I haven’t said this anywhere publicly yet– we made the difficult decision to euthanize our older cat Sierra a few days ago. He was old (about 15?), blind, lost a lot of weight, and was visibly in pain and not himself anymore for months now. The saddest thing I think is that it was a bit of a relief to let him go. He was meowing uncomfortably in the last months and it would distress all of us, including our other cat, who used to have a good relationship with him before. I choose to remember him from the good days, from the 10+ years that he was a dear companion. I remember how he would lounge in any sunny area, how he’d like to squeeze himself between me and my wife whenever we were watching tv together on the sofa, how he’d rub himself against my legs in affection, how much time we spent just enjoying each other’s company. He was really in many ways one of my dearest friends. And… I think he helped me realize that I wanted to be a father, helped me believe that I could be a good father. There was a time once years ago when he had a pretty gross health issue (his anal gland ruptured, which meant we had to apply cream to his butthole and syringe-feed him medicine). My wife and I took care of him together, and that shared experience I think made me feel confident that we’d be able to deal with a sick or difficult child. That’s just one of the many things that I’m grateful to Sierra for. My family (parents and siblings) was never interested in pets, so I don’t think they’d really relate or understand. But this guy meant a lot to me. Heck, I remember being really sad when a neighborhood cat passed, and that guy didn’t even live in my house. I’d fed and groomed and cared for Sierra for 12 years. Sometimes when I took a nap I’d wake up to see or feel him sleeping at my feet, or in the space behind my knees. We had many shared understandings. And now he’s gone forever, remaining only in our memories.
Sierra’s passing brought my own mortality to the front of my mind. I was a rather macabre teenager so I used to think a lot about dying. I remember worrying that I might not make it to my 30s. I just had this feeling back then that I didn’t have a lot of time. I remember reading books and blogposts and quotes, anything I could get my hands on, on the subject of death. I never really believed in any kind of literal afterlife. There’s a kind of metaphorical afterlife, maybe, in that we live on in the memories of others, and through our children, and through our works. Aren’t all the great authors still alive, in a sense, as we can read and interpret their thoughts from centuries or even millennia ago? But they don’t breathe, they don’t think, they don’t feel anything anymore. They’re gone. So, the afterlife has never been any sort of real consolation for me. ll that’s left to do then is to make the most of our time while we’re here. That can mean a lot of things, but a lot of it boils down to loving the people in our lives. Being kind and considerate to others. Enjoying rapturous experiences in music and art and food, all of which are things that can be enjoyed more with friends.
I don’t mean to go off on some kind of “how to live your life” lecture here, I’m just regurgitating what comes up for me. Point is, I thought that stuff through in great detail. One funny memory is, I remember being absolutely devastated by the original ending of the Mss Effect trilogy. IF you play the Legendary Edition today, you won’t feel the same way, because they’ve added an extended cut cinematic, which gives a lot more closure, amongst other things. But at the time, the original ME3 ending was jarring, dissonant, and you really got the sense that all of your efforts were kind of in vain, that nothing really mattered in the end. And so I had to work really hard emotionally to find a framing to make sense of it all, and here by “it all” I don’t just mean the game, but the senselessness of suffering and the arbitrariness of life. So much is so unfair. Writing about this in 2025, one can’t help but think about everyone who is suffering in wartime conditions, losing friends and loved ones. I’ve encountered videos of dead children on the twitter timeline, and such vieos hit me much harder than they used to when I would look up that sort of thing out of morbid curiosity. I am no longer curious. I have a child of my own and all I want is for him to live a good, happy, healthy life. Here there’s a perspective that’s like, well isn’t it selfish of you, to focus on your own family, which lives in comparative luxury as part of the global 1%, why don’t you do more for the kids of the world who are struggling? And… yeah. It’s a cruel state of affairs. But these problems are large and wicked and many individuals have thrown their entire lives at these problems without having made much of a dent in them. Am I just justifying my relative inaction, my mediocre morality? In a sense, yeah. It’s a full-time struggle for me to keep the roof over my family’s heads, and maybe a braver, stronger, sharper, better version of me would find a way to struggle for other people’s homes and livelihoods, too. But… and I know this is again me speaking from a position of relative privilege– I don’t think it’s quite right that people exhort one another to fling their entire beings into martyr-like self-sacrificing charity. Unless they really feel called to do it in their hearts, in their souls. I think charity done from a place of neediness has like, subtle knock-on effects that people don’t often consider. If you go around desperately trying to help people, in some ways you teach people that they are less-than… I’m a bit too sleepy to really do this point justice, there are subtleties and complexities to it that I’m not managing to address. Obviously food for the poor is good… but I also think it’s important that people live joyful lives. h there’s a CS lewis quote isn’t there… something about how the importance of joy, and not letting joy be held blackmail by pity… hell should not be allowed to veto heaven, be careful to not let a dog in a manger be the tyrant of the universe… joy is important!! joy is the point!!
idk if i have much more to say right now. oh. i guess i can just continue with the thought like… so yeah, i haven’t thought directly about death in a while, largely because throughout my 20s or so i felt like i was “done with it”, like I’d resolved my existential crisis. and for the most part I think that was correct; I don’t have a “oh i was wrong what a fool i was” feeling. I still feel like my older thinking and feeling holds up. I just have a sort of fresh experience of permanent loss that gets me revisiting it all. I’m older now. I’ll be 35 this year. Will I make it to 70? Could I make it to 100? Now that I have a child I especially wish to be around as long as possible, hopefully in good health. And it’s just got me thinking about how I spend my days, weeks, months, years.
My regrets feel less heavy now that I’ve attained some measures of success at some of my goals. You can go back and read earlier word vomits where I wrote things like “I’m a waste of this space i’ve been given”- really bleak stuff. I don’t feel that way anymore. I know that I am a nourishing presence in the world for a lot of people. But I shouldn’t take that for granted, I shouldn’t assume that it’s something static. Everything is dynamic. Everything is always changing.
But I do still have regrets. I wish I travelled more when it was easier. I wish I spent more time with friends, more time going out, meeting people, having conversations, writing, recording, making, building, doing. Obviously it’s always easier to say this in hindsight, but my hope is that I will be able to at least take some of this energy and cast it forward into the life I am living, and will be living.
So what’s next? My first thought is “I should write more, I should work out more, I should talk to friends more”. These are all things I’ve been thinking and saying for a long time. How does change actually happen, beyond just a bunch of shoulds? I’ve done a lot of reading about this stuff over the years. You have to change your identity, your self-concept, your environment. I’m going to change my environment in a big way in under 150 days, when I finally move to my new place after 12 years of ‘exile’ in my ‘halfway house’– things I will probably explain at a later date once I’m in the new place. I hope to make videos with more frequency once I have my own personal home office that’s entirely just for me. I’ve earned this. It’s time. I want to take my own work much more seriously, like a professional, because that is what I am. This is my job now. Even writing these wordvomits– initially this started as a side-project, as a hobby, and now as it approaches its final 10%, I see it as an important part of my portfolio. It’s proof-of-work that I take this writing thing seriously, at least along the dimensions that I care about.
why has this project persisted when others have failed? Part of it is that it’s almost accidentally well-designed. it’s specific, concrete, measurable, aspirational… what else have I done? I’ve played a thousand games of chess on chess.com with the goal of trying to increase my ELO on there. but am I going to play 10,000? 100,000? How much chess do I want to play over a lifetime? That’s the ultimate question, and it’s not one that’s easy (or maybe even possible) to answer at the outset. Intellectually speaking I think I’d rather spend that time playing music, learning music. or writing, of course. that goes without saying.
running out of steam somewhat. anything else to update? um, i’m not getting enough sleep, probably. I should sleep more. i should sleep earlier. but it’s so peaceful at night when the baby is asleep, part of me feels like i need to get as much time as I can. but it’s not high-quality time, since my mind is deteriorating from tiredness. and… I don’t have a boss here. I’m in charge. I get to rearrange everything. If I sleep early enough, and wake up early, I should have more clarity? Wouldn’t it be amazing if I slept early and then woke up before the baby? That seems laughable for some reason, but technically it should be possible? since the baby needs more sleep than I do?
I don’t know. everything changes. this too will change. maybe i just gotta hang in there. it’s rare that there’s something really decisive to be done. but sometimes there is. right now though it does mostly feel like a game of survival. a game of hang in there. just make it to the next day, next week, next month. at least until the new house. but the moment i say that i feel something like a flinch, something like a… that’s how decades go by without you noticing. but that’s why i write, that’s why i journal. to notice. so let’s keep noticing.