morning computer 004
Who Are We, Really?
Sometimes, alone, I feel like a ghost. Unmasked, I walk through the world as if I’m embodying impressions. I channel the wind, the sadness the rain brings, the spring gloom. My identity is composed of memories, of spirits of places, of things I tell myself, and of things others tell me. I know it’s all in flux. The masks are shifting.
…this reminds me of:
Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me, Paumanok there and then as I thought the old thought of likenesses, These you presented to me you fish-shaped island, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk’d with that electric self seeking types.
💬 from Walt Whitman’s “As I Ebb’d With The Ocean of Life”
In times of crisis, we set out to find ourselves. Perhaps we will find whatever it is that constitutes us out there in the Himalayas, or somewhere out west. Perhaps we’ll find ourselves in another person who teaches us to see, or in the sun that sets over the Pacific ocean. Often we’ll gain access to another part of ourselves through a story that inspires us.
But this quest to “find yourself” is somewhat self-defeating when the more precise goal ought to be “to create yourself,”
Discovery: Searching for a fixed point; you can miss it, never find it
Creation: Always happening, and especially when you realize it, and do with intention. Never has to end. Is complete when you say so…
In Hinduism, the ego is a trapping of the physical world. The body is often likened to a flesh tomb, and the ego is like the glass that contains our true self and shapes it. The true self—the atman —is a silent, conscious witness. It exists within every creature at its core.
I really enjoyed this piece, and find myself returning to it. I’ve read it two or three times already, and though it doesn’t necessarily contain any revolutionary, knock-me-off-my-chair epiphanies, it does that amazing and crucial task of giving form and structure to the kind of wordless questions and wonderings I often have, and allows me to re-engage with them, chew on them in more tangible forms than when they are swimming in my head…
Source: Who Are We Really?
Doldrums Defied: A January Recap
morning computer 003
from: Year End: On moving to the woods
Something I’m coming to know in my bones is this: I’ve come back to what matters over and over again, even when the timescale exceeds my limited perspective. I have every reason to have faith in myself.
Lucy Bellwood in Winter Bottleship, 2022/2023
[…] realising, properly, for the first time, that one day in the future I would no longer be here on earth, existing as the small but very definite and palpable thing I had become.
Tom Cox in Old Photos
The Origin of the arch-book
What began as an impulsive project on a Friday afternoon turned into a 4 - 5 day extravaganza.
The arch-book is actually a Dell Chromebook 11 from a few years ago. It is old enough that the newer ChromeOS updates didn’t run great on it, but it is otherwise a good machine with a nice, simple, utilitarian form factor. I really like it, and always lamented never using it to its fullest potential. A few years ago, I messed around with putting GalliumOS on it. That was fine but a) I never worked on it long enough to get all of the kinks out, and 2) I never really decided how I would use it once it was set up. I never integrated it into my daily practice and habits. And that was fine, I suppose; it was a hobby project. But I still felt like I was wasting a cool piece of tech.
Then last week with no warning, I decided to dust off this machine to see if I can make it a usable part of my day-to-day practice.
morning computer 002
“I feel very strong to do it."
Quotes from Steinbeck’s journals:
never temper a word to a reader’s prejudice, but bend it like putty for his understanding.
…and:
I have tried to keep diaries before but they don’t work out because of the necessity to be honest.
💬 Source: How Steinbeck Used the Diary as a Tool of Discipline, a Hedge Against Self-Doubt, and a Pacemaker for the Heartbeat of Creative Work via The Marginalian
morning computer 001
When you deeply love someone, you can look at them and see the difference between their true nature and a behaviour that’s an expression of suffering.
💬 Source: ‘The Limited Story of Yourself is Actually Quite Fictional’: An Interview with William Brewer by Julie Mannell on HazLitt
morning computer 000 - about
I go through the RSS feeds and newsletters, and compose a morningcomputer post here to condense what I’ve learned that morning that I consider worth retaining and processing. So some days there isn’t one.
source: Warren Ellis in Morning Routine And Work Day
Dang. That’s a great idea. Okay, count me in.
In my last post here, I was so worried about the precedent numbered entries in a series would set, I didn’t define the scope of the series itself well enough. Or if I did, I don’t remember.
Isn’t everything I write here a “process log”? This is a web log after all (since I am, for some reason, so set on using that particular antiquated phrase…)
So here I am! Making progress on my process and uh… logging it!
I’ve updated Homo Monstrosus, in both style and content. And the site has been on my mind more and more - as a tool, a project, a hobby, but also as a shelter, a record, a showcase. Creating and building in general has been on my mind more too, but the front, active part of it, rather than the back(burner), “sigh, one day…” part. I am almost building a creative practice. Or rather, I am building a creative practice, it’s just wobbly like a baby deer. Spooks easily like one too.
I am still iterating over exactly how I want to exist on the web. Still trying to crystalize and differentiate the ways one can publish web content. I’m not talking on a global, capitalism scale, or about being a Content Creator on a social media website or anything like that. I’m talking about one person, making (mostly) words and publishing them using the networked tools they have access to.
I’m thinking about the difference between pages that are designed to be dynamic and updated, versus static and time-locked. The blogging revolution brought web publishing to the masses, but it also came with this subconscious implication that the only valid content on the web was the newest, most current, whatever was at the top of the blog. And with that came the idea that “old” content was somehow less-than. Or that unchanging content, whether by design or as an artifact didn’t have a place on the web. Couldn’t be trusted. Or maybe those are just implications I wrestled with.
What do I want to make? Why? Who is it for? When is it for?
These are much more potent and healthy questions than the ones I’d traditionally ask like, Can I even make anything? Who do I think I am? Why haven’t I done more? Should I just stop kidding myself?
There’s other stuff on my mind. World stuff, obviously. But World-level internet stuff too. It seems very popular these last few months to acknowledge that the web and capitalism appear to be inexorably linked, and that the coupling is killing us, leading us and the planet herself to doom. And that’s not wrong, of course, but the situation was incredibly apparent well before Elon Musk said he wanted to buy Twitter (though that event, at least to me, seems to have kicked off the lastest wave of these kind of think pieces… and again, that’s not an inappropriate response.)
But as much as I generally agree with the sentiment - that’s not where I want to live right now. The internet hasn’t been what I’ve wanted it to be in a long time, well before I realized it. I can’t dismantle those systems.
I can chip away at my little site. Plod around this blog. Build my little chicken coop as the cathedrals fall to the shelling.
So that’s what I’m going to do.
Project Log 001
Considering
Well, I’m 39 now. Have been for almost 30 hours. So far, so good (all things considered).
And boy oh boy, do I consider ALL the things.
In fact, it feels like I’ve done nothing for the last 2+ years but consider all the things. In my defense, there’s been a lot to consider. But, as is my custom, I’ve become fed up with considering and need to do… something. And this is about the place that I never get past. The precipice of Something. It’s always the same. Some arbitrary ‘new beginning’. Seizing the supposed energy that comes with a new week, a new month, a new pen, a new notebook, a new year. Because, ‘this time’ it will be different. However by ‘this time’ + two weeks it will be basically the same as it ever was.
Even this, the wry but frustrated observation of past cycles, the ‘first post in months’ that is destined to be come ‘the last update in weeks’, the soft ‘but maybe…’ whispering in the back of my head. The sad sigh that follows. I’ve done it all before.
And so, I am embarrassed. So often have I tried to jump start something that isn’t a car engine. So often have I postured, trying on the costume of the person I want to become, standing in front of the mirror going, “wouldn’t it just be wild if I just wore this?”
Wouldn’t it?
“This time will be different.”
Well, things are certainly… different. Pandemic. War. And the careening, bucking, lurching, drunken networked, polarized society we live in just throwing itself against the walls of its cage. I can honestly say that life at 39 is different than I expected. I don’t know that I ever actually sat down and considered what it would be like to be 39. But I do know I wouldn’t have ever considered it would be… like this.
So I guess that means it can be anything, that I can be anything.
It means I don’t actually have to come out here and pay my dues by bleeding all over the blogpost, by being just self-deprecating enough, by noting for the record how stupid or privileged or pointless this whole endeavor is, by winkingly insulting myself to wrestle the privilege away from anyone else.
It means that I can just… do what I want. Type what I want. Take pictures of what I want. Post what I want, build what I want. Perhaps more importantly, it means I don’t have to do… any of it. I can just be.
I am sick of death. Lately that is the dense, gaping black hole that lives in the back of my head and perpetually and eventually tugs at all of my thoughts. I can’t lose any more down that drain. I need to do… anything else.
And so, I am.