i finally updated my blog categories and architecture in a way that i don’t entirely hate. i switched up the categories a couple of times, and settled on “try and put together proto-books,” meaning collections of posts that could maybe become a book someday. I ended up with ‘desire paths’, ‘heartsong’, ‘dominoes’, ‘copes’, ‘(things are) knowable’, and ‘word magic’. I sorted most of the posts into these categories, then noticed that i typically had some ‘anchor post’ for each category. so i then put all the links to all the posts of each category in each of the anchor posts… effectively making the categories unnecessary. so then i deleted the categories. what i have now is a kind of tree structure with branching paths. it doesn’t actually capture all of my writing– i feel like it covers maybe 20-30%– but I feel like I have a system now where I can add more branches in a way that doesn’t compromise the whole.
so what’s next? what’s ahead? in the longer term i’d also like to do some form of this for my wordvomits. i don’t think i want to complicate the wordvomit blog itself with meta posts on there (here), so what i’ll do is… i’ll come up with the meta-structure on the main blog, and basically quote and cite /1000/’s posts as if it were someone else’s blog. i think that’s a fairy ideal way to do it.
i also find myself thinking about other books i’ve been meaning to write, and how maybe i can weave paths through existing posts. that way i can have multiple starting points and you can read like 5-15 visakanv ‘books’ through blogpost collections. high voltage living. unlearning coercion. frame studies. everything can just be built out from this current tree structure, and they can all coexist without necessarily ‘hurting’ each other.
the cool thing about working on this is how it’s made the more important posts more apparent. obliqueness is important. word magic is important. wretchedness needs a home. i can probably have a post that’s a guided tour through /archives/, that would be worthwhile. should it be on this blog though? maybe, i don’t really care. the point is to let this current process guide me towards the realizations that want to be realized. clicking through recent vomits and reminding myself again and again that the goal is a sense of aliveness, to avoid ‘deadzones’, and maybe here i’ll repeat the story from my recent househunting of the two houses that made me feel most uncomfortable. one was full of toys and trinkets and other figurines, to an excessive degree. the other was a posh, shiny, satin place with designer handbags. both of them felt like deadzones, in a way. neither was inviting. both suggested to some degree “you’re not supposed to be here”, or “you’re not welcome here”, more like “look at all this stuff! look, and despair!”
and i have to ask myself… to what degree is my body of work like this? how much of it is junk that’s just insisting upon itself? I’m still shaken and traumatized from my past experience of losing my old blogs and writing, and as a result i have clung on to everything… but for what? what is the goal? I want something artful. I want something inviting and collaborative. I want something that feels comforting to sift through. i wonder if this is a goal that’s possible to achieve with these wordvomits. i imagine part of it would have to be about hyperlinking. well- probably before i even think about those things, i’ll want to review a bunch of posts again. should i read from scratch all over again, or should i look up some past reviews? well, this itself is a feelings challenge. i just clicked on my roam page for the reading project on there and right away i saw that the 0700s were from around the time that i left my job. that would be interesting to revisit, wouldn’t it? In 0706, on 2018jul5 I wrote, ” I felt like many of those essays would have required reading and research, and I didn’t quite feel up to it at the time. And I worried, just for a moment, that maybe I’m not a writer.” I imagine a lot of that stuff can now be expedited with chatGPT or Grok. And I don’t mean to have it do the writing for me– I would never do that ever– but rather, to ‘soften the ground’ by presenting me with some of the reading and research. I was very glad to do twitter threads then, in 2018. Now I’ve gotten mostly tired of them. And that’s okay too, times change. I want to write substack essays now. And I’d like to finish this wordvomit project in an artful manner that feels true to me. 0707 is about framing things, which feels exceptionally relevant now that I’m writing a substack called framestudies. So yeah it’s becoming clearer that I could get a lot of out rereading old wordvomits. I’m just too… fixated on the last frame I had, lol. There really is always this recursive thing where any work I’m doing, needs some version of itself to be true, to be described, to be manifested, to be exercised, in order for the work to come alive. I cannot in good conscience do frame studies until I get adept (again?) and reframing and experimenting with frames.
It’s possible that tomorrow I will have a new point of interest. That’s fine. I trust that sooner or later I will circle around all of the things that matter to me. I’ve noticed that over the years I’ve written nearly identical tweets in response to similar stimuli. Even 25 years of writing later, I’m finding that I still need to learn to trust the process. Trust that something that slips away will return later in some other form if it’s good. And right now, it’s 135am so it’s time for me to go to bed.