2023-01-30 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Monday 🗓 Date: January 30, 2023 📅 Week: Jan 30 – Feb 5, 2023

I slept like shit. I was wide awake for most of the night, even though I think I had a reasonably solid wind-down in the evening. I stayed away from screens, I read for a bit before going to bed, I listened to some white noise to chill out, but my eyelids just never got heavy. I tried to sleep for a while, but after an hour it was pretty pointless. I should’ve gotten out of bed earlier, maybe that would’ve helped, since I started to actually get tired after reading for another 45 minutes or so. Although it was well after midnight at that point, so

Anyways, it’s immediately obvious on days like these just how valuable sleep is. I feel like my mind is tucked farther back in my skull, so far away that it cannot be reached. I’m writing this with my eyes red from dryness. The only thing keeping me here really is that the sunlight alarm is good enough that I actually was awake when I woke up. I had really arrived when I woke up instead of waiting for my body to catch up for a bit. But I also am just straight up not having a good time, so there’s that.

I did some free writing for the novel yesterday. Just showing up for that was valuable, and I should get some more time in today, even if it’s just staring at a blank page. I can feel the wheels turning in there, that I was still fleshing out the details of the scene in my mind even as I was going to bed. (Perhaps that’s why I didn’t sleep!) I also recognize that there are many moons ahead if this is to become a Real Thing. Perhaps it’s a sign of getting older, perhaps it’s a sign of having done this enough times, or perhaps it’s some other interior growth, but I’m acknowledging so much easier the fact that this is just A Thing with writing, and that I really am working on consistently sustaining my interest in it moreso than strictly getting words on the page. I’m just inclining myself towards Doing the Thing every day, and that’s about all I can ask for. I feel like there’s some wisdom in that, or perhaps not wisdom so much as learning from my mistakes. (Is there a difference?)

An opening scene of cursing the gods. The king’s gods, at least. The rain washing away the soot and ash, the clear moon watching silently overhead. A terrible day for rain. One brother kicking down the stone statues of the gods, the other softly pulling away the smoldering rubble in search of something. A memento of their father, perhaps. A ring, or a rifle, or maybe just to see what was left behind. I think the singing thing I had in there before is maybe a bit too fantastical. He can sing at some point, but it doesn’t need to be so ✨magical✨ (or such a direct ripoff of In the House Upon the Dirt lmao).

Where do they go from there? What would one do in a situation like that? Blind rage may lead one to attempt to take out their wrath. To wait out the early morning and find the smoke trails of an army encampment and one-by-one slit their throats as they walk into the woods to take a piss. To steal a sword and rush in swinging.

The wise one may be more pragmatic. Find food, build shelter. Where’s the nearest clean water. Or it may be to grieve the lost. The fire was a funeral pyre, but an ugly one. Let us remember them as they were. What memorial fire would take it’s place? Something small, intense? Burning something like a leaf mandala, something representative of the bigger-than-us? To grieve is to let their souls free, lest they cling to us in terror.

And even then, where do they go. The nearest town that takes them, I suppose. Some small village by the river, taking the jobs they can. They had been turned away from so many towns along the way, so they were in no place to turn down an inn and a job. That’s where they may begin to find some comfort, begin to find something outside of just the two of them. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves — there are many moons of searching, of turning away, of anger and soothing in those days.

I’m so tired, I’m just letting thoughts roll out of my mind at the moment. “Thoughts” is maybe overkill, these are like the raw mind-sensations, pure sensation without embrace. Imagine a world of that. Hmm,

I’m just putting these little separators everywhere. I feel like I can tell when I’ve said my piece about something, but having them all spew out into undifferentiated paragraphs seems weird. Dear readers, what do you think. Like comment and subscribe for more content like this.

Alright, I’ve actually gone through this one today pretty quickly — writing about what your writing about turns out to be pretty good territory! — but I’m still officially kicking it into turbo mode.

I’m on run this week, which means I’ll officially want to die come Wednesday evening. I was looking forward to it at first, as I often do since it means having some unstructured time to do random stuff like my whole pay script migration, but I also feel like I’m getting nudges from folks to be a DRI and shit. I honestly just don’t care at all about that sort of thing. If it didn’t affect how much money I was making day-to-day, I don’t think I’d really care at all. The more I work, the less I really care about that sort of high-level decision making process, and instead I just want to crank shit out.

But anyways, I think to some degree that’s why I’m drawn to writing. It’s taking some warm-up time, but it does feel more like effort ⇒ output in some way, which is great. I can be solitary, I don’t need to think about “organizational planning” or “OKRs” or “KTLO” or “operational excellence,” all of which are important but make me want to throw myself off of a cliff. Just let me make shit. Please.

I should have known that to some degree I was doomed from the start here. I think my actual job is just somewhere more laid-back. I don’t really care about scaling the GDP of the internet. That’s not what makes me feel alive. It doesn’t even need to make me feel alive, it just needs to keep me interested, and in some ways the real KTLO is keeping my lights on, keeping my other interests alive until I don’t need to do this work anymore. It’ll happen, I know it, but it won’t happen soon, so I’ve got to grit my teeth a bit. Plus an IPO (or something) will happen, so I should at least stick around for that.

I think my ideal job really is just solitary. I say that knowing full well that I could find that magical, somewhat solitary job and come to hate it in six months. I mostly just want less BS corporate structure. If I want to spend time with my coworkers, I hate that’s it has to be couched as a 1:1 “productive meeting” or something. I hate the idea of “demonstrating business value,” as if “business value” isn’t the most degrading pair of words in the English language. Do I understand why we have it? Sure. Do I think it comes from an organization getting too big for its britches? Absolutely. It should be obvious that what we’re doing is valuable, even when the value-add is ambiguous or not metric driven. There are so many buzzwords in today’s Morning pages that I kidna want to delete it. These have no place in my Notion. But that’s the way these things go when that’s our option.

So I’m officially entering into my “idly daydreaming about leaving my day job” era. Although I say “idly daydreaming” where in reality I’m actually writing daily. I don’t want to change my perspective from “creating because I want to” into “creating so I can leave my job,” but it feels like becoming more creative is making me less interested in the non-creative bits.

Anyways, dear readers, rant over. I’m leaving to go take a shower and get some breakfast, and nobody can stop me. Then I’ll sit at my tiny little desk and do my tiny little job, and then hit the keyboard later on in the evening. You’re not inferior to anyone. I love you, see you in the morning.