2025-04-08 Journal Entry

We’re back baby.

I think I want to write about the Kumano Kodo today. It’s probably worth recapping everything that happened basically, just to jog my own memory about it. I should look back through some old photos of the whole thing, but for now I’m going to basically go off of memory.

The trailhead that most people start at is a short bus ride from Tanabe. I was up early to catch the bus, probably a dozen of us in backpacks and hiking gear. It was dark and misty, exacerbating the cool January air.

I had looked up the distances beforehand and compared them to my own hiking experience. I had done day hikes before, but not back-to-back for many days in a row, and not with a heavy backpack either. It had all of my belongings, plus the extra pounds from several bottles of water and food. But I was very much not prepared for just how exhausting the hike would be. (Suddenly carrying 33% extra body weight and hiking 25kms will be difficult, who knew!)

Uh why does this not feel alive in me right now? I think it’s that I don’t really want to just recap what happened, since I think that’s boring – I hiked, a lot! – but rather it’s interesting to see how it plays out in terms of asceticism, difficulty, purification, etc.

For many of us, our lives are sufficiently easy on a sort of day-to-day basis that we’re greatly benefited by doing something Really Hard. And hard in like a long, extended way. I go to the gym fairly regularly, and that’s hard, especially in small moments. It takes that extra bit of willpower to push through one more rep when you feel like you’re at your limit. But being on the trail means going through moments like this constantly, again and again, having nothing to do but to experience your own suffering constantly, to watch your mind wrestle with pain and misery for miles on end.

I caught my mind attempting to self-sooth by essentially negotiating easier paths forward. What if we just took the bus for these few miles? Should we end one day sooner than planned? It was trying its best to essentially haggle me into doing something easier. But that’s the problem: doing the hard thing is precisely what makes it meaningful. It wouldn’t be meaningful without the sacrifice, without that bit of misery.

Okay it’s clear to me that I haven’t sufficiently primed myself in the way that I would like. I’ve been taking forever to write about the Kumano Kodo and it just feels slightly wrong, so let’s put that aside for now.

I’m just going to essentially start over on my Morning pages – the new target will be 1150 (400 words so far + the usual 750).

I’ve pumped out two full pieces in the last week, and I’d like to get another one out by next week. Getting regular with it seems like a good idea. One a week, maybe alternating between a review and a post or something. Or it doesn’t always have to be a review, since I don’t know if I’ll always have something worth reviewing. Ozeki’s novel was somewhat anomalous in that way.

I’ve had just enough caffeine to not keel over and die, but I still am undercaffeinated. It’s essentially time for me to really put aside the caffeine, I’m simply having too much of it. A lot of my caffeine consumption at home is also another form of entertaining myself to death, anything to get out of the house and so on. It’s just a reason to go walking down to CVS or wherever.

That’s something I am looking forward to, though. Walking down to the library, sipping a drink from CVS, killing a whole day in the library like Benny Oh. That will harken back to my old summer days, I think.

Someone is interested in renting the house for 2 years, which I think sounds interesting. A bit of an anti-inflation hedge, and it’d be unfurnished so I may make only like $200 a month, but that’s better than nothing. It’ll cover the mortgage and insurance and let the house appreciate a bit. I think that would work out nicely.

It’s a bit funny that I consider myself such a non-creative person when I literally went to school for music, like I performed a bunch which requires some degree of creativity, depending on what exactly you call creativity. That’s perhaps an interesting question – what exactly is creativity? What makes one creative? What is the creative mood?

Caffeine withdrawal sucks ass. This is just as much a reason to not have caffeine as before. I need a Natural High etc., I need to be never drinking any more caffeine than what’s in like a green tea or coca cola. Same thing with drinking – it kinda sucks. None of these things are without consequences, and so as much as I may like them in the moment, life is Just Better without them.

[Later – 6pm]

Alright I’m back. I had some more coffee later in the day, and while I’m still probably slightly under-caffeinated, I’m more in the kinda realm of normalcy.

I’d like to keep on going with some fiction. Ideally getting my 750 words out. But I also am trying to spend some time thinking about some of these characters that I’ve kinda dreamt up – a guy chasing after the world’s greatest high, a corporate lady addicted to caffeine, a man running off into the woods attempting to flee from his partner (the more I think about this guy, the more I just end up ripping off Firewatch, or wanting to anyways), someone meditating on a bunch of random shit, someone waiting to hear back on a job. Some of these people are terribly similar, since at least two of these are job-related, the meditation guy is kinda everyone all at once, and the jerk-off guy has enough weird woo woo spiritual shit with his deity yoga and all that that we really don’t need another woo woo spiritual guy. So in essence, there’s a hippie/woo druggie chasing an exquisite high, an office worker who is addicted to caffeine and to their phone, and Firewatch Guy (a.k.a. Henry).

Ooohh, it would be a bit of a wink to call the Firewatch guy Henry.

Anyways, so my thought about the caffeine/alcohol lady (I think she’s a lady – it was originally two different characters, one male and one female, but the female came first, so Caroline it is for now). I’d like to investigate that impulse a bit, because I think it’s something fairly common, this balancing back and forth between caffeine and alcohol, the two socially-accepted drugs (well, nicotine I guess, and TV and porn and etc) as some weird attempt at navigating our way into the Perfect State or something. For me, it’s like we pound the caffeine to eak out every ounce of productivity, to force ourselves into this Productivity Slot throughout the work day and to power through any moments where we feel the need to rest. But then we almost overoptimize ourselves into Work Mode, and so then we struggle to make our way back out of it, to get into a state where we can really rest. And so alcohol becomes the other side of that balance and we start treating caffeine and alcohol as if they were balancing sides of a system, caffeine as the sympathetic nervous system and alcohol as the parasympathetic or something alone those lines.