2023-01-28 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Saturday 🗓 Date: January 28, 2023 📅 Week: Jan 23 – Jan 29, 2023

Hello World. It’s currently 4:45am and I slept like ass. I don’t know if it was the late-afternoon dosage of caffeine that got me yesterday, but my sleep was absolutely horrible. That said, it’s not so much that I feel absolutely horrid or anything — rather, I just feel like I’m not rested. I never know how to describe this feeling, but it’s almost like your bones are hollow, your muscles a ghost of their former selves. I suppose if my intention was to wake up at 5, then waking up at 3 (or let’s be honest — 2:30) isn’t the worst possible thing. I was just hoping for a bit more energy since there’s quite a bit I wanted to do today. There’s the Intersection board meeting this morning, which I think I will struggle heartily through, and I was hoping to make it to a book reading afterwards. I think I’ll have to play that one as it lies.

I made some tea this morning. I’m usually too lazy to make my own tea, aside from perhaps a late-night peppermint tea, but I didn’t get enough sleep and need some caffeine before I my actual breakfast. Folks, caffeine is indeed a drug. I should kick this habit. I just need something to replace yerba as my default morning drink. I could definitely slow my roll to the occasional coffee in the morning and that would be enough, but I’d like for my average day to be little more than some green tea.

Tea is also a wonderful drink. I’ve spurned coffee for so long and basically gave up on enjoying it, but green tea, jasmine tea, some earl grey, all wonderful. Plus, preparing tea is far more enjoyable. You don’t need filters, you don’t need a whole coffee machine — you just need some tea bags and hot water. Boom, done. You can go the whole gaiwan loose leaf tea route, but that’s not what I want to do in the morning.

I was thinking of a weird dream sequence for this novel idea I’ve got, and there’s plenty of room for whatever the fuck I want it to be. I’ve found myself slowly pulling from a bunch of different sources, like the Dragon from Grendel, the episode of Spongebob where Squidward ends up in that vast white expanse after breaking a time machine or whatever, “Universal Love, said the Cactus Person,” and more. I think that’s a pretty good spread.

I also think leaning a bit on dream sequences but couching them within the frame narrative of someone in a coma/slipping into and out of consciousness will give me enough freedom to do weird stuff while keeping the outer narrative vaguely linear. Who knows, I’m still in the outlining phase of things, so no promises yet.

God damn do I want a breakfast sandwich right now. Curse you, San Francisco, for never having restaurants open, but also curse me for not keeping any food at home.

I’m distracted largely because I’m not so sure what to write about at the moment. I’m kinda stalling right now as to what to put in these morning pages for today. I’m pretty distracted, hungry, and just trying to refocus my day. Maybe I should shower first, that might help, but I also don’t want to do that until I’ve finished these pages.

I’ve put probably more work than necessary into getting my Notion set up a bit better, but realistically I don’t think it’s actually impacted my life. Having a more robust writing section will be good though — right now, things are scrawled into my Moleskine, so taking some time to organize notes into Notion would probably be wise. The Morning Pages organization is better, certainly a step up from just having a page with the date as the title, but I also don’t really care if they’re disorganized. As are the contents, so is the Notion. It’s not like I’m going to go back and look at them hardly ever probably. That’s the way it should be. Whatever, at least now I can look at a pretty calendar and see it fill up with stuff.

Anyways, I came here to finish my morning pages and drink my tea, and I’m all out of tea. One of the weird things about life is that so many of us are basically addicted to YouTube (or sub YouTube with TikTok, Instagram, or what have you). I recently kicked my TV out of my living room purely because it had become a YouTube machine and was just playing random crap all the time. I would sit on the couch and zone out, watching the same dozen videos over and over and over again. I felt like a toddler watching Cocomelon. Damn, Cocomelon is addicting even to me. Someone told me that those shows are designed to keep attention by switching perspectives every 4 seconds to maximize holding your attention, and I think that’s true. But I also think that’s why we like YouTube and TikTok so much — they’re quick and draw us in. They reward us by making us not have to think about anything. I feel like this is the critique given for basically every bit of media ever, from TV to magazines and newspapers, but it also feels true. Constantly consuming media keeps one from really having to actually go back into their lives. Especially with the rise of Twitch and social content, we can build these parasocial relationships where we don’t even know the goddamn people but they still feel like a meaningful part of our lives. That’s fucked up. Good riddance to Twitter, and I hope YouTube is next. It certainly does keep me entertained throughout the day, and gives some low-level stimulation, but I wonder if it’s worth it. I rationalize it by keeping these lofi hip-hop channels going a lot of the time, but the amount of time I spend watching Twitch compilations is somewhat unnecessary. Heh, somewhat, okay bud.

I’m in the middle of a transitionary moment, and I’ll just acknowledge that I guess. I came out of retreat being really sensitive to a bunch of things, and I’m using that sensitivity as an opportunity to reset. Out with the old, in with the new. Retreats are cool, and I should do them again. They’re just a good reminder of this is the way things can be. You don’t have to do what everyone’s doing, you can decide what you’re comfortable with and set your boundaries there, you can stretch yourself to do what you didn’t think you could, you can find your way yourself. You can dig up the dirt at the bottom of it all and toss it around. You can lay down a fresh layer of something else. You can plant seeds. You can dig past it to see that it wasn’t the bottom after all. Relatedly, many of the things I considered to be really fundamental just weren’t. Stories we tell ourselves are everything, and you’re not beholden to the one that’s right in front of you. You can go down as many layers as you want and start over if you like. It’s never too late. Fuck yeah.

So anyways, I feel like story ideas are bubbling up. I’ve got more input, I’ve got more structure, I’ve got a bit of a better map on how these things go. And as more things bubble up, the urge to continue working on them gets stronger and stronger. I was daydreaming about the story the other day. Daydreaming. That’s not the way things normally go, but I’m glad that’s changing. But it does require me to put the fucking phone down and just sit still. I was in the bathtub and just stared at my toes for a while and thought about a talking cactus in a dream desert. I thought about a dragon, iron-scaled, lazy but wise. I thought about a doctor baffled by an impossible diagnosis. I thought about a mother and father, clutched in each others arms, making a choice on behalf of “their child, their only child” (to quote the Metta Sutta) that would ultimately be his cosmic demise. And all of that came up from sitting in the bath. There’s a world of potential that I feel like I’ve barely even poked at, but it’s there. It tingles, it grows, it sits quietly beneath the surface of the skin waiting to pounce.

Anyways, I think it’s about high time for my breakfast. Hail and Farewell, my friend.