This almost feels haram to write about, but nobody else wrote today so I guess I need a post. Maybe there are more types that people can mention to me.

Proposing when he feels like it

This is a type that proposes whenever he feels a certain feeling. However he may also get divorced when he feels like it, or cheat when he feels like it.

The kind of women who are game for this are several types. Some are really excited that somebody actually commits, yay! After potentially a bunch of other relationships in which the man would not commit, this is a breath of fresh air.

Another type of woman thinks they can control a man like this. They see his tangles and loose ends and have their own plans for how they will pull those strings. This doesn’t usually end up going super well for them though.

Proposing when he feels it but the it is a crazy intense thing

This is a type of guy that, contrary to the previous type, never, ever, ever wants to be divorced, and longs to be married but would prefer to never be married than to ever be divorced.

These can come from any religion, and even be proudly agnostic or atheist.

Perhaps he will allow divorce if there is something like crazy abuse, but he is not really thinking about “loopholes” that would allow the divorce. To him, it would feel more like an annulment anyway, like the fundamental elements that made the marriage real were removed, rather than feeling like a divorce.

This guy divorces when he is “sure” about it, somewhere very deep in him. Unfortunately, these guys can wait a very long time for this “sure” feeling to settle, and even do things to unsettle it when it starts to get close. He can date someone for 10 years and be pretty sure that he will marry her, but not be completely sure, and unfortunately in year 4 she gets pretty fed up and leaves, and he either thinks “oh well I guess she wasn’t the one” or sometimes does go back and goes after her.

Proposing when doing so unlocks the next stage of the relationship

Sometimes a guy “unlocks” something by proposing. Perhaps she will break up with him unless he proposes. Perhaps they are fighting a lot and the woman says that they will fight less if he proposes. Perhaps she got a job offer and is going to take it, and he can propose and come with her or stay where he is. There is a version of this in which she plans to stay a virgin until marriage, and he is not sure about it but proposes because he wants to have sex with her to see if this is what he wants.

This category of guy proposes before he is fully 100% sure. He tends to get drunk and ask his friends what they think of his decision and collects pros and cons. He would rather not get a divorce, but does not consider it a grave sin if he does get a divorce. This is a practical man and he is willing to take steps and action to make things better, and does not like to feel like a weenie who is not willing to do the thing because he is scared.

I am sure there are more types!

Supercycle has new (free!) monthly dream interpretation jams, and I went to the first one today. It was awesome.

I had already read (and given away) my copy of Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams by Dr. Eugene T. Gendlin, which is the book we use as a reference. This book has a list of questions that you can ask when remembering your dream, free online.

We talked about the general philosophy and then had breakout rooms in which we talked about our dreams in pairs.

One of the things that stood out to me is how easy it is to say “oh yeah I know what my dream means basically I do not need to analyze it,” and then how much richer the integration of the unconscious becomes when you sit down and ask any number of Gendlin’s dream analysis questions.

When I say “any number” I mean that he has a few pages of these, but even if you go through one, or three, there is still a meaningful effect.

Examples:
What did you feel in the dream?
Then ask: What in your life feels like that?
Visualize and sense the lay-out of the main place in your dream.
Where have you been in a place like that?
Vividly visualize the end, or any one important scene of the dream. Feel it again. When it comes back as fully as possible, just watch it and wait for something further to happen. Wait for it, don’t invent anything.

I realized that two back-to-back dreams I had were actually trying to say the same thing, in the way that Hamlet and The Lion King say the same thing, while having completely different content. My “casual analysis” did not catch this: I only caught it after answering the questions in the jam about what the locations of each reminded me of in the past in my real life.

Each of the dreams also had “obvious” tie-ins to real things that were happening in my life this week, that it was easy on a casual reading to miss the symbolic patterns. That is, each dream was finding a symbolic language as a way of showing me something that is in my unconscious.

The guide for the jam, Emily, mentioned that partaking in the experience of reading the symbolic language of dreams as a way to accessing the unconscious is one of the lovely things about dream interpretation. This is a paraphrase, and she is a much better philosophical thinker than I am.

What I love about the book, the set of questions, and the format of doing this with people is that it does turn the object that is [the dream] into something like a text that can be read using a process, before bringing your own potentially biased interpretive frameworks onto [the dream text] right away, and similar to the ways that book clubs can both foster discipline and deepen engagement with a text, dream-book-club has these same benefits and is a fun thing to do with people!

All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.

–Paul Klee

What did I learn from writing every day for six months? Which aspects of writing got easier? Time to reflect on what was evergreen.

On Self-regurgitation

I would find the above painting menacing, except that most of Paul Klee’s paintings have an element of play inside them. I see a drawing of chortling figures on a spitroast, with barbed spikes coming out of their distorted tucan mouths.

This is what writing feels like for a lot of people. This is what writing feels like to me.

The visual arts were my first love; I was having too much pain from hand cramps and decided to switch to writing. Perhaps not a huge loss if both my love of reading and my ambitions to synthesize many different ideas may give me an edge in writing that I wouldn’t have with painting.

I entered a world of a different kind of pain common for those who see writing-as-art: the self-flagellating, self-crucifying scourge.

I had this kind of torment when I was painting, but I felt entitled to it. When I was writing I assumed that it had to be easier. Anybody can write, the way anybody can speak, and so why so much pain? Is my writing benefiting from it? This was a second layer of flagellation. But just as somebody can paint from a place of age-old ichor or Bob Ross up some lilypads, maybe the same variance is present in writing depending on the disposition of the person and on the task at hand. And sometimes just hanging out practicing lilypads with your music or your buddies is what you actually should be doing.

I applied to Inkhaven the first time because I was curious what mechanizing the process would feel like. What would happen if I put myself on this spitroast and let the crank turn? After all, most writers who are prolific say that they write every day, and most of them say that they go one step further and write at the same time. When I read books of writing advice, people I respect say that there is no escaping the full torment of writing, but you can make it easier by giving yourself a time and a place for it, and in your own personal transformation in consistent engagement with the craft, many aspects do get easier. The promise of the ease is hard to explain, but you will notice yourself transformed if you do it.

Writing every day for 30 days did transform me, and writing every day for 180 days did transform me further. My biggest transformations involved my relationship to my own loathing of my writing, and my energy management around that loathing. This led to continued transformations involving the love of my writing, and the love of the generator in myself from which that writing comes from. In feeling a deeper love of my own source, I was able to more authentically relate to other writers, alive and dead, and have more fun playing with craft.

Klee did catch me, in the end.

Everything written below was hard-won for me, but it may not match everybody’s way of working or match the kind of writing they are doing. I did not burn out, and after the 180 days continued writing weekly with more vigor than when I had started. These are tricks I learned along the way.

The most important thing I learned is that my feelings in the process of writing did not have any 1:1 mapping to my feelings months after the writing. In remembering and rereading something I had rewritten, often I found that I like it a lot more than I did in the rough process of creation. Perhaps I thought my idea was too flippant to write down, and I thought I did not give it enough attention. Or perhaps I slaved over a piece for weeks and still did not think I got it right. In both of these cases, whether it was emotional under investment or emotional overinvestment, myself as a future reader was often charitable, kind, and very pleasantly surprised. I would find my own past writing valuable to myself and my purposes, and I would get likes on random past pieces months later. If what I wrote captured my thoughts legibly and my emotions honestly, then these were sufficient pebbles for my future mind to follow along and enjoy the rereading.

The standard for if a joke in comedy is “good” is if it gets a laugh in the moment. In music if you want to listen again. For myself and for my writing, if I want to read it again, even if I catch edits I want to make.

On Saving Energy

This ended up being very important. If you are writing every day for six months, there will be many days when you are thinking about other things, doing other things, or otherwise can’t really write.

When I was writing every day for 30 days, I sort of hoped that I wouldn’t get sick on any of those days, and otherwise did not have a plan. When I was writing for six months, I had the opposite assumption. It was unlikely I would not get sick at all, and I would need a plan.

The strangest thing I learned was that it was easier to write when I myself was sick, than when somebody I really cared about was sick. When I myself am sick, I can still keep my attention on myself and on my thoughts for long enough to write a blog post that feels honest and true and worth reading, and to hit publish. When somebody else is sick, I would be much more likely to forget the daily writing goal entirely until my “don’t forget to write” alarm goes off, and then taking time to write would feel indulgent. My attention would simply be elsewhere.

When I was sick, I actually found that I could meander a bit, the goal being not to strain myself too much. When somebody else is sick is actually when I learned to write fast—go-go, done, back to whatever I was doing.

Here are the tricks I learned for saving energy, to make it in the long game:

Just write it down, without editing it in your brain

If writing is “saying something” then editing it right after you’d already said it means doing a lot more extra work. You can just write it down, and chances are it will come out as simple and coherent. Your brain has a very advanced capacity for self-organization, and you are likely already more organized than you think you are.

If you feel disorganized, chances are the thought is not as disorganized as your feelings surrounding whether you like the thought or not. In that case, still just write it down. You can write what already feels clear to you despite emotional confusion—this is likely to come out naturally and organized first, and quickly. Then, what is confusing will emerge organically, and you can save the confusing emotional crux for a Part II. “Leading the reader to the hard thing” is generally a kindness. In craft, it creates a good introduction to the hard thing and works as a friendly setup for why the hard thing matters. The reader would encounter this as helpful and good writing.

The act of writing itself helps you clarify what you want to say, and so spending the time clarifying, writing, is killing two birds with one stone.

Notice which part of the process you are in

If you are writing every day, spending too many cycles just to end up saying the same thing you wanted to say the first time means a lot of extra energy is used up.

My first time at Inkhaven, I wanted to spend a lot of time socializing, and so I knew that I would have to figure out how to reduce redundant time use, or else burn out. This continued to be important in the marathon-writing as well because I was still working my job and doing other things.

One major way to reduce redundancy is to separate the “just write it down” and the “I’ll edit this” stages of writing into two very distinct stages in your workflow. Two stages may seem like a lot, compared to one fused stage, but the total of two stages is a lot fewer than the potentially ten stages you would have if you were editing it and recursing on the writing in your mind.

I do believe that recursion often makes writing better—whether it’s another editing pass or another pass at deeper thinking. But I would make those recursion stages their own special stages.

There is a downside of this certain very specific goopy mind-recursion, which is that your brain tends to be pretty organized, and in running this process you may accidentally make it less organized.

I consider this different from “figuring out what you want to say” which usually involves stewing on something for a while in an extremely nonlinear fashion.

Noticing which stage of the process you are lets you have the most indulgent fun in that actual process, without the constraints of another part of the process creeping in, and keeps you organized.

At Inkhaven1, I wrote my ideas on a piece of papyrus, free wrote on the typewriter in the morning, and then in the evening I edited my writing on the computer. Thus, the stages were separated both in the equipment that was used, and separated in time.

Write about what you are already thinking about

On some days when I didn’t feel like writing anything at all, and then when I thought about why, it was because I was saturated. Something happened that day, or I was making plans to do something, or I was overwhelmed, or I had feelings I needed to process. Context switching into a “writing mode” would feel too energetically expensive, like switching off entire modes of being to upload another just to get my writing done. This context-switching would use up a lot of energy, so I started writing what I was overloaded with. I was surprised that there generally was some angle on what I was thinking about that would appeal to an audience, and that doing this generalization to other people made me feel less overwhelmed about whatever I was thinking about.

One of my favorite things about having written every day was the feeling of surprise at how many things would simply not have been written ever because I did not want to write.

The constraint of needing to write that day, and not for example writing two posts the next day if I missed a day, meant that I ended up just writing down the most interesting thing that happened that day. This post about visiting the largest glass museum in the world would never have been written, if I didn’t have to write that day. I was really tired.

When I reread it, I was struck; the entire week after that visit was extremely chaotic, and involved multiple people and several relocations. I was pleasantly glad that the fragility of my glass post was not broken by the turbulence of my ensuing emotional world, but rather was safely preserved.

Travel writing or adventure writing was not my current genre, but if you keep an open mind to genre, then the things that are happening to you are a wonderful cauldron of ideas.

You may think that this is “cheating” but I promise you will forget about the cool thing that happened that exact day, and never write about it ever again, and it will never be written. The only way you will remember it again is by looking at your old writing.

Later in my 180 day journey, I started recording conversations too. When I wrote this piece theorizing why people say they have “average friendships,” the most interesting that I was thinking about was a conversation I had the day before. This piece about cooking with wine straight up included copy-pasted texts from a friend I wanted to remember.

In the fastest blogpost I have ever written (9 minutes) I straight up talk about my philosophy that if you are hard-pressed to find something to write about, you can look to your groupchats, or your diary, or wherever it is that your alive thing with other people happens to naturally occur.

I have found that people do like the, “where did you go,” “what happened,” “what did they say” posts, especially when they are well-written with an eye towards legibility and meaning to the reader. The reader gets to learn about another person’s subjective world, and how another person relates to shared reality.

The way to get comfortable with this kind of writing is by putting the reps in, and the way to get the reps in is by not shying away from it when the muse flies by. A lot of people explicitly practice this kind of writing even when there is no muse, and so putting in the reps when it occurs to you to do so would not be indulgently overdoing it.

On Hating Your Own Writing

There will be moments in writing every day when you hate your own writing and think the entire endeavor is a waste of time.

I consider this a separate set of questions from saving energy, though this is a major way that energy gets spent.

You can still write, and produce really terrific writing, even when your heart is not fully into it, if you are organized and trust your processes.

Protecting your ideas

You are allowed to despair, and you are allowed to despair a lot. That being said, your ideas should be protected from your despair.

Have a container that you like, that makes you feel cozy and safe, where you put different things like your ideas, snippets of conversations, sudden bursts of inspiration, where they get saved and undamaged that you trust, and know where to go to check when you need that type of object.

For some people it’s just the default notes app in their phone. Some people really hate that user interface. Maybe for you it will be a notebook, or an email thread to yourself. The important thing is that you know where you will check when you want to look for your ideas cauldron.

Penholder Friction

Relatedly, when you are ready to write, you want to make sure that you have a pen—whatever your version of a pen is.

Nobody likes that feeling of being really excited to write something down, but not having a pen.

Everybody knows that if there is a pen-holder in a house, the pen-holder seldom moves. It is kind of heavy and nobody ever has a real reason to move it. And everybody knows the disappointment of needing a pen, diligently going to the pen-holder, and noticing there are no pens. Or that there are many pens, but none of them work.

These are the feelings that you are trying to avoid. You want to go to the pen-holder, see pens you like, take the pens you like, and feel good about the entire process. You want to reduce “pen-holder friction” where it is not necessary.

You want to follow the fun. The things that feel like they are fun, or that they feel like they are working, or that do not feel like work — that’s what you want to be doing more of. When it feels fun and joyful and unhinged and unfiltered and relaxing — these are good feelings! You want to be feeling that. This is important for anything long-term. Trust your own inner critic and your own inner project manager — trust that they will still be there even when you are not looking at them, and they will come out and say stuff to you when they feel like it. These are not particularly self-filtering or self-isolating parts of your psyche. They will come out and have meetings with you. Don’t feel like if they aren’t looking over your shoulder for a while, that this means you are doing something wrong. Probably it means they trust you to do something right without supervision.

Knowing where your pen is means that you can follow the flow right when you feel it without any additional friction.

On Metaposts

Most people have an idea of what kind of writing counts and what kind of writing does not count. This varies by person!

For some people, only highly technical writing that they consider research is what counts, and fiction is fun and flippant. For some people, fiction and poetry is what counts as real art from the soul and all other writing is merely mechanical. For some people, only writing truthfully about things that really happened is real writing, and all other writing is fun silliness.

Given how much these feelings about what is real writing and real art and real work depend on genre, one way to soften the feelings is to fiddle with genre and become more versatile. If some of the genres aren’t “real” to you, then you can treat them as a sandbox. It means you can practice, mess up, and get feedback in a low stakes environment, while improving your writing craft for the kind of writing that matters to you.

Sometimes what feels like fun is a metapost, and then you feel shame that you feel so moved to write something in this lower genre. Why am I writing about writing? Why am I writing about my time at Inkhaven?

I would stop feeling the shame. Often these posts end up being treasures, and actually do not end up getting written “later.” If you aren’t happy with your volume of metaposts, you can do one of two things:

1. Write about whatever was happening that led to your feeling of excitement to write this metapost. Maybe it was a cool conversation, or a cool walk, or maybe you went to a conference and on coming back are reflecting on writing. Explicitly spelling out what was going on can make this metapost more interesting, and have more very specific details about your environment that can be very interesting later!

2. Commit to doing 1, and just split them up into two posts. Write a post about whatever felt immediately pressing or inspiring or burdensome that led to the metapost, as one post, and then write the metapost without much of an eye for craft. This way, you do not have to feel embarrassed about “wasting” a post on a metapost.

3. Commit to writing two posts every time you do a metapost, about whatever you want, and don’t worry about trying to make the metapost good. If you are embarrassed about it as a genre of “not real writing,” do write it, sloppily, whenever you feel the inspiration, but also write something else. If you don’t have inspiration, write about the last book or movie you liked, or the last event you went to that was interesting. The idea is if you are embarrassed about your metapost genre writing, use it as a reason to practice disciplined craftsmanly genre writing for a genre you want to practice more, and maintain your internal self-respect.

Whichever route you choose, the point is that shame is heavy, and if you are not writing from your place of shame, it is not helpful to good writing. Writing through the shame can be a lot more productive. And so if a metapost shines brightly through you, write the thing! Get it out! And then if you have shame around such feelings, use another strategy above and move along! But don’t let the shame either stop you from writing what you want, or become stuck inside you such that you don’t end up writing other things either.

Use Images if They Help

Sometimes you don’t care about the blog looking pretty—you only care about the writing. Even in cases like this, you might be blocked up because the page layout for your writing feels wrong. You just hate something about it, and it breaks your flow, even if you know what you want to write and feel coherent and streamlined in your process.

I changed my background color here on Substack a month after Inkhaven ended. I should have done this earlier. I prefer writing on a dark background, and this change takes about 2 minutes.

This post started off by having a lot of bullet points. I realized I hated that. Then I changed it to have these headings, which felt better, but the separation I wanted from the bullet points vanished. That’s when I thought to include the small illustrations. They broke up the piece visually in a way that was making sense to me as I was writing it.

The images kept me in flow. At first it broke my flow, with the penholder friction (“how am I going to make my diagrams?”) but I did have a marker and a notebook nearby, and I just took a picture immediately after I drew each diagram in a signal chat with a friend, then dropped it in here, and kept writing. Done.

It has never been easier to add little doodles. If you get the feeling “Ugh there maybe should be a drawing or a diagram here—that’s how I have it in my head, but I have to keep writing,” it has never been easier to stop writing, put it in, and keep writing. If you do this a lot, it might be very beneficial to consider the image incorporation as a part of the writing flow, to be integrated and iteratively improved on as part of your writing process, rather than something separate.

The point of a small picture or a diagram can also be to serve as the transition you actually have in your head. It can be a way to make a section feel more complete emotionally, when the writing is already decent and clear. Sometimes what you are doing is fiddling with your own emotions about the mind-feel of a section rather than requiring any new transition on the sentence-level.

A transition may feel incomplete to you, as the writer, while being perfectly clear to the reader. Note that professional editors often edit out overly elaborate transitions.

What Did I Learn in 180 Days that I Didn’t Learn in 30 days?

This is the real question. Did I gain anything continuing my daily writing after Inkhaven, or were most of the gains in the first 30 days?

The most important new thing I learned in 180 days is that writing is seasonal.

I liked writing before Inkhaven, and I knew I would continue to like writing after Inkhaven. I used my time at Inkhaven to try to optimize some of my processes for writing (I had never written every single day before) and get over emotional blocks surrounding my process of writing. After Inkhaven I continued to revise these processes and check how they worked in various different circumstances. I wrote in clubs, in cars, in airports, to get my daily blogpost in, and I learned not to be strained with it, while putting as much love and care into it as I could find in myself. One of my favorite pieces, “Ask Dynamical Systems Questions, Get Dynamical Systems Answers,” I wrote after spending four hours hanging out chilling in a hospital.

The longer timeline let me look at my past writing without remembering what it was like to write it. What I have to look at is what I left for myself to look at in the writing. Too much would have happened emotionally for me to go back to where I was emotionally when I wrote the piece, unless those emotions were themselves captured in the piece.

Some things I really cared about for a long time, and kept writing about for a long time, but then 5 months later if you asked me if this is something I want to write about, today, I would say no. I can care a lot about something and write very diligently about it, but after I have written about it, apart from editing, not have a need to write more.

Similarly, some topics only feel exciting for a day or two. Noticing these patterns allowed me to let go of judgment about my writing. I care a lot about reading, and looking at art, to continue to have inputs that I consider beautiful artistically or mathematically, or both. These inputs help me form judgments about my writing. But otherwise, the waves of inspiration work in mysterious ways, and sometimes I just want to write something one day because I want to write that thing that day, and I will never want to write it ever again.

Rather than considering that specific writing as “fake” or “not real” for its ephemerality of feeling, I consider it special to capture the feeling, if I am so called to want to capture it. (Even if the capturing is motivated by needing to write something that day, if this is the most interesting thing I am called to write about in a 24-hour period, this can still be special.)

I will not know if I like it or not, or if it survives a quality test of if I care about it later, until much later comes and I glance at it, and notice if I care about it or not anymore. I have surprised myself. Sometimes something about it catches me, and I make some edits to it because I do still care about it. Sometimes my own writing feels foreign to me. Sometimes I do not think the writing is good, but writing it was important because it transformed me in the process of writing. It can be hard or impossible in the moment of writing to tell which it will be.

Six months did not teach me which of my writing would last. But it did make me a better writer. And it taught me that I can’t tell which writing will stand the test of time even for myself. I did notice that doing my best, and putting in more detail, and being clear and honest did help in making the writing something I liked six months later. The effort does matter.

I do often write for my future self, but in the moment I do not actually know what my future self will like, and in the moment of writing I do not like either the idea or the execution fully, but I like something about both that I try to lean into. I consider the writing I do on this blog as writing for my friends, writing for friendly strangers, and writing for an anonymous public. I also consider it leaving pebbles for my future self of things that I had cared about enough to write about. And I care enough about my future self to keep making my best attempts to show her that her past self cared about things she should also care about, and to try for her sake to write about them legibly and beautifully.

Alright so most wines last 3-5 days. So if you are cooking with wine, you can buy something called “cooking wine” which is more like a Wine-Like-Product and is not wine and does not taste good, and people who are serious about cooking seem to avoid it, don’t cook with it themselves unless it’s some crazy last resort scenario, and do not recommend it.

If you really like wine then if you open up a bottle of wine for cooking, you can then also just…drink the wine if you don’t want it to go to waste. For many people cooking with wine in Europe this is simply what happens, a natural part of life in the flow of things, absolutely no problem.

But if you don’t want to be wasteful and are not in the habit of drinking wine, its short shelf life seems like a way to never have it when you need it, and when you need it to only use it a little and then the rest of it goes to waste, which means you won’t buy it again, which means you won’t have it when you need it…

You can do a lot with lemon and cream and capers and dill and mushrooms but man sometimes you do want that kick—how do you get that kick? What’s the missing ingredient? Oh right the wine.

Some people with otherwise perfectly functional alcohol tolerances sometimes have a pretty bad reaction to wine (this is a known effect of wine on certain people). What then? Or maybe they want to eat their chicken marsala without also getting drunk that specific night, or maybe they know they drive a lot or have to be somewhere.

Anyway, what to do? How to get into the flow of wine things without being wasteful?

My buddy has a smart response. It is simple in its theory and a bit more difficult in execution, but it does solve the problem.

→ Cook with it the normal way. Like deglazing pan after caramelizing onions etc. it lasts around 1 week in the fridge for more cooking or also use in pickling or other things

Aight so now we’re cooking.

Literally the solution to not doing enough French cooking because you never have the wine is literally to just do more French cooking because you have the wine.

Alright so let’s suppose I want to make a chicken marsala because that’s the only wine-based dish I know how to cook. If I also like and know how to make french onion soup, I can make a really nice french onion soup with the same wine.

And so I will end up using up that wine bottle through a natural process of cooking for that week.

Any time you want acidity, you can use it in place of vinegar or citrus depending on recipe.

Making a tomato paste roux and then adding good red wine can make a really tasty sauce for a stew

White wine sauces go well with garlic, lemon and herbs. With or without cream. Pasta is the classic with seafood

Sherry is great with heavy cream because it can hold up well. Good over chicken or other meat. Also super good with mushrooms

Sherry is good if you don’t drink wine because fortified so much longer shelf life and can withstand oxidation

Cooking with wine is a bell curve. You want good enough because flavor is important but not too fancy because you are heating it and blending with food

Dry sherry’s are good with seafood but I like cooking with these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amontillado

o.O Fucking Amontillado. Poe, anyone?
Inviting somebody to your house and offering them Amontillado in your basement is certainly a move this October o.O

Amontillado, a dry sherry, happens to be keto, and so if you want to be all literary and goth, or just have an alternative to being the archetype that shows up places and only drinks vodka and tequila, this can be added to your keto rotation.

And this is where we come into our next trick. If you want to practice with the recipes, if you practice with sherry while you figure out some stuff, sherry lasts over a year. Sometimes it gets better with oxidation and age.

Thanks JM for the contributions!

I was on one of our Supercycle-adjacent philosophy calls with a friend recently, and we got to talking about friendships: what to expect of them, when to cut your losses, hopes.

I brought up a common error that I see often: as in many areas of life, people often average out their friendships.

Into their 30s, people tend to see a new stranger-turned-acquaintance at the coffee shop and a really good friend from 10 years ago potentially as often as each other. Sometimes they even see the acquaintance, the “shallow friend” more than the deep friend — though not always so.

In this way it can become easy to not want to impose on the deep friend. “Oh I haven’t texted him in four months, I really shouldn’t be asking him this favor.” Or it can be easy to do small impositions on your new friend, “I’ll ask him if he wants to come to the game tonight.”

In these ways your friendships end up averaged. Your acquaintances get more intimacy points than perhaps they’d earned yet, while your good friends get fewer than they’d already earned because you do not want to cash in on those points lest you disrupt the friendship.

In actuality, your really good friend is likely to be a way better friend than you even dreamed you deserve in friends. They are probably filled with capacity to do way more favors for you than you would ever need or ever even ask for, with more imagination and thoughtfulness about your well-being than you have capacity to hold in your mind. They also probably have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours thinking about you and modeling what may make you happy.

By contrast, your very recent acquaintance may not even remember those four conversations about your niche genre of movie that made you believe that you guys had an awesome vibe and 100 movie nights yet to come.

Given this large actual variance, why do so many people end up with an averaged view of friendship?

The way this averaged view ends up happening is how these friendships intersect with hope and imagination.

With new acquaintances, there is no existing loyalty but potentially nice future payoffs). Depending on how jaded you are with people, you may have a lot of hope that this will develop into something. Actually if you are completely jaded and finally feel something like a vibe or a spark, you may have a lot of hope more prematurely than other people.

With your really good friends, you already did a lot together and so potentially you have less imagination for new things to do that don’t disrupt or ruin the existing dynamic, and thus you have less hope around new potentialities because you are spending less time in an imagination space around positive brand new experiences.

And thus, new acquaintances have a distortion coefficient towards higher intimacy, and really good friends have a distortion coefficient towards lower intimacy.

This kind of distortion is the kind of we see when we take an average of anything. The distribution collapses.

What’s the solution?

This is where my marvelous, mischievous, marbles come in.

My friend started talking about playfulness, fun, mischief. As he was talking about his longing for these things, he started to radiate a wonderful energy. As he was trying to find his own long-lost mischief, his search for it in himself became it. That is, the search for mischief became mischief itself.

This may make sense when you think of Fred and George in Harry Potter — they were always looking for mischief even when they were not literally doing it in that moment. And in this way, they were mischievous!

(I prefer the British pronunciation of mischievous — it is a lot more fun already! They add a sneaky little extra “i”)

He became very beautiful in the moment. Very beautiful, very striking.

I stopped to tell him so, because why keep it to myself?

We continued to talk about many things, and at one point I told him that I don’t think the moment of beauty was an accident. I think that there is actually real beauty — and not only beauty, but real moral valor in mischievousness.

You see, in mischievousness there is an antidote to the average.

Not in terms of “when you fuck around and find out you learn new things that are unique or eccentric and not average” — though that too of course.

I mean something actually literally technical here.

When you are mischievous, you are throwing little marbles at the universe. You are allowing yourself to be an open sensor to data that the marbles ping back at you.

Imagine yourself in your bed, on your laptop, all the walls of your room around you. When you throw a marble 1 foot forward, it maybe doesn’t make a sound, or makes a soft thwomp when it lands on your bed. When you throw it harder, it might hit the wall to your side, and you hear a clink. When you throw it all the way across from you, you hear a big CLINK.

Mischievousness is how you become like a bat, sending out signals, seeing what sounds come back from the world around you.

When you get signals back in this fashion, it becomes extremely hard to “average” them (what would an average of the 3-dimensional landscape around you even mean?). Instead, you have to build models around what your world looks like.

It becomes very hard to just discard anomalous data, because it would be anomalous data on what axis even? Did you send marbles in the opposite direction? You have to actually contend with both what you predicted, and what you failed to predict. You have to contend with reality.

I believe that mischievousness, far from making you a dishonest trickster, actually would make you more honest by allowing you to see honestly the world around you.

And I consider personal development in this direction to be very virtuous, and not just fun!

Of course, what counts as “pushing yourself” in this way will vary between people. Some people may already consider themselves pranksters, but are not paying much attention to the signals they send back. They are throwing their marbles but are not paying attention to the sounds they make.

Other people are throwing marbles, but only in one direction, and so the resonances from the world they receive back are one-sided, or self-validating.

Some people are rather shy, and are not sending out many marbles. Perhaps they want to be polite, or perhaps they are simply shy, or perhaps they have no idea how far you can actually throw some of these back. Or perhaps they have heard ugly noises back before, and are scared to hear those exact noises again.

In each of these instances, whether you throw a lot and don’t listen, or are shy…just throwing some (more than one — do not give up from throwing one, hearing a strange ping, and drop the experiment entirely), in a direction you are curious about. You can go very soft and listen intently, or if you are bad a listening, throw a little more moderately and make sure you are hearing a clear sound. As long as you are both tossing and listening to the same marble, you are doing it right.

In all of these instances, the world is more forgiving to your soft pressures and even hard marble throws than you may expect it to be. After all, it is the whole entire goddamn world. It has seen a lot and has known a lot, and your attempts to see it will hurt it less than you think.

Will it hurt you, on the other hand…

That’s for you to decide. ;) :p

My friend Milan and I were trying to figure this out. He asked me what the Magic the Gathering Color Pie would say.

If I was on the blue-leaning half of the magic the gathering color pie, this wouldn’t be a problem. I would just make a bunch of metrics, track them, come up with optimizations, have fun…

But I am not on the blue-leaning half. I am in the red-green area, and so doing the blue stuff is not just counter-intuitive, it is competitive with and against my natural way of doing things and my values.

And so what to do? One of the inventions I believe in strongly when we use the MtG system for problem solving is to stay faithful to the idea that opposite colors really are in conflict with each other, and that no you cannot “just do both opposite colors” without some special alchemy.

We started modeling out my situation. I liked myself, didn’t want to change. I did want to win the bet, wanted to impress a specific girl by looking a specific way for her, and had a few strategic health and social reasons for losing weight.

Alright. The strategy there is black.
The not wanting to change and liking myself is green.

(Note that green can be extremely strategic, and black can be extremely counterproductive and stubborn depending on the situation. However, the way I the colors manifest in my specific problem is that green likes feeling happy and embodied and integrated, and why move towards things that ruin that — and black is considering tradeoffs and certain specific self-interested positions.)

Those two are natural opposites in the color pie. In between them is red. And so any integration between these two conflicting colors would have to happen through red.

We got this far, which is already pretty advanced and a cool application of the color pie to a real problem we were working on.

Now, how do we design the thing?

Red likes experience. Is there a good experience I can create?
Black likes strategy around tradeoffs. Is there a way to make metrics for this that I can track, rather than (blue) metrics for fun and for the sake of it sometimes?

I came up with a metric I cared about. Not losing weight, but changing the ratios of muscle and fat. I was at 40% fat and 26% muscle. I thought wouldn’t it be kind of delightful to flip them. And then that experience is one I can wrap my mind around enjoying.

This allowed me to bypass a certain kind of enjoyment / complacency of Green. There was something that I could imagine enjoying — and enjoyment in transformation, rather than enjoyment in what is already there, and this is one way to get Green to move (other ways are threats :(. Remember the Ents in LoTR).

Once I had the right “red-black metrics” the rest became very easy to me. Probably that should be explained rather than handwaved.

I really like weight-lifting, really liked an excuse to lift a lot and to devote energy to it. I am still a n00b and so get the n00b gains.

I also started doing keto, which proved surprisingly sustainable and easy.

But basically, there were a lot of things I liked, that I was chill with doing, that I was able to align with the red-black metrics I had set up.

Having a spreadsheet where I tracked things was a black-red activity, not a blue activity or a white activity. And I enjoyed my spreadsheet a lot.

I enjoyed what I was eating, enjoyed my workouts. Nothing was feeling pushy.

This is where the green was looped back in — things I naturally enjoyed from before I kept doing or incorporated again if at some point I had stopped doing them (hadn’t lifted for a while).

I guess an important note is how much I wasn’t optimizing after this setup was created. I don’t do any cardio at all, though I might start to on my rest days. But my cardio would be playing Beat Saber, not running outside or on a treadmill.

I’m not trying to optimize my lifting either. I basically go to the gym and do whatever I want. I also go to the gym I want to go to. I ended up on a good split, but that’s because I realized going 5 times a week on an upper/lower/rest split means that I actually get two guaranteed rest days per body part, and that means I get to be extra spicy lazy. I have a spreadsheet where I record what I did, try to beat my “last high score” on any exercise for progressive overload, and make important notes about injury prevention (I am not allowed to bench press anymore, for a while).

Also, I am not calorie counting at all. Every so often I vaguely check my calories. On one day it was surprisingly high, when I got a lot of cream in my coffee order at lunch. But most of the days I check my calories because it seems weirdly low. I picked keto as a thing because I didn’t want to track calories. I do track carbs in a day, loosely, because that number can’t be over 20. But since counting to 20 is so trivial I wouldn’t really call this “tracking” anything.

I do 6,000 steps every day, but that’s just because that’s how much I’d been walking while restless and before I’m bored. I am not gunning to increase that to 10,000.

And so the main “optimizations” are “am I doing it.” And the things I am “doing” are being in keto, going to the gym, and doing progressive overload in the gym.

I am not trying to stay clean keto, either. I’ve had keto Wendy’s three times. I eat keto ice cream. I eat sugar-free root bear and coke zero. I am not trying to “optimize it.”

I do take vitamins sometimes and protein and finally got some collagen. But these are Green-based what feels good to my body based decisions. They are optimizing for “feeling good in my body” and not quite for results.

And so you can see that this isn’t a Blue optimization strategy at all. I am not trying to figure out “the perfect way to lose weight.” I am trying to figure out the way I would lose weight with the least effort and resistance as possible, aka how to reach my goals while being maximally lazy.

I got GLP-1 competitive results (15 lbs in 2 months) while building muscle.

If you like not optimizing things, you might like to check out

https://suboptimalism.neocities.org/

• thinking that other people, to be productive for your company, would be doing what you yourself would be doing if you had extra time - aka being mini me’s or extensions of your own mind. In reality, if this is the assumption, other people would really frustrate you and you’d end up believing nobody is capable of doing any real work. This would frustrate a competent team into quitting, and you would end up with a company that has a ceiling for good people because the kinds of teammates that convince you that they are doing what you count as productive by your standard of “is this something I myself would do” rather than productive in the sense of “does my company make money” or “does my company do what I want it to do?” would be a certain kind of person that you consider lesser than you almost definitionally (they don’t have better things to be doing than your overflow work, and doing your overflow work is the most productive thing you see them as doing), and therefore not people you trust to keep an eye out on your blind spots or do things you have a harder time with (and therefore not actually creating real synergy).
  

• a bunch of people have an idea of being a boss or being a CEO without as much consideration around what it means to them to be that and how it simply relates to their ego structure rather than how it relates to how they want to be a leader in the world or how the concept of CEO relates to what they want to create in the world.
  

• A bunch of people don’t think very much about how they are different from other people, including being very different from people they admire, and including being very different from people they do not admire! There are many differences between people and this means that different things matter to them. If one person does not get a Christmas card they really do not care, but for another person this can really impact their motivation to work for you.
  

• If you are setting it up such that you can’t take a sick week or a sick month and things still be fine, then you aren’t setting it up in a great way, because it means you will always be working.
  

• If you want to look cool for people who you aren’t ever going to hire you because they are doing different things from you, and also aren’t ever going to be your customer, because they are doing different things from you, and you consider these people “cooler” than your actual team and you praise these people in ways you never praise your team, or insult your team in ways you never insult these people, something is really wrong.

How fast can it take to write 500 words?

How bad can it be while still counting?

I say — to you! If it is your voice, why not! Why shouldn’t it count!

And if you do not like your own voice, steal somebody else’s voice.

Steal Vishal’s voice, or Ben’s voice.

You see, I have not just tequila to consume today.

I have another deadline

another writing deadline.

Yes. You have watched me uphold the blogeppe. But did you not know that I have other writing?

Did you not know this is my fun writing?

Yes, I have other deadlines, and not just these midnightedly-setted

The fastest ‘geppo

gelatto-geppo

As long as any velvet is making contact with your pen, with your keyboard, as long as there is traction with literally any part of you inside of you — I say then it counts

People try to ‘pour out from the soul’ as a posture but you have to find the velvet some of the time, and sometimes when you find the velvet, that is all you find, and you have to give up on other priorities

You think Ulysees was written without this Velvet? You think Virginia Woolf wrote The Waves without this velvet?

I am not being very Johnny Truant here; I am a Thumper who has taken acid.

If you do not know what to write, write about that which excites you, that was so exciting to you that you had forgotten it;

Go to the place where life happens;

and where is it that life happens?

Write what you wrote in your groupchats;

I had written

So what would a wolfman priest do after he sexually devours his high priestess

would he take a nap

would he go back to work

would he keep hanging out

would he play music

I had written, on Japan, to

there are funny dark sushi places in alleyways like in the movies

that wouldn’t let you in as an american without any local

that have 5 types of sushi max, and sake, and indoor smoking

I had called my friend in Japan,

we talked about the thor in thursday. I told her about my research

she misses me and I miss her. she said I love you and I said it back

It was the first time

What does it mean?

Have I slowed down to even ask?

“who’s excited to discuss god’s interior decorating arc”
says a woman I admire

I had written previously on Judaism,

Fun quotes from a friend:

“However, part of the reason there is no priest is because everyone pretty much understands that the Old Testament is a text given to us by a mind so far beyond human comprehension that it’s Cthulhu-esque.

However, just because it’s beyond our comprehension doesn’t mean we can’t *try* to understand it. Judaims is about the journey of understanding God.

“

7:34 PM

❤️

“And the only way to do something as precious as that is to not hold back but to ruthlessly examine EVERYTHING to make sure it meets the standard to be attributed to literallly the most perfect being in all of existence

So a Jew arguing with you is a way of saying “your ideas are a thing which can help me approach the divine; let us approach it together”

“

7:37 PM

❤️

I had been thinking about philosophy

I had written,

”If I think about something a lot, it must be important to me”

“Actually if I think about something a lot it might be a tangle of confusing / unintegrated philosophical questions I don’t know how to look at, and my actual philosophical foundation is that wordless still pond I never look at over there because it’s just chill and peaceful”

“Maybe I would be happier if I hung out in my pond versus in my tanglewoods”

9 minutes! I am done! I can keep going

I had written, we can play a group game, “things that must be true”

For example, “that everyone who survives past a certain age in all of history learns that someone they cared about has passed, and has experienced that moment”

The woman I hope, to hear from, who I hope to hear from each and every day, she writes back,

this is not necessarily true of the insane!

I told the woman that I would buy another plant if the pothos did well, and I did: a parlor palm. Now I have two plants in terra cotta pots.

I told myself if the parlor palm did well, I would buy a third plant. It is doing alright, but I’m still only at two plants. A third plant might change the dynamic in a nice way, but I haven’t been ready yet. I am still making sure that I am giving adequate attention to each of my plants, and sometimes I am not. They each are not dying but neither one is growing too much more, even though they have adequately large pots. Perhaps they need fertilizer.

And so I am not a plant lady but I do have two plants that I am doing activities with. My planty microactivity.

I have a Masterclass account. I don’t know anybody who has one other than me. I really like them. When Masterclass first started, they would have a lot of really Big courses that were really cool. Marc Jacobs for example has a fashion design course with a lot of projects for you to do as cumulative homework, like an actual class. As they continued to make deals with celebrities in different fields, some of the courses ended up being pretty small. But they are still awesome.

It used to be the case that going through a course felt like a Big Hefty fancy thing. This was a really cool feeling. However, they have since updated their website to encourage more casual viewing. They made playlists, so that you can hear different perspectives on the same subject stripped from multiple classes (a feature I don’t use because I like hearing the same person talk for a long time). And so with this encouragement, just hanging out on their website not really paying attention but absorbing great content feels fun. My masterclass microactivity.

I think there could be a case for elevating microactivities to Microactivities, but I think it depends on the disposition of the person doing them. There can also be a game around trying to make your microactivities feel as large as possible, without them counting as a mesoactivity or a macroactivity.

In my own life, doing the laundry, loading the dishwasher, and changing the bedsheets do not actually make it to the level of microactivities. I had at some point decided that I do not want these activities to feel hard or in the way of anything else, and so I do them when I am pitter-pattering around anyway, metabolizing energy from a different activity.

I think it can be pretty customizable for every individual, and so I am reticent with making a list. But there are nice things to know about

Respecting the person who you are meeting with

Ideally you respect the person who you are talking to. There are people who meet with a person they do not respect, because they are making enough progress on their problems. There are also people like seeing their coach or therapist so much they basically forget their problems when they show up and mostly just hang out.

Between these two sides of the axis, there is respecting the person you are working with. You want to at minimum respect the person, and maybe there can be something a lot better than that, but if you do not respect the person you are talking to, you can probably find somebody who you do respect, and that will probably make you happier.

Some people have had the same therapist since they were seven years old. Some people have tried seven therapists in the past year. But every person who has ever used a therapist has at one point only had one therapist in their entire life. And that experience often makes a big impression on the person the possibilities of the profession. If it is a good experience, the person may keep working with this person for a long time. If this is a negative experience, the person may stop using any therapist at all for many years.

Working on problems one at a time

There are many people who can help with many problems! But there is a challenge around working on them in an order that makes sense. A good coach can figure out a pretty good order, but if you have something specific in mind, this is an area in which you know yourself best. The amount of work you want to put in this specific question of which problem you want to be working on actually narrows down what style of coach or therapist can do something good for you.

For example, if you do not want to expend much energy thinking about what problems you want to solve or in what order, there are coaches who will straight up tell you what sucks about you, what to change, what plan to follow, and then yell at you or give you the punishment you signed up for when you do not do it. Some people are really really really into this because they already feel like a worm, actually feel seen and respected when somebody else acknowledges it, and want to give themselves over fully to a process of transformation in this way. There are kind of a lot of these and they tend to advertise themselves pretty aggressively as the kind of people who provide this specific service, and not something else, because they want people to buy what they are selling, and not be confused about what exactly they are buying.

For this kind of person, another style may be helpful, which is a person who is very patient and actually very slowly gets you to reveal parts of yourself, so that they have more information about you that they can methodically and delicately coprocess with you, such that in learning gently to be transparent to them you also become transparent with yourself.

These people can actually be extremely advanced, and actually not put themselves out there very much in terms of advertising, so to find these you might either just get lucky or run into one of them when looking around at many options.

….to be continued!

Actually though, I am losing more weight than I thought I would be, for less effort than I thought it would be. This is good for people who do not really want to think, or really modulate their energy. I am not out with other people and so it’s a good time for it.

NEVER MIND! YOU CAN can Gatorade Zero.

But yeah being a weird buggy kind of sick is the first time that I am having issues on keto. I will have to troubleshoot.

Beef broth has been good. You can just put that in a cup and microwave it and drink it.

But yeah, biggest issue I have found is that if you have a stomach bug or something of that species, then you just don’t want to eat for a while, and then the thing you wan’t to eat isn’t going to be filtered milk or cheese or meat or anything like that.

I did have, half a slice of low-carb toast and some butter. And then broth and some ham and three baby carrots.

But like. This is probably going to be the biggest issue in being sustainable.

Merp merp

what to do

There could be a thing around if I know I’m sick, to just get the chipotle or the middle eastern place or whatever I know is legible to me and comforting, and not to expect myself to just sit down and make it because I have a rotisserie chicken. The chicken isn’t really helping me feel like a normal person.

Sometimes the difference between the easy version of a thing and a hard version is in the details.

Say your friend asks you to pick up a desert for their party. No problem. Now they say that the specific desert has to be both vegan and gluten-free please. This is now a much harder problem because the number of stores that is en route from yours to theirs that has deserts that contain neither eggs nor flour is….much lower. And you might be clever enough to narrow it down to “Ice cream” and think that actually a big store like Target probably has something that fits the criteria from being such a big and diverse store…but now you have to be smart, and not just agreeable to complete this favor. And if your friend isn’t actually responsive to their phone because they are getting ready for their party then you’re on your own about being smart. Probably some sorbet from the Target freezer section will work. Then again, you might not be passing a “Huge Store” either as those are generally only in certain parts of town given how huge they are…

This is just meant to be an introductory example for how something that is pretty easy can easily become pretty hard.

Often something seen as pretty easy can become very hard by either increasing parameters for success, or constraining either information or resources.

In the above example, parameters are increased (success criteria), and both information (exactly what the person might like) and resources (stores that contain the needed item) are constrained.

Usually for these things, I either do them myself, or when I delegate them I try to make it as easy as possible. “Hey can you get me at Talenti Raspberry Sorbet from Target, Walmart, or Whole Foods?” (Ostensibly also I would have a model around how convenient it is likely to be for them, and what hedges I want to put around the ask.)

What else makes things hard?

Things are a lot harder when people are tired. “Hey can you drop this off at the storage unit” becoming “Hey can you also find the speakers in the storage unit and bring them over to my friend’s house” can actually become a much harder ask if the person is very tired or is not great with weights (in the case that this is a large 6-part speaker set, the storage unit is very full, and you have to both find, excavate, and carry all the parts of the speakers).

The thing is, people like doing things for people, like to be chill about “small favors,” or want to seem dependable when they’ve been asked to do something and said yes, to do the variation of the errand that actually will be most useful to everybody.

Resentment builds up though when the ask is seen to be “easy” but actually it ended up being hard.

What else makes things hard?

Energetic mismatch. You go over to somebody’s house. They really want to get very drunk, you don’t. You have to navigate this. This navigation can be much, much more energetically draining than expected, such that there are generally pretty big social rules around not doing substances around people who aren’t into doing it with you at that time.

Just look at this:

Come on down to Florida
I got something for ya
We could see the kilos or the Keys, baby, oh yeah
Guns in the summertime
Chic-a-Cherry Cola lime
Prison isn't nothing to me if you'll be by my side

~Florida Keys

She pulls it off, in every song—without making it senseless or without emotional coherence with the entire song. This is hard to do!

I am currently in my “rare Lana Del Rey songs” era.

I am preparing to make a “My favorite Lana Del Rey Albums in Order” post. I wanted to do a silly introverted exercise.

There are many posts like this, but the point is to add a new post into the public discussion by figuring out my own feelings and opinions and putting those feelings and opinions thrustily.

And that is meant to be a beginner exercise to thinking about about putting into language what she is doing and why it moves me as much as it does, and what I am bringing into the conversation as myself, to be so moved.

I was definitely inspired by my friend ’s thoughtful series of essays on intellectual touchstones, linked at the end of this post. This essay is not an attempt to mirror those, as I do not yet feel prepared to write a post like that, about any writer. But starting to think seriously about a musician who I reliably return to, in this way, seemed like a fun first step in that direction.

Let’s start by pointing out that Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence in its full version is an entire one hour and 17 minutes long. It is basically a double album, and it maintains thematic and musical coherence this entire time. This is a formidable work. She had put out 9 albums in about 15 years. And then she shows off by having lyrics like this:

My pussy tastes like Pepsi cola
My eyes are wide like cherry pies
I got sweet taste for men who are older
It’s always been so, it’s no surprise

~ Cola

And the audience swoons for the virtuoso. I love it. I am glad that I learned to appreciate this.

I wish I had more to say. I guess I can’t do the thing for a musician either. But that I’d listened to Lana Del Rey for years and am realizing I have not even listened to every album says something about the extent and variety of her discography.

And so I will listen to every rare song she has, and rank her albums, to have a more intense relationship with an artist I already have an intense relationship with.

’s touchstone series:

The Blackthorn Hedge

Bourdieu as a Touchstone

Welcome to The Blackthorn Hedge. With this letter I’ll discuss one of my personal ideological touchstones, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, according to my plan in “Laying the Hedge: Arc 1…

Read more

a year ago · 36 likes · 28 comments · John Encaustum

The Blackthorn Hedge

MacIntyre as a Touchstone

Welcome to The Blackthorn Hedge. This letter discusses the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre as one of my ideological touchstones, the second in a small series planned in “Laying the Hedge: Arc 1” and begun with a letter on Pierre Bourdieu three weeks ago. MacIntyre is particularly known for his work on tradition, practice, and moral community, and s…

Read more

a year ago · 46 likes · 28 comments · John Encaustum

The Blackthorn Hedge

Hirschman as a Touchstone

Welcome to The Blackthorn Hedge. This letter is one day late, and it discusses the economist Albert O. Hirschman as one of my ideological touchstones. This is the third in a small series planned in “Laying the Hedge: Arc 1” that began with letters on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu…

Read more

a year ago · 17 likes · 2 comments · John Encaustum

The Blackthorn Hedge

Lorraine Daston as a Touchstone

Welcome to the Blackthorn Hedge, to the first letter after a long hiatus. This is one final letter of Arc 2 before I write a summary and begin Arc 3. This introduces the work of the historian of science Lorraine Daston as an ideological touchstone. She has the least general name recognition and the least polemical engagement of the five touchstones I’ve…

Read more

6 months ago · 36 likes · 22 comments · John Encaustum

I had written about him maybe twice before, here.

It feels a little bit…wayward, to write about him. But maybe I will appreciate it later, or maybe somebody else will.

Anyway. This is a fragile post, so I will just write it and submit it for the Foreverhaven, without thinking too much. Already I had the thought to write a different post, and had gotten caught up in some other writing.

The truth is I find thinking about him difficult. But every so often, something happens, or I look at something, and I notice that I am thinking about something that he once has said to me. When I was younger I would think that the advice is pretty general. Now I know that everybody gives different advice, everybody’s mothers and fathers emphasized different things.

He told me once, not to judge how smart a person is, based on how tormented they look. Sometimes, very smart people look tormented. But sometimes — often — very smart people look very relaxed, like they are not trying at all. Life is easy for them, thinking is easy for them. It is no trouble and would not look like trouble. He told me that if a person looks “normal” this is not evidence that their intelligence is not actually substantially above average.

I have met people like this. I have sat next to a football player in a class, and we were given the same assignment, and had the same amount of time, and he blew everybody out of the water. The former cheerleader COO of SpaceX seems like this.

Another thing he told me, is that if a person is really really good at something, do not assume that they are going to be very good at some other thing. Sometimes skill and intelligence are transferrable to other fields, but sometimes they are not. It would be a mistake, therefore, if I see somebody being really good at something, to throw some task at them without checking if they can do it, or if they want to do it, or if they would do it well. It is possible I myself have not even checked how hard the task is.

Probably one of the lessons I am most grateful for is to sit down with a movie or a book and to respect it as a work of art by the artist. The point was to not learn anything about the material at all, and to just devote an amount of time to it and absorb what the artist had to say, from beginning to end.

I have met very smart and literary people who do not have much patience for this, these days. They want to learn about what they are reading or what they are watching beforehand, evaluate it against what they have seen before, check if they are currently in the mood.

My father’s concept was that maybe I would not be in the mood, but now I am following the artist into whatever mood is created, and letting that process of emotionally alchemy happen on that ride.

My father is particular, and himself does not have sensibilities for very diverse or artistic art forms. This would be a scenario in which the student has taken the lesson and has run with it much farther than the teacher. I do not think I would be able to do half of the emotional alchemy I currently am able to do, without his putting me on a couch at a random time, putting on a movie, and telling me to sit there and watch it for sometimes three or four hours. I would have no idea what the movie would be, or why he was showing it to me. I have watched Dogville like this, and La Vita E Bella, and Once Upon A Time in America.

Respecting the artist, respecting the experience that the artist wanted to create — admitting that there is another experience I could be feeling right now, entirely different from my own, if I allowed myself to relax and be pulled by something, moved by something…

I use this a lot

look if you want better ambiance you need more lamps
you also probably need more rugs and pillows, probably you need more art, definitely you need more plants, you might need more books

but you definitely need more lamps

I have met very few people who have an adequate amount of lamps in their homes

listen.

you cannot rely on overhead lighting
most of the time, in most situations, you should turn off overhead lighting entirely and use standing lamps, or lamps on tables

if the only lighting you have in your home is overhead lighting, then you absolutely do not have enough lamps, because the number of lamps you have is currently zero

if when you turn off the overhead lights that come with your apartment or house, there is no way to get more light because there is nothing else to turn on because you have no lamps, then there are not enough lamps

“but I have perfectly fine overhead lighting”

has anybody ever gone into your home and gone “whoa you have really nice ambiance here”

or “oh you have really great lighting”

if not, then no, you do not already have an adequate solution for the specific problem I am describing

which is to make your home have something special
that makes people feel nice
that makes them want to stick around
that makes them want to be there, when they are sick
that makes you want to be there, when you are sick

If in this era of infinite electricity and electrical components you are not ambiance-maxxing and able to quickly go from needing to read a bunch of technical printouts, to being able to vibe, then you do not have enough lamps

I had a guy curl up on my couch instead of going home when he was feeling sick, because it was really nice for him to stay. He had a big house. He had family that was waiting for him. But he was feeling sick, and he curled up on this couch in my small living room, and he laid there, peacefully, until his family called him asking where he is, and then he went “holy shit” and drove back home.

how do you know if you have adequate lighting?
how do you know if you are “already doing it right?”

basically everybody has inadequate lighting
and so if you actually have adequate lighting, it would stand out and people will be complimenting you

they will tell you — “whoa your apartment has aura.”
or
“wow you have really great lamps”
or
“where did you get that lamp?”
or
“I want to keep hanging out here and doing activities.”
it will NOT be subtle

A lot of standard lighting installations — they flicker

The light flickers in a way that you almost certainly are tuning out and becoming hardened against because if you actually paid attention to it it would drive you into madness

You can start with this
It is cheap, robust, steel, battery-powered. You can can move it around different rooms, see what it looks like, see how it makes you feel. You can see what kinds of things it stirs in you, what feels the same, what feels new or different

do no start with an expensive new lamp right away, because you will be confused. you want to notice what windows you have, what curtains you have, where you need light, what activities you do. Where you tend to sit, where you tend to read, where you tend to wish you had extra light, or where you wish you were spending more time if the light were different somehow.

If an expensive lamp calls you right away, and you are not the sort of person who gets discouraged by having objects you aren’t sure what to do with, then go for it, if you think having the lamp will make you feel good about lamps

This is often how it happens
People buy lamps impulsively
Lamps sing to people

An enormous worm from Dune, inside of a normal worm after the rain

If I were a worm, I would be a worm like this

just terrifying

I always have something to write here, if I am writing something to save the Foreverhaven

Today I have nothing to say

I started a journal, pretending I’m all Johnny Truant from House of Leaves, with my lewd allusions to things I do with my buddies named Lude

something like this

I have hopes for tightening up this blog, maybe use another blog for my Foreverhaven posts, but I am not sure

I like this blog enormously. I wouldn’t want it to sit empty.

Sentences I like:

The lads seem to like the gork

The cached elephant*

Need to tap into something like a rant, crush these next 400 words.

*The cached elephant is an image I made up today for a friend.

this image was from that image of, different people, who are blind, touching and describing different parts of an elephant. one holds a leg, one a trunk, one a tail. And some people (like my friend) would have capacities like, “oh there is a tail here, tails don’t exist in isolation, means there is a back further up” -- but other people wouldn’t have a cached imaginary elephant in their mind. they would just be like “i have a leg and can tell you all about the leg if you ask about the leg.” Asking for help can be like this. You are further ahead than people and so cannot talk to anybody about it, but you still might be able to get context from people if you ask just the right thing. But often people assume you know what they know — would not assume either you don’t or that what you see is a cached elephant — you are faking it a little bit, how clearly you see, not faking it qua faking, but you say things you see, and the person thinks you see all of it, when what you are doing is pointing at your cached elephant without being there to touch it. But they think you both see clearly — that you do see the leg — and that if you see the leg, you must be holding it, and you wouldn’t at the same time be seeing the tail — nobody has that much seeing — but sometimes people do.

I can’t get the poem from House of Leaves out of my head. But I can’t share the poem because finding the poem in the book was meaningful to me. And so if people discover it on their own, that’s a special poem.

Things from my Courier New Font Johnny Truant journal:

What if in longing there is room for more explosive closeness

maybe in absence is room for imagination

who knows what I’m supposed to be writing when I’m serious about writing.

I think today is the first day I really can’t think or write anything here.

In my first journal entry I wrote about the flies. It is hard, I think, not to notice other living things. Other things that can move and affect the environment at a faster rate than normal.

If I were a worm I would worry about rain a lot.

What else.

just keep thinking about things that are larger on the inside than on the outside

people are, books are

paintings, if they are good. computers. anything with hyperlinks. any animal. Any worm, even worms that are not Dune worms on the inside.

House of Leaves was my big book for 2026, in the way that Moby-Dick was my big book for 2025. By “big” I do not mean page count, though both are 500+ pages. I mean challenging for me personally, in some way, such that reading it leads to some personal growth. A “Dark-Souls-esque” book that might take me a few tries to get going and isn’t smooth sailing, but that I had pre-decided is a journey I want to go on.

I was really surprised by this book. It bounced off of me three times, when I tried to read it, before I finally made traction with it, and so I came up with additional prerequisites that would help me.

The first time it bounced because I wasn’t looking for something cold, technical, or particularly postmodern. I was hungry for intense emotions, and my brain wasn’t warmed up for reading this kind of writing. I looked at it, read the “introduction” by Johnny and some of the first chapter, but did not actually understand anything, even at the level of basic things that were happening.

The second time it bounced because I was overwhelmed by early intense and explicitly detailed masculine sexual tropes. “A hooker ‘painting’ the walls with her blood, and a stripper named ‘Thumper’ — not for me.”

The third time, I got through the introduction and got to the Navidson Record, but was very intimidated. What got me over the edge here I couldn’t have predicted. (It was getting bored with the Brothers Karamazov and wanting to read literally anything else).

Some of the prerequisites I did —

I read The Candy House by Jennifer Egan. I was expecting a kind of masculine, technical genius in House of Leaves, and The Candy House is a work of what I may loosely call feminine technical genius, though this is likely an unfair characterization given that “masculine” usually means something like “precise” and The Candy House is a very precise work. The first time I was glancing at HoL I was struck that I may have a longing for a lot of emotionality and predicted that I would be annoyed that this book that is famous for doing a certain specific thing wouldn’t be doing other things — and I worried that this would lead me to an unfair reading. “Wishing a book was another book” is a kind of non-charity that I try to avoid.

Funnily enough, even though The Candy House is a lot shorter, it took me a lot longer to get through. It was emotionally intense in certain ways, and getting through it was good for me. It involved a lot of precision around memory. It took me many months to finish it, even when I was getting into it. It took me about two weeks to finish House of Leaves when I started reading it in earnest.

This is one of the things I like about reading in this way, where if the reading is hard, you do some prerequisites. Often the prerequisites are valuable in themselves, and then you read more instead of being stuck!

The Brothers Karamazov with a reading group also really helped. I thought that I would have to wait until I finished the Brothers K before starting House of Leaves in earnest, or I would get too confused, but I was not liking the Brothers K that much, and wanted other content to triangulate it with. I was also having a harder and harder time reading it, into books 4 and book 5 of Brothers K, and so used that break to read all of House of Leaves.

This was helpful because though the Brothers K seems intimidating because it is Dostoevsky, it is a straightforward novel. It was written as a serial. It’s basically a telenovella. And so that was a good foil for a super normal, non postmodern book to contrast HoL with.

To warm up for the sexual content, the Brothers K helped, I read a bit of Ulysees, and some writing from friends. I had hopes of reading all of Ulysees, but realized that it is often treated as a “reach book” in its own right, a Dark-Souls-esque book, and would take me a long time. The Candy House helped me also in terms of wrapping my mind around Los Angeles-style ennui around sex. Watching Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac 1 and 2 was also helpful, as well as centering myself a bit into my own feelings with rewatching a movie involving sex I really really like, The Duke of Burgundy.

This helped me see that things like the “bloody hooker” and “Thumper” were not without some detached irony, and that “reading way too into these things as if this is where the emotional weight is, rather than plot device, because I find it personally new and intense” would be a mistake. And so seeing how other content and other authors play with this stuff and what they’re doing was really good for my reading.

All of these prerequisites were done at my own pace, and with friends. It was a lot of fun and felt like a natural exploration of my interests, with this goal of priming myself for understanding a specific book in mind.

I liked the book a lot more than I thought I would. I thought that, with my preparation and priming, I would appreciate the technical deftness of a genius madman, would not miss the emotional landings of normal books enough to stay focused and finish, would have good conversations with friends, and would respect HoL’s deconstruction of genre.

In fact I ended up just breaking down and sobbing at two specific major emotional points in the book. Just in a pretty normal, “oh my god oh noooo :( ”

I was surprised that my reading involved much less being taken in by any technical deftness and more swept up in the literal content of the book, the images it creates or provokes, and the emotional themes that it brings up.

I am somebody who tends to imagine things when I read (I learned recently that this is not true for everybody). The descriptions of the dark corridors conjured for me literal dark corridors, and then the themes around trauma, grief, and mental illness took me to those locations in myself, and now I am imagining the dark corridors be there, in those sites that the book is pointing me to.

I actually have a lasting impression in myself, after the book, when I am feeling hopelessly dark, in that instead of having a void, that just doesn’t feel like anything, instead I am having those infinitely expanding fractals of corridors and stairwells. Instead of feeling like there’s “nowhere to go” it feels like there are lots of places to go. They’re just dark. I don’t find it an accident that I have been texting a bunch of my group chats pretty dark stuff this week while reading! Feeling out my own expansion into my own darknesses.

I found this to be powerfully healing, and really touching in that the book is about the healing power of books for trauma, and I did feel like I had a big effect on some of my trauma stuff, from this reading.

The poems I found were beautiful. The special house of leaves specific poem I found especially deeply moving and meaningful to me.

Even now I tear up reading it, I don’t know

I am glad I primed myself not to be upset by things like “lack of women characters doing stuff” or “showing the internality of characters through dialogue” or “graphic descriptions of the kinds of things men want to do to women when they feel freedom to write about it.”

This let me get through the book

and I was really really moved by it. I found it very tender. I found it really really big in its tenderness.

I think learning about “what the book won’t be” actually disproportionately increased my enjoyment of the book in ways I would not have expected. I did that to curb disappointment, but actually the metacommentary on genre and “what is a book” that HoL does had been supplemented — that is, having built this relationship of things “outside the book” did help me both understand and enjoy what is inside of the book.

I am somebody who in my interpersonal and intimate dealings, has a fiery sunny mode, but also have a moon mode, enneagram 4w5, a little more looking at what’s missing and noticing how that shows what is there, more focused on silences and what breaks the silence…….

And that side of me really appreciated some stuff — a bunch of stuff that might be quieter but felt pretty loud to me, given my buy-in into generally taking myself into colder and smaller places in myself, farther away from the world (potentially my negative schizotypy stuff, derealization, stuff like this). And so from a place like that, dispositionally, and then following what the book is doing, it did lead me to feel a very big expanse of tender warmth around the ending, the last 30 pages.

There was a whole chapter in the book that involved a ton of citations involving things that are not in the book — just hundreds of citations of houses that are not the house in the book

there is a joke in the Index too - there are items in the index that are not in the book - that just say DNE - does not exist? but if you erase the letters DNE from INDEX you get IX which is chapter IX which is the chapter with all the citations of things that are not in the book……

And I think technically I do not usually follow things like this particularly well, tricks like this, but emotionally I did get very involved with this and so got a lot out of it

where I did get really really bought into the book, the story, what will happen to everybody involved.

I bought the setup that Zampanó was writing about a real film, and that the real film actually happened.

That is, enough “disbelief” about Zampanó existing was set up as a premise (who is this guy, why did he leave this manuscript?), and then questions about the film even existing, and then is what happened in the film even real — all these areas of disbelief were fleshed out (and this is one aspect of the technical brilliance that people refer to) — that a certain dance around “actually believing the novel” did indeed happen for me, and I did really care about everyone the way I would be if I was reading a normal novel.

I also decided to have certain buy-in early. For example, I was noticing all the instances of “house” that were in blue — I did not know why, and still do not know. But I had decided that the “house” in “blue” was going to be a magnificent little treat that I am extra emotionally invested in, like of course this is a wonderful thing, that “house” is in blue! as if this is a really important thing. It might be. I wouldn’t know why. But I got really invested in feeling the feelings around having buy-in for that early, as a cool thing, and I think that did give me an emotional foothold for the larger emotional arcs and surprises.

I basically read it in two big chunks. I read it from the beginning, through when they all come back from the house the first time — this took about 7 days. Then I took some time to do some work — a few days. Then I went back and finished the book in a day.

I found the ending of the book to be satisfying. I didn’t expect it to be. I thought that the “first ending, where I first stopped” after everyone returns from the house would be where I actually would feel complete and happy, that intense darkness labyrinth, and that everything afterwards would kind of just be a wind-down. But there was another crescendo and another wave, and that second wave was this big loving wave of warmth I really did not predict would be there, and I found the end to be really quite beautiful. It made me want to read the book again, kind of, but not yet, and maybe only just bits of it, now. I still am thinking about it and am overwhelmed in it, lost in it.

This book did leave me feeling like I would reread large parts of it, and then maybe reread it again in a few years in its entirety. I see how people revisit it.

I also did read it when I was pretty sad and a lot of the emotions in the book resonated with feelings of isolation I was experiencing in my own life.

I think I definitely got smarter reading it. Like probably actually increased an IQ point or two.

Some people talk about getting “lost in it” and that definitely happened to me. I didn’t really want to put it down, but did need emotional breaks. But a reading session for me without a break would be about 2-3 hours, which is long for me.

Still shaking, in a unique way, afterwards

I found it meaningful also that this book is about the death of books as a genre, in the age of digitalization, but also that it is about death literally, in that if you do not read it as a book about it in context of literature but just read it straight up, it still works. I read it more in the spirit of this second way, as a book about grief for people who you love who died, and how to keep living.