Journal 2025-05-03

Welcome back to another installation etc. etc.

Went to the Indy race at Barber Motorsports today with the Blaylocks, which was a lot of fun. Extremely muddy, but me and Upton went up on the Ferris wheel which was a blast. He was pretty stone-faced going up and down the whole time, but then when he got off the ride he ran over to everyone and just yelled THAT WAS AMAZING. So I think it’s safe to say he enjoyed it.

I’ve told everyone in the family about the road trip, and I feel like I haven’t really made it clear about what exactly my goal with all of this is. The question is usually something like so are you going to keep traveling after X date or whatever, which is a totally fair question, but it’s sort of the wrong one. It has a subtle implication that this is “just a phase” as if I were some kind of tempestuous teenager or something, when in reality this feels like a permanent change. It’s more like, how am I going to keep the game going next?

And the answer mostly just seems to be “keep going.” What is there to stop for? What does stopping really even mean? I don’t know. But sitting still just kinda feels bad at the moment. Or not bad, but it feels not like me.

One thing I was thinking about writing more about was, oddly enough, the value of writing. But more specifically, about the value of writing purely for oneself. It’s not really just writing, but rather practicing an art form. I was thinking the other day about ways to get people less invested in their phones or in the dopamine casinos, and perhaps one way out of that is through art.

I have a feeling we’ve almost entirely dismissed the practice and appreciation of art as essentially entertainment. I don’t think most people consider what may be instructive or redemptive about watching TV or movies, when in fact there’s ample opportunity for art to be both of those things, and often it is. (Some, of course, may have little capacity for instruction, but so be it.) Learning to be instructed is a skill that many of us — myself firmly included — should continue to develop. But practicing art, even briefly, is often instructive without much intention. Even the act of sitting down and writing daily is instructive. And this is because while consuming art can (but shouldn’t!) be a one-way street, the creation of art is inherently two-way. It forces us into a particular metaphysical trick: that when we create, we put our thoughts out there into the world, and by doing so we realize that those thoughts are not ourselves. Such a reality can be lost on people, or not may not be so clearly defined internally, but it’s essentially impossible to miss on at least some level.

Consumption is inherently self-defining, creation is inherently self-dissolving. Is that really true? There’s plenty of artists out there with gigantic egos and whatnot, although exactly how that manifests in their inner world I have no conception of. Perhaps it’s true in the exact moment of creation, but those more given to naval-gazing may spend a bit more time appreciating their own work in the end as some form of intellectual or creative masturbation. We can’t save everyone.

This is one of the unfortunate failures of the educational system: the creation we do in school is almost certainly a display of our thoughts, but rather the thoughts of others. We’re generally rewarded for writing papers that align with our teachers, to paint in a certain style, to play our music according to predefined tastes. And thus we lose out on the wide world of what could be at any given moment and instead fall back to some external notion of correctness. Without the ability to create wholeheartedly, we do not learn. It’s like going on a first date in which you attempt to hide away all of the strange and unbridled parts of yourself that you don’t feel are worthy of surfacing, and thus you enter into a relationship attempting to slowly disrobe your true identity in such a way as to always be at least partially what you believe your partner wants, and also by extension the kind of person that you think you are. If we never create as our true selves, we may simply just never see it.