Journal 2025-05-18
I am outside a Starbucks where my ears are getting blasted by music from the 80s, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but is only because I’m kinda tired and every little thing subtly rubs me the wrong way. This is almost entirely because someone honked at me earlier for something, which just makes me run those scenarios over and over again in my mind. That’s pretty unproductive, not gonna lie.
Oh, but I’m gonna have dinner with Craig Mod! He invited a bunch of Special Projects members out to a celebratory dinner, and I’m on the list. Sunglasses emoji.
I think it’ll be cool, mostly cool to just see the little community of people who all have revolved around Craig’s work. It’ll be interesting largely because he pulls from a seemingly broad swath of people — just going off of the folks chatting in The Good Place, there’s walkers, Japanophiles, photography nerds, adoptees, writers, and a bit of everything else. So I have kinda no idea who will show up there. But it shall indeed be fun!
Anyways, what more do I have to say. I’m kinda tired. I just always want to be sleeping, or thinking about writing, or something. My goal for today is basically to get out half of an outline. And I should probably also get some notes out for an essay, either a travelogue or something else. I also wanted to see if I could feed my hikes into my blog or something. Like have a kottke.org-style scroll that incorporates recent hikes or something to that effect. And I should also do some planning for Spain. But the novel bits are first priority.
I wonder what I have to say about recovering from burnout. In some ways, I’m really probably not the expert on this topic. But I bet there’s something about the F&IG bit about being fixed to be able to return to the playing field being an aspect of finite games. There’s something there, and then there’s probably something about Vonnegut’s advice to make shit, to make anything at all. Which feels important as well. The people I know who haven’t totally burned out from there job tend to fair much more well when they have some kind of hobby or otherwise just Make Stuff. But I’m really bad at compartmentalizing all of those parts of my life. I feel like I just need to dive into making stuff some more.
I was just reflecting on my preoccupation with feeling understood. I haven’t been able to find the source on this, but someone attributed a quote to Thich Nhat Hanh that was something like this: “If your love for your child is not infused with understanding, it will not feel like love to them.” That’s so real for me. Writing is at once both that and not that at all. I write to understand myself, and hopefully transitively for others to understand me as well, but I don’t explicitly write with other people in mind. It’s almost always as a way of clarifying my own thoughts and feelings about the world.
Everything is action. There’s a moment in The Pale King where a character talks about what it’s like on some drug, some moment where he was “doubling,” basically just noting what he’s doing in any given moment. I am aware that I am sitting slightly hunched in the Starbucks across from Joshua Tree, listening halfway to the music piped through the speakers while still trying to piece together the topic of discussion of these two older women next to me who sound as if they’re checking up on each others medical conditions. Or something. Anyways, I was thinking about this for some reason — oh, because I was thinking about doubling because it helps to clarify that inaction is a form of action. I am avoiding thinking about a difficult decision by writing about other things, I feel a tightness in my chest that originates in my decision to forego taking decisive action with respect to Something Or Other etc.
Anyways, I’m gonna be spending more time in LA than I originally intended, so I should probably figure that one out sometime soon. By “figure that one out” I mean “figure out what I’m going to do.”
It’s perhaps interesting that the more time I spend on thinking about the novel, the less I think of other more interesting essay topics. I should still devote a bit of time to the essays — those are fun and light and keep me producing shit. The last time I published was almost a week ago. We gotta keep up that cadence. A travelogue would be good, before my week in LA. On the docket it goes.