Hey Visa, how are things? Pretty good overall as usual, though maybe a bit more scattered than usual. Scattered how? Too many projects? What are the projects? FAN2, Introspect epub. Voltaic. /marketing/. 1000wordvomits. YouTube. Google drive. Should I go and sort out my google drive stuff? What’s in there? High voltage living? Constructive ADHD. 50 yr plan goes into FAN2. Index. Intercourse.
I have a lot of stray thoughts about a lot of stray things I could be doing, but that feels like random acts of doing. I want to be effective. I want to strike hard where it makes a difference. So right now I guess I’d like to spend some time and energy figuring out where some effort would make a difference. Gaps in my ref? Consider the speedrunners. Victor Wooten. Kenny Werner. Ethan Hawke.
I haven’t clicked through Magic Beans in a while. I haven’t made a youtube video in a while. I’m putting a lot of things on standby while trying to write a good substack essay. But how do I write a good substack essay? Am I even really trying? Lol. No I’m mostly agonizing in my head. What am I agonizing in my head about? The perfect title, the perfect image, the perfect order of things. Let’s let go of should. What do we feel like doing right now? Feel like experiencing relief. What would be a relief? Dumping more stuff in /archives/? I haven’t done a patreon update in a while. Do I currently feel like doing it? No. Do I want more clients? I could followup on the thread I did a while ago… could turn it into a post, and do a sequel. Not feeling like I’m in a rush to do that.
I think I need better indexing. But do I feel like I need better indexing? I want a good night’s sleep. In my current frame, to get a good night’s sleep I need to earn my rest. The best way to earn rest is to publish a substack essay. Publishing a wordvomit comes pretty close.
I was revisiting some stuff about problems and problem solving, mariocastleproblems. A lot of time and energy is misdirected, spent attacking what seems like a problem, instead of vibing with what the actual problem is. Usually because the problem is scary. What’s the scary problem here? Is it stuff in my personal life? Do I think that the problem is that there’s a scary problem? Right now just spilling out words into a textbox is providing me with some amount of relief, it’s making me realize that I haven’t given myself space to just ramble without any particular direction in mind. I’ve been overly directed. And that’s tiresome.
One of the big weird truths that I’ve encountered recently – and maybe I want to do a collection of things titled or tagged weird truths – is about emotional knottedness. I have a tweet and an abandoned substack draft about this, and in some ways I would say that Introspect is about this. Wishing I had a list of all the things I’ve said that Introspect is about. Someone said something like “stop pretending that you know yourself” and I was like, yes! exactly! Another one is that introspect is about lovingly investigating emotional knottedness. If you’re gentle and persistent, the knots almost undo themselves. It’s weird to write about. A lot of it seems to be about posture, a way of being. I’ve written elsewhere about how what I’ve gotten from books is the author’s way of seeing, way of being. And what I’ve learned from my exboss and my wife were their ways of being, too. My wife for eg is good at persisting in getting people to answer questions when they’re being evasive. And when I said that I saw her do this, and I learned from it, people tend to ask, “oh, what exactly does she do differently?” And that’s really, really hard to answer. It’s not even like she DOES anything differently. Simply witnessing her do it made it easier for me to do the same. In some ways it’s “as simple as persisting”. I find myself challenged by the limitations of language. I have to try and get creative. Maybe some of the things are weirdly straightforward. I remember once writing something like, “you have to believe that change is possible“. I would think and say that I am someone who, generally speaking, believes that change is possible. But do I actually believe it, full-heartedly? It’s complicated. The Belief that I’m talking about isn’t static, it’s dynamic. It’s devotional. It’s something you attend to. Something you enact.
People these days sometimes use the word “performative” to describe someone’s behavior as fake, contrived, deceitful. I recently learned that the term was originally used by John L Austin to describe speech-as-action, like “making promises, betting, performing a wedding ceremony, an umpire calling a strike, or a judge pronouncing a verdict”. With the benefit of hindsight I wonder if it would be better to call it “declarative”, since we tend to say “I declare…”.
I was thinking in the shower about this gif I’ve seen a few times now that I enjoy, accompanying a breathing exercise. It begins as a dot and then it expands into a line, a triangle, a square, all the way out I think into an octagon. And then it collapses back into a dot. I really like that. There’s something in there about stages and cycles. I think it’s useful to be able to reduce things to simplicity, and then to expand them as necessary into complexity, and then reduce it back again. Sometimes we wake up and we’re in the middle of some big projects that we’re working on, and it helps to have all sorts of scaffolding. Sometimes everything is a mess and it helps to start over with the most simple of things. A pen-and-paper todo list with 3 items can be a soothing, clarifying thing. I’m going to publish this wordvomit now. I think I might use the middle of it as the basis for a substack. Maybe that’s how I should approach thinking about substack essays. But there are no shoulds. Things are possible. I can just try stuff.