2025-04-25 Journal Entry

Type type type, let my ilttle fingers just goooooooo. I don’t know. I just woke up, and I’m trying my darndest to not really do anything besides make my breakfast, so that I can get straight to writing and get that juicy dopamine injected into my synapses.

Sometimes I feel like knowing too much about how our brains work might be a bad thing, and that somthing inside me may work better if I instead just imagined this as emulating the great writers or something. I don’t know of many writers who started writing late at night or anything – it seems like basically everybody gets up, has some caffeine if that’s their thing, and then gets to writing for a few hours. I guess Brandon Sanderson doesn’t do that, but he’s probably anomalous in a whole bunch of other ways. He also gets liek 8 solid hours of writing done every day, which most people don’t seem to. Actually, he does start writing in the morning, if I remember correctly, it’s just that his morning is late since he wakes up at like noon or whatever, and then he just so happens to stay awake until midnight writing.

But I just wonder if there’s a part of us as social creatures that values emulation, and that with the scientific revolution we’ve, perhaps rightly, started saying “no, you should start writing early in the morning because of your dopamine receptors” instead of “because that’s what Oliver Wilde did.”

Anyways, I’ve continue to go back and forth on several next steps. I think the reality is that what I ’m sort of avoiding is the judgement of my family all over again, just like when I left the first time. It’s like, oh now I need to be going on some big adventure somewhere or whatever, but now I have the inverse sort of problem: I want to just go out into a cabin and do nothing. Of course I actually am not totally sure that’s what I need, since I felt like I got a decent amount of traction going out and doing stuff like the Camino (or rather, the Kumano Kodo). Aaaaaaahahhhhhhhh how does one really make decisions.

So let’s plan through the limitations step-by-step. The next thing I basically need to be back home for is probably the weekend of 7/12, which is the family lake weekend. We’ll see how that goes, but that’s almost in two months. That leaves me somewhere in the ballpark of two months or so to get back in time for that. I could do a lot by then, but maybe just bouncing around Europe is the way to go. It’s the off season in SEA at the moment since it’s the rainy season, and I think I can always make a quick decision if I decide to do the Camino or something to that affect. Plus it’d let me go see the Berlin Phil again, which I would die for, and probably go to Italy and chill on the coast or something. Plus I could go to the Irish coast, probably see some cool shit in England. I don’t know. I also only have two months, so knocking out like Germany/Switzerland/Italy or something like that could totally be sufficient to do in such a short period of time.

I just have this gnawing sense of wanting to really regain my attention again and get to writing. I feel like such an asshole for continuing to say that and then not really writing, but it’s the goddamn truth. My mind is just so resistant to getting all of that momentum going, resistant to the idea of just barfing out something bad until it’s good again. But in a way that’s how the whole creative process really goes. If you don’t know what to say or exactly what you want something to look like, you have to get it onto the page, relentlessly until it’s done. Once it’s out there, you can always throw it away afterwards or completely change it if it’s completely bad, but you have to get it out there first, or else you’ll never really have the option to do anything at all with it.

Part of me wants to make some progress on the spiritual path and all that, but part of me also feels like if I never actually try doing all of this writing stuff, then I’ll never really know or otherwise make anything concrete out of my life, and that feels more real and important to me, to have something that at the end of my life I’ll be able to point to and say that I did that, I made something for the world. And if the world doesn’t want it, then so be it, but it feels important and necessary to rip something out of my chest so it’ll just shut the fuck up. Sitting and meditatting for a thousand hours might help, bu there’ll always be that what-if in the back of my mind, and that probably won’t go away until I remove the if part and make it into something real.

I don’t realy even know what I’m writing right now, but I’m going to just completely let my mind go and just put some words on the page. Coffee shops are a bit of a weird place. People are just as and also infinitely more varied than one could expect. I could probably put every single person here into a bucket – the middle-aged lawyer dad in a polo shirt, probably about to go play golf; the brunette with the uniqlo bag and a flowy top; the blond mom with her hair tied back, probably feeling like she’s in a rush to prepare for some Friday evening event when she in fact has essentially nothing else to do for the rest of the day. I don’t know, I’m just making all of this shit up.

I was thinking the other day what BPYO must be like from Zander’s perspective. Every moment is so multifaceted; I can imagine him up on stage, arms stretched wide, an audience electric, young talent (seemingly) hanging on his every word. There’s this impulse of power, but “power” to the powerless is imagined to be oppressive inherently, as if it tears you apart when it flwos through your veins – but for Zander, it feels rather like freedom, like self-determination. That kind of power is more about getting your way. It’s a little microcosm of the world, in a way; all the trappings and affects of money and authority and audience. But in order to get that power, he must have sold himself over and over again to get there.

Is it a fulfilling job to be a motivational speaker? I imagine so. I think one can at least delude themselves into feeling so. And perhaps to some degree, I also discount their own feelings and ability about the whole thing. Zander undoubtedly loved it, I think. To take his emotions seriously is somewhat difficult from my standpoint, but he did build substantial organization, and much of that is clearly his own money.

So in a way it’s a weird thing – the youth orchestra is essentially entirely his own. He and Wyss collectively make up nearly half of the organization’s funding. Hansjorg Wyss is the other half, and that’s another world I haven’t really even touched on before. I entirely forgot that Rosalynd, BZ’s ex-wife, was Wyss’s partner (details? not sure), and that I guess since Roz and BZ were still connected somehow, that that’s maybe why she convinced him to support it?

Also interesting to note – Roz died in 2023, apparently it happened “suddenly while swimming with her husband, Hansjorg Wyss”. Was anybody around to see that? What’s up there? Also apparently Wyss’s foundation owns 100 million acres of US land. Well, “owns” isn’t quite right – it has paid to help the US national parks foundation to buy that land. But that’s still a potentially interesting bit of juice to squeeze if I go down the whole money laundering route. I also think I need to heavily obfuscate who these people are – these facts make it fairly obvious who I’m talking about.

But I can imagine an interesting love/power triangle between the three. Ben running the orchestra, Roz using donations as a carrot for Ben’s orchestra or potentially being some kind of interesting romantic ploy, and Wyss trying to launder money through to further his US-based interests. Hmmmm.