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June, 2025
June 30 Travel, while you're in the place, changes what you do day to day, but adventure changes you.
I cannot help but to wonder when I wander, and my greatest feelings of wonder have happened while wandering.
One becomes a better writer by becoming better at every step of the process. I may be an expert at revision, but my narrative nonfiction book is, in a very real way, only going to be as good as my field notes.
(For instance, I know that Robert Macfarlane's notes are more effective and illustrative than my journal entries from Iceland—because (1) he was making notes with the intention of writing a specific book and because (2) he captured more raw "qualia" (phenomenological data) than me; I mostly captured the sequence of events and had no idea that those journal entries would become the basis for a book.)
Title idea for an essay about my first time going backcountry skiing: "The Pleasure of Pioneering: Why We Hike for Hours for Minutes of Skiing"
June 29 I had been on a certain path in life, and I was trying to get off of it, trying pivot. Iceland was how I committed to that new life-path. I forced myself to do what I knew I wanted to do.
June 29 2025.06.28: Overheard on a walk in Beach Haven, LBI, NJ, from a conversation between three women, in passing:
One woman: "By how they act, you'd never know that they—"
The other woman interjects: ". . . that they were married."
At the same time, the first woman finishes her sentence: ". . . were married."
June 28 Neither Obtuse Nor Opaque
Every writer for every idea must strike a harmony between an obtuse or opaque explanation. You don't want to bury the idea, like a corpse in a coffin, and you don't want to exhume the idea, like a corpse on the table for a follow-up autopsy.
June 26 I don't want to be a travel writer; I want to be an adventure journalist. These are important distinctions in terms. When one travels, one goes somewhere to do something new. When one goes on an adventure, one goes somewhere to become someone new. I want to go on adventures, but I don't want to write about them—meandering reflections, quick-hit bullet points. I want to report back to the homeland from abroad. What do you need to know? What's the scoop? What's my angle? I'll do plenty of writing about my travels for myself, but what I want to publish is adventure journalism: trip reports wherein I discover and divulge a story as if it's a secret or a myth-come-true.
June 25 When to Use Numerals in Prose
For any single piece of writing, or for your personal style, choose how to handle small numbers. These are your three options: Spell out
(1) all numbers below 10 or (2) all numbers below 20 or (3) all numbers below 100.
If there are too many small numerals in your pose, then the important numbers, like years and measurements and street numbers (or list delimiters, as above), won't stand out as much.
Bryan Garner prefers option (1); DFW, option (2), and the final option is has been Chicago style for at least the last fifty (not 50) years.
June 23 ~12:30 p.m. I just saw IShowSpeed recording a live stream, which was apparently a race against the famous YouTube-sprinter-guy Daniel Labelle. They were on the Weehawken public track, and I walked by in the background with my orange water bottle in one hand and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in the other; I was walking back from reading on a shady bench on the riverwalk. As I passed the track, I locked eyes with another passerby, a guy my age, who was walking the other way. We both shook our heads at the absurd scene, which eye-contact-interaction was immediately followed by my overhearing Speed saying "Chat, subscribe! Let's get to 41 milli, y'all."
A monk in meditation achieves a state of attentive aimlessness. But some monks betray their own aimlessness, if one is only meditating as means to escape Samsara. They might see Nirvana as a destination, and I wonder whether seeing it that way it makes it impossible to reach.
June 22 Paragraphs are the unit of composition for prose of any and all forms, but to craft skillful paragraphs, a writer must master the elements of which they are comprised. Letters comprise words, which are separated by spaces; words comprise clauses, which are delimited by punctuation; clauses comprise sentences, which end in periods; sentences comprise paragraphs, which are strung together by line breaks.
It is a feminine thing to write a book, especially fiction. It is a masculine thing to publish a book, especially to self-publish.
June 19 Maybe the only way to get where I want to go is to be aimless for a while.
June 15 The Absolute is manifested in and experienced by everything and everyone in every moment, and yet It is inaccessible to us in life. Man's relationship to the Absolute is no different than his relationship to the Sun: we feel its warmth on our palms and its power within our bones, yet it remains eternally out of reach.
June 15 Material for "Community of KC" V2
Before leaving for college, I was not trying to "get out" of Kansas City, but I was excited to go — excited enough that I would sing Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York" in the parking garage between valet runs at the Hotel Phillips. I got so many reps at that song, and so much confidence from the reverb in the garage, that I chose it is my audition song for auditioning for an a cappella group my first semester of college. Anyone in New Jersey who meets a kid from Kansas assumes that he would be singing "New York, New York" and longing to "make it there." That's why, without fail, whenever I introduce myself, as being from Kansas to an NJ native, they say, "You're not in Kansas anymore!" And they say it as if commending me for an accomplishment. What the NJ natives seem not to realize, and what I have learned over the past seven years of being here, is that if one makes it here, one might not ever go anywhere else.
— —
If New York City is the center of the world, then it is the center, just like the Sun is the center of our solar system, just as there is a supermassive black hole at center of our galaxy. Our goal as a species isn't to make it to the sun, because we know it will kill us. If New York is the center of things, the best thing to do is to orbit it and use its fusion runoff as fuel and slingshot around it toward nobler aims. At least, that's how I ought to relate to New York, knowing what I do about myself, knowing who I am and who I want to be.
— —
Where I live at the moment, and Weehawken, I can't see the horizon. To the west of me is a sheer cliff, and my building is one of eight apartment complexes in a row that sit beneath it. Of course, to the east, is Manhattan – more to the point, Midtown – which is a wall of glass and concrete that prevents me from seeing the sunrise. Yes, Kansas is flat, which might be a reason for you to fly over it. But the sun sets in Kansas, as well as the sun rises, our divine. There is not so many things as to refract and reflect and block the light, so instead, you see this expensive glow that washes over the unfathomable mass of land within your field of view between you and the distant, unobstructed horizon.
— —
I love my home not as much for what it has given me as where it dares me to go.
— — I'm convinced the only people fit for New York City are the people who were born in it.
— — Sinatra said, "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere." But he failed to say, "If I wind up there I might not ever go anywhere."
Potential new title for the revised version of my "Community of KC" essay (inspired by DFW's essay on the IL State Fair): "Getting Away from What Might Seem to Be the Center of It All"
June 14 Jun 13, 2025 at approx. 11:30 a.m.: I did my first-ever muscle-up (with kipping). It was the first pull-up of my workout, and I was just feeling it, so I went for it. It seems like the past few weeks of high/explosive pull-up training has paid off.
June 13 The population of NYC is disproportionally young and hot, whereas the population of KC is disproportionally older-looking-than one's-age and not as hot as one could be. Yet one city is not living better or more morally than the other, for these are sins of the same cardinality, merely different in kind: gluttony and vanity (pride). The average young and hot New Yorker is concerned with the acquisition of material things and how those things improve one's status and affect how one appears to others, and the average older-looking-than-one-is Kansas Citian believes that one's hard work ought to be rewarded with pleasure and comfort — trading what one's earns for indulgences, rather than using one's leisure time for appearance-upkeep. Whenever one group criticizes the other, we see in action the Parable of the Adulterous Woman; we see sinners casting stones. A New Yorker sees a crowd of Kansans [queuing for food] and calls them bovine; the Kansan sees the New Yorker cut in line and, in reply, calls him serpentine.
June 13 My skin shouts, "Get me out of here! Get out!"
Working toward a particular outcome makes that outcome more likely, and working against any particular outcome—avoiding it—will make it more likely too. We engender that to which we give our attention and energy, regardless of whether that energy is of grasping or aversion.
June 12 If brevity is the duration of a rapper's latest diss track, then concision is how many disses per second there are in the track. And if a rapper strikes the right density of disses, his listener will be happy to listen longer and would feel robbed if the track were more brief.
[[Concision ≠ Brevity]]
Checking a Sentence's Meter with Finger-Tapping
I just stumbled upon a fun and clever way to feel out the meter of a sentence. Using your thumb, tap each of your four fingers on the same hand in sequence, from your index to your pinky, where each word is represented by one finger and each syllable represented by a finger-tap.
So, for instance, the four-word phrase "Speak your latent conviction" would be represented as: Index — 1; Middle — 1; Ring — 2; Pinky — 3. For a longer sentence or phrase, loop back around through those same fingers.
The thing you get a feeling for is whether there's monotony or variety. You'll immediately feel whether the sequence has too many monosyllabic or too many polysyllabic words. And once you recognize the pattern via this little meter-method, you can consciously break the pattern for emphasis.
June 11 How could the stardust of the Absolute be all around us and all within us if there is not, or were not at some time, a stable star with a lively, burning core? We can assert that Star's existence by the evidence of its dust but only if we also assert that the Star is inaccessible to us and may be so forever.
Being sensitive (saying things that appeal to your sensitivities) is pathos (the Pathetic Appeal). Convincing your reader that you're sensitive is ethos (the Ethical Appeal).
June 5 If you want to write like Thoreau, put down Walden right this second and, instead, read all of Emerson.
// You want to write like Thoreau? Don't read another page of Thoreau. Read Emerson. A writer's goal isn't really to imitate but to be inspired to create. If you have the impulse to imitate someone, start to read the works of those who inspired that author to create.
June 3 Watching a video on calisthenics (explosive pull-ups), I just learned of "the Russian method" of progressive overload. It seems like it would solve a problem I've been having of not being able to add reps to my sets. According to this method, you add sets before you add reps. (And, in the case of weighted calisthenics, you add weight after you hit your goal for sets and reps.)
So, in the example of weighted pull-ups, you start with whatever weight you can do for 3x3. Then, you work your way up to 5 sets of 3 reps: 3x5. Once you hit five sets with that weight, increase the reps and reset to three sets: 4x3. Work through that pattern until you can do 5x5 with that weight. Then, reset the sequence by adding weight (10 kgs, lets' say) at 3x3.
I can apply this more broadly to my workouts, where I can try for an extra set rather than trying for an extra rep per set. I'm going to try this with my pull-ups and dips, which have both been stuck at 8x3 for a month or more.
Here's a niche book on writing that I love: Quack This Way. It's a transcribed conversation between Bryan A. Garner and David Foster Wallace. It's short and not prescriptive. Reading it, I was just energized to study and master the craft.
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