2025-04-17 Journal Entry

I haven’t written in a little while, and that’s fine since I’m very much in the process of Figuring Out my House, but I also miss morning pages and the sense of clarity and accomplishment they give me, so we should get back on that. I’m doing them without any headphones or music at the moment, and it’s strange to me the sound of my own fingers on the keyboard. The rest of the library sounds quiet in comparison, and I know that it’s only kinda loud because of how close I am – and otherwise Mac built-in keyboards are generally quite quiet anyways – but they still seem disruptively loud to me.

I have a guy aggressively trying to rent my house out, and I want to just ghost him but he did literally show up at my house the other day, so I kinda don’t want to do that. I’m thinking I just lie to him and say that it’s rented. Part of me is like vaguely concerned that I’ll get sued or whatever for housing discrimination, but also this dude is suspicious as fuck, literally showing up to my house, Thorne said he sent him a whole bunch of weird redacted information and so on. I’m all about privacy, but there’s a certain level at which you should expect the person renting you a house to know a decent amount about you, at least like your driver’s license information and income levels. And there’s another person considering the lease anyways, so that is what it is.

What else to say? I now need to find an apartment to rent, and quickly, so I’m just spamming people on Zillow. That’s what I really should be doing right now – responding to property managers – and I do have an appointment for tomorrow, but then again I also just know this whole process will be a headache. I’m gonna have to explain to everyone my financial situation, which is going to be non-standard and otherwise raise some eyebrows about the whole thing, but perhaps they’ll be understanding. Worst case, money solves all problems, and I think doing something interesting like offering to pay the whole year up front my assuage some concerns about my ability to rent the place. Most of these are like $800-$1000 a month, so dropping $12k to not have to think about it for a year sounds like a nice idea to me.

I really do feel kinda bad about not writing, but I think I do have pretty good reasons at the moment, which is that I would ideally like to have a place to live, if you know what I mean. After that, I want to get to outlining and all of that. I think I want some kind of multi-main-character sort of thing, and something to do with, I don’t know, this. This simultaneous smallness, the feebleness of the individual person, the way that we’re all going to die, that coupled with the unbridled infinite, the constant becoming of the world. That juggling those two things as part of the human attention feels at once the single most important thing we can do as well as the most difficult thing. How strange it is to be approaching this sort of thing at all. And that societally we’ve really lost that, I mean really lost it, the ability to see clearly and to take responsibility for our own actions in the world. There’s always our attempts at pushing morality outwards, onto our institutions and so on, institutions that we simultaeneously don’t trust and also entrust with being the caretakers of our moral stances. Legality as a purity test. But then it’s not just our relationship to the government but also to the church or to religious institutions, which we’ve broadly put aside – perhaps rightly, given their known corruption and power struggles and so on – but then also are unable to replace with any other meaningful moral system. Whatever other moral system we might acquire probably requires some kind of long, attenuated thinking and attention-paying. If we otherwise just wait to be told what is right and wrong, we’re simply rejecting, rejecting, rejecting, and in that we lose the ability to cling and to hold on to any sort of ideals or Righteousness or Something Good.

I don’t know what to do about all of that, but I can see a world in which someone must create the rules, must think through moral systems from scratch. Sonny Boy but with an adult trying to manage it all – someone to be whatever the mysterious old wheelchair’d guy does in that show. Someone to play the role of God or Overseer, of a shepherd to guide us all back home.