I had 9 different unfinished drafts in my wordvomits, and I was thinking I’d just copypaste them into my notes and ignore them, but as I went through them it occurred to me that they provide a fairly revealing snapshot of what I’ve been thinking and going through over the past few months. So I’m going to stitch them all together below, and add some meta-commentary maybe.
11dec2022 envy: I saw a tweet that said something like, “if you want to know what you really want, look at what you’re envious of”, and it occurs to me that I haven’t thought about this in a while. So begins a writing/thinking/feeling exercise where I run through a bunch of ideas and pay attention to how it feels for me.
(The first thing that comes to mind is:) I’m envious of people who are fit. Kinda. This feels like a generic vague thing that probably most people have to some degree. There’s a bit of “gosh would be nice to have that wouldn’t it be” but I don’t feel an ache or a yearning, I don’t feel twisted about it. (So this feels like a stock answer that isn’t a true answer).
Oh, I’m envious of people who have nerdy family – nerdy parents, nerdy siblings. Gosh. This causes me to ache. Is it because I feel the lack? I also lack six pack abs or thick thighs and calves. But doesn’t quite cause me the same ache. So, obviously… (I stopped here. Was it maybe a little too painful to stew on? Alienation and loneliness? I’m going to port this over to another note to dig deeper separately.)
jan2023 too much stuff: been feeling kinda unproductive lately. was even feeling sad yesterday, not about any particular thing. look i wrote a great essay titled Are you serious? that was very well received by loads of people. excellent followup to We were voyagers. Now I’m nervous about what comes next. It occurred to me that I could do all of the handwringing and uncertainty about my essays in my wordvomits, so that I could let the essays breathe and not be burdened with all the second-order thinking that arises. I do want to include some meta thinking in my essays, but not to the point where it gets in the way of the essays themselves.
Currently the essay I’m thinking about most is In media res. In the middle of things. Partially I just like the title idea, and I also know the image I want to use, which is that threadless t-shirt that I once used as a facebook cover photo… actually a lot of my facebook cover photos would probably make good substack cover images… (Note to self: huh, I thought I already had a draft for this but turns out I… don’t? 🤔)
28jan2023 old notes – unfamiliar and overfamiliar – a reminder that continuity is an illusion: feeling tired and kinda frustrated and overwhelmed, i have so much stuff everywhere. closing tabs now. I want to write something for my substack and publish it before the end of January. It’s now 234am. I’m probably not going to finish it tonight, whatever it is. I’ve been looking at pictures and putting them in my pinterest. A friend (djm) who was going through his old notes reminded me of what it’s like to go through old notes. Some things are so familiar that you wonder why you even bothered to write them down. Some things are so unfamiliar you don’t even remember writing them down. The review process is more interesting and useful than you remember. (this is an interesting point to make about memory and consciousness and feeling… about the most magical thing being how magical things seem… illusions… should be part of an essay but I’m not sure which yet. I guess the useful-interesting insight here is that that’s kind of what I’m trying to do with my essays, I’m trying to collect all these one-off notes and put them into something more… robust? comprehensive?)
20mar2023 – seeking explosiveness I’d like some excitement in my life. As I started this thread I realized the holding company of my t-shirt business is named JIBABOM!, which is a Singaporean variant of “Kaboom”. I have a lot of stuff everywhere and I often find myself compelled to try and rearrange all of the things in some way that makes sense. But… (this ended up being transmuted into the crackle-boom essays– resonance, yeet, and branching paths)
23apr2023 – frustrated with incompetence of others. (this is a restatement of ‘there is no fuck‘). i can only demonstrate by example. It’s friday afternoon. I woke up early-ish in preparation for a marketing consult which ended up being postponed. I was working on an essay but I got a bit bored and decided to check Twitter and then I got annoyed. Annoyed at how so many people are so incompetent at being artful on the timeline. But most people don’t think of themselves as artists, maybe. They don’t see it as their responsibility to make things better. What can I do to make things better? I’m not in the mood to write something for twitter when I’m already writing two essays at the same time. But I could post something pretty. Done. ✱ I was going to say “got distracted for a while”, but I don’t like that phrase. Waylaid? Sidetracked? (There’s an essay here, does branching paths already capture it? Maybe I could leave a comment? Or update it?) Anyway. 3 hours passed. Was i happy with how I spent those 3 hours? What did I do? Click around pinterest a bunch. I didn’t mind that. I always feel like I’m cultivating and sharpening my taste when I’m clicking around Pinterest. ✱ yesterday turned out horrible for me, lol. I didn’t sleep enough. But then I slept 13 hours and that was great. I cleaned my windows, wonderful. Now I’m going through my notebooks. ✱ that was yesterday again. i had a moderately productive time going through a couple of my notebooks and i’d like to go through more of them.
08may2023 – gnashing – finally after 4 months of gnashing i feel like I had a really productive day with regards to my body of work. the big insight was that I could use my /archives/ as a repository for old threads and old blogposts. I know that I want my /blog/ to be more of a gallery than a junkyard, and that I want my substack to have well-crafted, compelling reading experiences that have heart, insight… good works that endure, that I’ll want to reuse, revisit, reference, share repeatedly. So far I’ve written 2 good substack essays and I’ve twisted myself in knots trying to write a 3rd good one. I’ve written several others that weren’t as amazing as I hoped. I think I have to make my peace with what I know to be true in my heart — there’s no way of being certain that some particular essay will be great, I should just try and write something decent and ship at a fairly regular cadence.
In an alternate universe, at 1 essay a week, I would have shipped… 16 essays this year. And about 30 more last year, maybe. In our current universe, I shipped 1 this year, and 6 last year. I find this… underwhelming, knowing what I am capable of. If I had shipped 45 essays, I could be confident that at least 3 or 4 of them would be Good, and I could’ve included them in my list of “Visa’s recommended”. But alas, all I have so far is 2. But the good news is I still have time to change things up. / I feel good about having posted so many threads and drafts into my archives. I was starting to get some kind of ominous feeling from my magicbeans google sheets, like it was starting to… weigh on me, constrict me, increase the amount of muscular tension in my body.
14may2023 – I’m in such a funny place in my life right now. I wrote the big book that was weighing me down for several years, and now I am free to do all of the work that I want to do. But I’m feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. I think because… my projects are not very well-scoped (there’s an essay to be written here), so I’m struggling to do a correct and meaningful amount of work at each stage. I woke up in the middle of the night to do some writing. I did some writing. I wrote a couple of longtweets, one about QTs, one about stuff me and my wife were talking about re: our relationship. I found myself doing some twitter search re: the blogosphere, which is research for an internet culture essay I want to write, and have been drafting many times over. I added a new sheet to my magicbeans google sheets titled “research”, to better sort a bunch of the links I have going on. I think yesterday I was piecing together a google doc on culture
I thought I was going to write a post about understanding media, mediasense, mediums, etc. I know I will publish that sooner or later. I know there’s also the one about smartphones – universal cursed artifact. I just want to make good things, man. But the big good things I want will take a long time, and I don’t feel like I have a lot of time. So I have to figure out how to satisfice artfully. Which is another concept I have lying around, artful incompleteness. These are all great concepts, but I’m not sure if they’ll make good essays. I’ve been loosening my internal restriction on what is good. Remind yourself visa, publishing something passable each day will bring you closer to the big things you want to do.
I think I’m going to shower and go to bed. Is there anything else I want to do before that? Nah just a note to self to revisit notes later and maybe do folders post
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I can be very harsh on myself. The thing is I know that being harsh on myself isn’t particularly productive. So why do I do it? Part of it is maybe shit I picked up from childhood and wider culture. Part of it maybe is that that part of me doesn’t even want to be productive. I’m taking a moment to sit with it. Do I want to yell at myself? No… I know that doesn’t work or help. So… what’s going on? I know that I want to feel a sense of progress. And the wild thing is that I know that a sense of progress comes from… meta-awareness? I know that I can’t just navigate by simple, straightforward feeling.
Tension is often a kind of primitive todo list, I think. I’m trying to get myself to remember something. I’m flinching in anticipation of some kind of pain. I’m reminded of a time that I read a quote that said something like “make yourself comfortable”, and I relaxed…
24may2023
nally taking a minute to read some of my wordvomits – decided to start at 700, which is interesting. at 703 i picked up my first bump of 3000 twitter followers. I asked “why does my output engine stop” and noted that “I haven’t truly rested since i was a child because there’s always homework to be done” – bleak stuff.
704, sad, 705, first day of free agency, emotional range expanding. how excited I was. its been 5 years since and I don’t feel that great anymore. but that’s normal.
I think I want to take a minute to dig into the homework thing, because it feels outdated. What is homework? When I was a kid… homework was something that I was subjected to, something icky and yucky that I didn’t want to do, and yet if I didn’t do it, I got in trouble, and my teachers would be mad at me, and they would complain to my parents, and my parents would be mad at me, and I would feel guilty and ashamed and upset, and yet somehow feel relatively powerless to do anything about it.
My last day of school would’ve been in 2009, around October or so. That was 13 years ago, almost 5,000 years ago. But I am still carrying that with me in my gut. I still feel like I have overdue homework weighing me down, wrenching my shoulders and guts. I carried this with me into my working life. But then I left my job, and now I’m a solo operator, a free agent… and I still carry this with me! I still feel bad when I feel like I haven’t done my homework, even when I haven’t even defined what my homework is.
I can imagine there might be a theoretical state where there’s no homework and I don’t have to do anything, but somehow my body doesn’t seem to believe that. So it seems like I might be better off trying to hack this with some sort of simulation. Meaning, assign myself homework deliberately, and do it. Okay… uh, shall I assign myself to… clean up my desk? I’m reminded that I once read something that said “make yourself comfortable”… and I felt inspired to tidy up!
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ok yea that’s all the drafts. Note to self to come back here and look for things to expand on?