When you drop all ideas about pleasure causing happiness and pain causing suffering, then you can find happiness where you might expect to feel pain and you can see how certain pleasures can lead to certain suffering. When you pay attention to your actual feelings rather than what you might expect to feel, you will surprise yourself.

Source: Pleasure, Pain and Happiness

#morncomp #quotes

Shelves of scripts I'll never give away. Soundtracks moved from device to device that I can't listen to anymore. Boxes of programs and cast party souvenirs in the attic.

It's cliche to say this, but it was a lifetime ago. I think back to that period and it's not unfamiliar but it is foreign. Like walking through your childhood home and realizing you aren't in a memory but in a dream that's slowly melting into a nightmare.

But the nightmare isn't now, it was back then, when I violently ripped out that page from my life and tossed it to the wind. Only later realizing there were words on the page I'd never see again, never stumble across and only sometimes be able to remember the vague shapes of. Words that were so important to me not just lost but discarded. A secret formula, a spell, a code, a key. Gone.

At the time, I thought my love of theatre defined me. I couldn't imagine myself or my life without that as the foundation. What does that mean now, for the things I see around me that I cling to? The stuff I surround myself with that I hang my identity on?

Maybe its encouraging, empowering even. That part of my life is gone, and yet I remain. Completely different and exactly the same.

There was so much more violently lost back then than just my connection to the stage. So much more pain caused and endured. And yet most of those scars have healed over and I am stronger for it. Leaner. Smarter.

But there was such potential then. I was just starting something, intoxicated with the potential of it all, and I drunkenly wrapped my life around a lamp post. The wounds healed. Relationships irrevocably lost, but hearts grew back. I am better for that time in my life. Much didn't survive the transition. Much did and is stronger as a result. But in between, or maybe holding it all together is... theatre. That life of mine, just getting started, never to resolve.

Hanging in the air. A ghost light on stage waiting for the next show that will never come. But at least the theater is never truly dark.

***

This melancholia brought to you by:

...wandering forward, sometimes only by inches. But I am moving. And so is everything else. I will never truly get to pause everything and have a proper look around to get my bearings. But I can keep dropping pages like breadcrumbs as I go, and following the marks on the trunks of trees left before me, and keep chasing the sunlight I see streaming through the trees ahead.

And that will be enough.

#journal

Okay funny story – I wrote the below little post over a year ago, and for some reason, never published it. Instead it was hiding in drafts nearly lost to history and my memory.

Spoiler Alert: I did end up rejoining Tumblr, but then got back off of it around the change of the year as part of a general rejiggering of my internet/media/art-experiencing habits and routines. I do miss some aspects of Tumblr (again) but not enough to got back...

Anyway, original year-old post follows:

As a service, Tumblr’s lack of commerciality and consistent inability to successfully monetize itself is part of its whole appeal. There’s a whole genre of Tumblr posts that just screenshot and mock the bizarre hosted ads that spawn on the dashboard like mutated fish in a radioactively-poisoned river.

But it’s a loving kind of mockery—users seem, for the most part, to be genuinely grateful for the state of the site. For many, it’s a refuge from the dystopian insanity that the rest of the internet has come to represent. “It’s like anti-social social media,” says Bec, regarding Tumblr’s continued paradoxical appeal.

[…] for those who value creativity without the pressures of “hustle culture,” and wish to avoid the current-events performative outrage that has crept in, kudzu-like, and swallowed up almost every single other area of open expression online, Tumblr remains ideal.

The corollary of that, of course, being that those who appreciate that creativity without necessarily needing or wanting to express it themselves can also find happy homes on Tumblr, as spectators to a healthy culture of simply liking things.

Tumblr was absolutely my social media “home” for a long time – though I never saw it has a social media platform, per se. It was communal blogging and celebration of cool shit. It was the only platform I ever amassed any sort of following on, and the only one I ever saw my self wanting a following on.

I deleted my account and my tumblogs (hell yes, that is what I did and will aways call them) when the porn ban came down – mainly because the site/admins/corporate overlords were handling it, oh so badly. But it sounds like a lot of that has calmed down now…

And now, I’m nostalgic for it? I am feeling… things? This will not do, not at all.

I’m not considering getting back on Tumblr? …am I?

Oh no.

https://www.fansplaining.com/articles/the-ever-mutating-life-of-tumblr-dot-com

#morncomp

I understand and agree with their usefulness in the world of 'blog as archive', but among the other parallel worlds of what a blog can be, I kind of like the ambiguity of posting without them. Does it really matter that you know exactly what day I said this? Or, how close this is, temporally, to the previous post? To the (hopefully) next one?

I mean, it might matter! I don't actually know! I'm asking you!

Undecided. Is there a date on this post? Depending on when you are looking at it, there might be. Or there might not. I'm not sure if there is a third option.

“The only one among us not free to change their mind is the one who does not decide...”

I’ve been spending some time, literally tonight and in general, bopping around the current, uh blogosphere. I’ve found a few sites, I believe from ooh directory that are doing basically the exact thing I could see myself doing which is… this, right now. Except in a blog instead of privately, talking to myself in Notion.

Why not do this in a blog? Why I am here? Because I don’t think anyone will read it? I just read a bunch of random blogs. So its clearly not that hard to get it in front of some eyes.

Because I don’t want to invest the effort? That’s very possible, but that’s also the kind of energy I’m trying to transform.

Because…it will suck? Well probably but that’s a bad reason not to do something.

And so, I'm here. Again. For the first time. Again.

I don't need to know how this will all go in order to do it at all. I need to keep telling myself that.

Something I read tonight, from this new personal blog I discovered discussing their love of 'daily bloggers':

I also like it when they don’t have all the answers, as prescriptive blogs aren't my jam. The more they write without an overactive filter, the better. It allows me to learn/discover things alongside them.

That's... facinating. Because, trying to actually answer my above question of “Why am I not just blogging?”, I realize a large part of my hesitation to engage with blogging specifically (as opposed developing and writing more polished “essay” posts (which I don't do much either but for different (bad) reasons...)) is because I devalue what I write when I “write without an overactive filter”. I doesn't feel “real” and I can't imagine anyone would want to read it. I literally don't see the value in it for anyone outside of myself.

...and then I think of all the time I've spent reading other people's personal blogs and zines, and things like published diaries, notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.

So yeah. I think I just need to get out of my own way and type stuff on the damn internet. And go from there.

Thanks, Veronique.ink!

[Nietzsche] accepts the inevitability and suffering of reality (eternal return) but insists that the person, the self, must change perception. This change of perception must address only oneself, for no other expectation or altered circumstance but only sheer will, insight, and perception, can give us a new ability to understand, tolerate, and transcend suffering. The present moment of existence must become the tablet on which to etch one’s aspirations, intentions, conclusions, directions, not change any external circumstances but to see through everything, to live in its contradictions. [Emphasis mine.]

Eternal return is purgation of past weaknesses, failure, error, desire. The self must embrace not only the will to pursue a new self but what would be associated with Nietzsche as the will to power, meaning no more than the taking control of one’s self in life and destiny. Because this self-made destiny is the fruit of a personal struggle, the self must overcome much that is irrevocably external affecting the inner person. The will must transform the self not through attack but through transvaluation, the will overcoming obstacles, subjectivities, falsehoods, not reliant on society, culture, others, but forging one’s own path and system of thought and values.

From: Eternal Return via Hermit's Thatch

Once again I've been thinking about eternal return (heh).

Once again I find myself circling, hovering around the periphery of action.

Once again I find myself going through all of the motions and preparations leading up to an actual change. I make the run up closer than I ever have.

Yet still the gulf remains. The gap. The canyon between me and It.

I have been at this point so many times before.

I just need a better approach, I say. So I retreat back. I plan the route. I clear the path. I wait for favorable weather. The wheel turns again; I set off running. It's easier this time, I am gaining speed. I see the Other Side. I see where I can land. I just need to jump, and...

And I skid to a stop, right at the edge. Again.

It is easy to get lost in that. Here I am making the same old mistakes. Here I am again, not doing the thing I claim I want to do.

The gravity of my goal, my task, has no doubt captured me. But I can't come into land. I simply spiral tighter and tighter around it. And sometimes I drift away and maybe that's what I need – to let it go and float off somewhere else – but no, at the farthest reaches, the arch of orbit tugs at my back, my retreat slows, and my path bends and I am on the approach again.

How many times will I do this?

But to think that this isn't yet another repeat of every other failed attempt... to realize that I am not being cursed with another frustrating iteration, but blessed with another chance to get it right...

...that despite how many times I have found myself here, the only thing that exists is this present moment...

”...the person, the self, must change perception.”

#morncomp #quotes

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?

#morncomp #quotes

Aloy

The month started off with a discovery: Aloy, our kitten, Champion of the Nora, Savior of Meridian, was... a boy. We got Aloy (yes, named after that Aloy)in late October when they were about two months old. We were told they were female, and had no reason to question that. Since then, three different vets and who-knows-how-many vet techs examined this cat, but it was only as they were literally about to spay her that they realized, hold on, that's a penis.

Our vet called us from the operation, moments before the first cut, and she was so embarrassed. We weren't mad at all, but we were... surprised. So, Aloy got neutered instead and we had to re-learn our cat's pronouns.

Aloy the Boy got to keep his name, lost his balls, and gained... a cone.

Oh God, the cone. Could one apparatus simultaneously confer such shame, confusion, rage, humiliation, helplessness, and desperation upon its wearer as this cone did to poor Aloy? The looks of abject sadness. The complete inability to remember how to eat in it, how to drink. The repeated, melodramatic attempts – FLIP, SIGH, PLOP – to get comfortable.

Once the cone was off and new normality was established, it was time to make the basement Aloy-proof, or at least approach that impossible goal as thoroughly as we could. Since his arrival, Aloy had been restricted to roaming the first floor, and I have been working most days up there with him and D. But my office is in the basement, and I was ready to get back down there – though I didn't want to do so until Aloy was ready to have access to expanded territory.

The basement has needed to be cleaned and severely reorganized since the Fall anyway. It wasn't remotely cat safe, but Aloy wasn't remotely cat-responsible enough to be down there, even if it was made “safe”, until very recently. So over the first few weeks of the month, I cleaned and prepped my office and solidified the main room down there as The Studio, half workout gym/studio for D, half craft/collage/workshop space for both of us. Frankly, the basement has probably never been this clean or organized the whole time we've lived here. All it took was a tiny cat with apparently confusing genitals.

The Arch-Book, etc.

I've been puttering around with this blog, my website, and web-related creativity on and off (more “off”) for a while now. It's been part of a larger project to pivot how I spend my time, and to engage with new and refined practices and processes. In short, I'm trying to live a more deliberate life, spend my time the way I believe I want to, instead of the ways I happen to drift into. This has manifested in redefining my daily routines, the devices I use, and how I use them.

And somehow as part of that quest, quite randomly, I decided to make my erstwhile Chromebook an intrinsic part of that processes.

I've discussed elsewhere the project and how unexpectedly it came to be. Basically, my MacBook is getting old, and likes to stay plugged into the wall most of the time, so I needed a device I could bring around the house with me, more focused on typing and creating content. The MacBook's battery has been flakey for a while, and I've been working around that by just... not doing the sort of generative, creative work I claim to want to do. With the MacBook downstairs plugged in and a new cat upstairs quite literally demanding my attention, it was the perfect excuse to keep kicking the can. Until one day, I picked up the can, opened it, and out popped the peanut brittle snakes of a knotty hardware project.

So for about 10 days, I spent nearly every moment of spare time learning how to install and use Linux on a machine intended to serve a purpose I have to some degree been avoiding for... twenty years? And it's... worked?

Creating the arch-book and redistributing my digital life across a different arrangement of devices naturally triggered many knock-on projects, but the majority of them were all still aligned with my larger set of goals: spend my time deliberately, facilitate meaningful reading/watching/listening experiences, build creative and journalistic practices.

By the end of the month, by and large the infrastructure of this part of my life is up and running. It will always be an active process; there will be endless tweaking (both with Linux, and my life), but so far the maintenance hasn't over-shadowed the actual work I want to get done. The arch-book sits right in the middle of all of this, and besides being an important cog, and a valuable tech project... it's just damn fun to use.

Building, Creating, etc.

I've been more active on this blog, comparatively speaking. Although, as you can see it took my until late February to actually finish and post this January recap so let's just keep things in perspective, right?

Anyhoo, I have been puttering away on Homo Monstrosus, tweaking, fussing, etc., and actually updating the /now page I built in the Fall.

I've also finally completed a several-year (albeit with huuuuuge gaps) project of organizing and cataloging my personal digital photo archive. Most significantly, I've made dozens of themed albums, in part for personal organization, but also so that I can begin to go through these photos and albums, and begin to create themed public galleries to be posted... somewhere. I'm still figuring that part out. Stay tuned.

I've always thought in a different universe I would have got deep into photography. I took 3 years of (film) photography classes in high school and by the end was developing color photos by hand. That was nearly the post-high school path I took. Maybe it should have been? Another post, for another day.

I'm looking forward to sharing the pictures I have taken with... whatever random internet weirdos happen to find this place. Welcome weirdos, I am one of you. Take me in and share your weird secrets with me. I'll show you cool pictures of cats and flowers and the sky.

Reading

I want to read more this year, but I'm also broadly focused on taking stock of what is around me, clearing out archives, and being deliberate with that reading – especially internet-based reading. I've been pruning my digital inputs, trying to remove sites and apps that I don't actually engage with, but rather keep scrolling through hoping for a hit of dopamine.

This tactic, of locking myself in a playpen with options, but healthy, curated ones is something I've been implementing in stages since the Fall, and it seems to be working for me. To that end, instead of scrolling Instagram, or the algorithmically-focused-on-outrage news app, I've been diving through my embarrassingly huge Pocket archive, and even stepped back in time and set up a good old fashioned feed reader with limited and deliberate subscriptions. I no longer want access to anything and everything I might want to read; I want easy, direct, no-distraction access to a few, carefully selected feeds from sources I am looking forward to reading each time they post. I don't want to skim, to get the gist. I want to engage and build relationships with pieces, authors, and sources.

At some point, I should probably document here the feeds I do follow and consume regularly (Man, people really seem to hate that word, “consume”... I recognize how it can be seen as a shallow replacement for engagement, but to me it also can have connotations of engaging-with-wholehearted-aplomb. Devouring, etc.), but for now I just want to mention the current highlight and darling of my regular 'net-based reading has been the posting of British author Tom Cox.

I get like this sometimes, lose my focus, then reel it back in. It’s part of the pattern, inevitable, crucial. But I notice I need to guard against it more than I did in the past. It’s the incessant, troubling speed of everything.

Source

I love his style, from his journal-style compendium posts to his more creative and wonderfully weird writing and ramblings. Probably the most excited I've been to find a new writer in a long time. Now I should probably read his books...

Perhaps the only thing more embarrassing and daunting than my Pocket queue is my comic book backlog. The good news about such a large backlog is that I can grab literally anything from it and find something I enjoy. And that's why I've been devouring Sonic the Hedgehog comics, the most recent run, available with my Comixology Unlimited subscription. These aren't the deepest and most life-changing books, but they are fun as heck, vibrantly drawn and colored, and a wonderful companion to Sonic Frontiers.

However, for something with more artistic substance and depth, I finally started Kelly Sue DeConnicks's incredible, revolutionary and beautiful Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons series. There's no way in a few lines to describe how great and intense this book is, from the writing to the jaw-dropping art. Just read it. That's what I'm doing. First two issues down, though I keep re-reading them instead of moving on the third. Like Sonic Frontiers, I just don't want it to be over...

For Christmas, D got me the collected poetry of Gary Snyder. Despite being and English major and loving poems, I can't remember if I've ever sat down with a book of poetry and just went through it beginning to end, page by page. I've read a lot of say, Whitman, but by bouncing around from thing to thing, following threads and thoughts, flipping to random pages, etc. There's nothing wrong with that approach; it's organic and leads to wonderful discoveries, but this time, I wanted to try something more measured.

I've made it through Riprap, Snyder's first collection, and loved it. Poetry in general is a real challenge to me in a lot of ways. It must be sipped, cannot be gulped. It openly mocks and destroys the “pages-per-day” type quantification I usually plan and measure my reading habit in. This is exactly why I need it in my life. Interaction with poetry takes as long as it takes, and rewards not by completion but engagement.

Reading Riprap has made me want to reread Dharma Bums, where I was first introduced to Snyder via Kerouac. I didn't get to start the novel in January. Let's see if that's something that shows up in the February recap...

And in the remaining hours...

I didn't game nearly as much as I thought I would in January, mainly because I spent so much of my free time working on the above mentioned projects. I am always so hot and cold with this sort of thing, I either do nothing but game – often at the detriment to anything else I want to engage with – or I don't touch the controller for weeks, absorbed in other things. I really would like balance. Some of everything. Slow, steady movement forward through a few different streams. That is something I am working towards, trying to train myself for – though I wonder if it is something that is even possible for me, and if I should just embrace this particular part of my nature. But that's a whole other post for another time.

I did play Sonic Frontiers, which I started essentially the day it came out in December. I absolutely adore it – and Sonic in general – but as alluded to earlier, I admit I've been slow to finish it, in part because I just don't want it to be over. This is why I have never actually finished Breath of the Wild despite it being possibly my favorite game ever and having it since 2017.

I also started and got a fair way through Final Fantasy Adventure for the Game Boy via the Collection of Mana for the Switch. I got that compilation for Secrets and Trials of Mana, which I've never played and only recently heard of (I was a Sega kid, hence the Sonic obsession). But I am weird about starting at the beginning of series, and a sucker for Game Boy games, and so had to dive into this one. So far, despite its age and related clunkiness, I am enjoying it a lot, and the chance to name the two main characters after both our current cat and our recently departed one has been unexpectedly meaningful...

(The main hero is male, and I decided to name him after Aloy before we actually discovered his true sex. An interesting premonition?)

A great addition to this year has been me and D's decision to commit to weekly movie nights. We both love movies and always want to watch more, but as with so many things we just... don't, at least not regularly. But in December, D said enough was enough and she watched 31 movies in 31 days! I watched most of them with her and was vaguely around for the rest and while that kind of hyper-focus is a lot even for me, it inspired us to try and commit to a movie-watching practice in 2023 that was perhaps a little more manageable. So enter Weekly Movie Night! In January we watched:

• Knives Out
• Only Lovers Left Alive
• Jurassic World
• Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Generally, we're going to alternate picking movies, with Knives Out being my first pick and Only Lovers, D's. But we also decided to go through the Jurassic World Trilogy with my dad, which none of us had seen yet (the movies, not my dad – we can see him, and do, fairly regularly). Every movie we've watched so far has been highly enjoyable, with the first two quickly becoming deep favorites for me and D. Fallen Kingdom is the weak link of the bunch, but I still enjoyed it and am a sucker for the entire larger franchise and am looking forward to finishing it out in February.

...and further on

That was January. It was... a lot? And by that, I mean, I did a lot? I just can't help ending those sentences with question marks because I am still not used to the fact that I am, indeed, Doing Things. The Things I want to be doing, no less. I don't expect February to have the same sort of momentum (spoiler alert: it does not) but I have enough moving that I am optimistic I can build on this month, lay down more coats on this foundation, and continue to make incremental progress on the things that are important to me.

And if all else fails, there is still cat. Good cat. Pretty cat. Speaking of, behold, Aloy, Prince of Cones:

Cat tax paid. See you next month!

posted: 23 feb 23 tags: #monthlyrecap #princeofcones

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

#morncomp #quotes