[Every day is a puzzle.]
Now that I’m basically a full-time parent of a 1yo, I can’t quite work the way I used to. I feel like I’ve taken a while to try and adapt to the new normal. I think a big thing is, I can no longer count on large swathes of time and space to just muck around. I need to be more methodical and precise about what each block of time/energy is for. Right now for example I’m writing this in wordcounter with the expectation that I will publish it as a wordvomit. That will feel good. I’m doing this partially because I’ve published a substack Post and a Note in the past couple of days. So I don’t feel as much pressure to write and publish another substack post anytime soon. I have some breathing room. I wrote the Note about my writing process and tweeted it too and it softened the ground for me to finally get into vgr’s tempo, which I might write another post about. I also want to go through my notes and screenshots, but those are eternal things. I’ve also decided that my big post for the year is On Wretchedness. I also want to work on a post about Inception.
I had a direction I intended to go with this wordvomit (Car Masters) for about 20-30 minutes but I decided to dump it and head back to Tempo.
I think I should keep reading Tempo. All decisions are made within situations and narratives. There is no narrative-independent model of decision-making that can be labelled absolutely rational. Models of rationality lie inside the mental models and narrative contexts that operate by them.
I was thinking about the point of writing howto guides. Anybody can write one. The question is whether the person writing it has any real experience actually doing the thing, and whether their guide actually conveys anything helpful about how it is to do the thing. Orwell said that every book is a failure. It’s very difficult if not impossible to overcome the bandwidth limitations of communication. We don’t even really know what we know, in a sense. We approximate it. All comms is approximation. Some approximations are useful. Some are “not even wrong”.
I got interrupted by baby stuff– back here and feeling fragmented, and really the one thing I want more than anything else is the relief that comes from defragging. i’m conflicted about the word defragging. on one hand, it’s evocative, i have memories of watching a computer defrag. I just looked it up on youtube and there’s an 11 year old video of windows 95 defragging with 150,000 views and lots of comments saying it was so satisfying to watch.
I need to finish this wordvomit in order to feel some relief. I’ll just talk about what I’m doing in the other windows. replied to some tweets. looked through some old google drive sheets, merged a couple. I’m getting tired and frustrated and starting to feel like this was another unproductive session, me wasting my time. But hey, I can still salvage this, maybe in a different sense than I originally intended. I originally intended to get some work done. I was a bit vague about what that work would be. I’ve gotten tired. The smart thing to do now would be to find a way to finish this wordvomit in a way that I find personally satisfying.
Should I talk about being annoyed about other people? But there is no fuck. The real annoyance is inwards.CA would say just do the next right thing. What is the next right thing? When you’re tired, begin the process of winding down. Close the tabs that you can’t do anything about. Going through some old tweets in my one-tab and it’s clear that the context collapsed for a bunch of old things. I think I still haven’t ultimately made my peace with this reality. If you want to preserve something, you have to make an effort to contextualize the thing, because the context collapses.
What now? I’m tired. I’m grumpy. The only job I have left is to forgive myself, and to go out and spend time with my family as fully as I can manage. What went wrong here? I took too long? I didn’t plot in advance precisely what I was going to do? I allowed myself too much freedom to mess around?
Alright so I just stepped out for a moment to go change a diaper and I actually had the space I needed to think about what’s up. I probably sit for too long every time i’m at my computer, and should get up and walk around more often. Anyway what I realized was that I have a bunch of frustrations around critics and criticisms, and that this goes way back, and that I should write a substack post about it. That would be an interesting angle to bring up the tempo book since someone criticized it. so rather than write my own review or overview of the book I can just talk about the criticism. I can talk about the fact that my first band was called Armchair Critic, because it’s so frustrating to see people say shit without doing anything to help. And I get it, there’s the man-in-the-arena quote, and then there are people who use the man in the arena quote to justify being assholes. There’s never any substitute for discernment and judgement. There are no simple rules that apply to everything everywhere all the time. I want to talk about how it’s easy, as an author, or a musician, or a creator, to encounter the worst 0.1% of critics who also happen to be the most vocal, and then internalize what they’re saying: what you’re doing is nothing new, doesn’t add anything, isn’t important, is convoluted, etc etc. There’s a bit of an art to dealing with that. Part of it is that you want to defend yourself, but part of it is also that you might not need defending at all. What if all of those things were true and it was fine, actually? Thinking now of criticisms of Lauren Graham’s book. What if it’s fine, actually? Why do things so often get judged as if they are on trial to be a masterpiece or a masterwork? There’s a status regulation component to that. Beautiful. I’ll copy this out and use it as the body of my next essay.