Journal 2025-05-09

I’ve stopped for the day here in Lake Colorado City, in Colorado City, Texas. It is perhaps one of the more confusing park names I’ve seen: Lake Colorado City State Park. The “City State” bit makes me think it’s some kind of city-state in the ancient Athenian sense, like it chose to separate from the rest of thetas to be its very own thing. This would be, of course, very on-brand for a Texas city.

But I’m gonna camp here for the night and then make my way on over to Big Bend tomorrow. The 5 hour drive was actually incredibly easy, and this time around I did it with no audiobooks or music for the vast majority of it. Just looking at the road, some audio memos I wrote on The Way of Kings and some other just random ideas, but otherwise it was just me and the road.

Driving along these huge stretches of grass, no hills just grass and trees all the way to the horizon, gave me a better understanding of the sort of emotions in Blood Meridian. It’s easy to see how one could go mad this way, to lose all sense of relation to the human world, how one could go mad and just wander the plains endlessly. Finding a town out in the wilderness like that must truly seem like a miracle. You can drive an hour at full speed and barely make it between the two, and even then that town may just be six abandoned building and an old guy running a tire shop. Going mad is practically the default.

I assume it has something to do with solitude. Solitude slowly loosens the grip of society on the mind. It loosens that judgement and shame that binds us all together. In that way, solitude can make us whole, make us truly ourselves, hence why it’s such a common feature of monastic traditions: Thai Buddhist masters trudging off to live in the forest, Christian monastics spending years in those small stone hermitage buildings. And by the same token, that loosening of shame can make one appear insane — or perhaps actually become insane. Empathy and social cohesion are defining features of our primate heritage, our ability to co-regulate with the people around us. We learn from each other’s nervous systems, each other’s routines and habits and skills. And by shunning all of that off, we may slowly devolve into madness.

Of course a certain type of madness may not be so bad. “Crazy wisdom” is what Chogyam Trungpa called it, the kind of wisdom that laughs in the face of norms and regularity. To go down that route is neither good nor bad, but it does require the acknowledgment of a certain solitary existence. Haruki Murakami talks about this with being a writer, that writing requires a certain amount of solitude for him, but that that same solitude is almost like a poison, so he goes on runs as a kind of antidote. Pushing himself, routine, these things keep him alive.

Anyways, I don’t really know what all else to go off of there. Thoughts on Solitude is probably everything one needs to know about it. That’s obviously not true, but whatever. There’s probably a whole host of reasons for solitude — focus, religion, silence, recovery, escape, banishment. Being castaway and having no choice but to befriend a volleyball. Many such cases.

Blah blah blah, some words. The image of some huge fat man in a suit made of meat is all I see in my mind. (People from the future: that’s a Blood Meridian reference. I’m not that crazy (yet).) The wind out here feels incredibly nice. I’ve gone full shirtless, sitting under this little awning that my campsite has. It feels absolutely wonderful out here. I thought it would be excessively hot, but I think I’m still firmly in that spring time weather that it feels nice. This is truly excellent news for the rest of my trip, which will slowly get more and more north, so hopefully that means I won’t completely keel over and die from heat stroke.

I probably should also be slightly careful when I work out. The weights that Fitbod has me doing for leg presses is quite a lot, and when I stand up after doing them, I get extremely light headed. Lowering the weight helps, so I probably just need to keep it right around 200 for a little while, because 220 nearly made me pass out.

Anyways, word count done. Peace out, my dearest.