want, and doing what you value. The things you must do get in the way of the things you want to do, and the things you want to do often contradict what you value. The ideal is to want to do the things that you must do and to only want to do things that align with your values. Under that impossible scenario, no matter what you're doing, you're always doing what you want. It is impossible, but you can approach that way of living.

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