Notes - March 26

Ironically after declaring that I don’t read I’ve enjoyed the stimulation of listening Michael Pollan latest book: « a world appears ». I understood very little of it but it cheered me up a lot. None of it felt particularly new. It felt adjacent to Robert Sapolsky and San Harris books. Granted the Perspective differ and Pollan tends to be more quirky and personal. Not that Pollan is unscientific. I deeply appreciated the closing on a zen retreat. I appreciated his roundup of all the theories and his last note: « we will probably never know, and that’s fine ». Some of the core concepts of the book are recurrent conundrums of both Buddhist philosophy and Science which I love to toy with (by that I mean throw at my wife or blab about on this blog) such as: the limits of language, intelligence and embodiment, sentience, reality as a process not a thing, direct experience versus conceptual thinking, partiality of knowledge.

I thought about starting to record streams of consciousness. That sounds actually like unproductive fun, something I sorely need. After sleeping on it, this blog is already bordering the genre too closely so I’ll leave it at that. It seems like I can’t resist the dopamine hit of a good note dump.

Some need to be saved. Some need to be saved from themselves Some need to be saved from themselves saving themselves from themselves.

It’s not because you can build spaceships that you should It’s not because you can grow blueberries in the desert that you should It’s not because you can build intelligent machines that you should If the moral bypass is that fact that if it’s not you, your neighbor will do it, you have failed the ethical test.

A close neighbor works for a big tech company. We chat occasionally. Last time he mentioned being pretty tapped out and disinterested. AI had something to do with but also his career stage. During our most recent chat he acknowledged being fully checked out. No care at all. Out everyday at 3pm. Claude, no Claude he is out. The days of putting out fires at 5pm are behind him. I’m not there, yet. Maybe I’m just too into the rat race. My ego stuck in the hamster wheel. Definitely a lot of envy.

Php is great. I love today it more than ever. I feel like a dude that knows how to fix a printer building my dead simple php blog via FTP, making changes live, breaking stuff, tweaking. Sometimes I have to get off the screen precipitously and the website is broken for a day. I mess up my RSS feed every other post. Out of respect for myself I’ll stick to my ways. The internet needs to be weird, human, and simpler that makes it fixable.

Derek Sivers is now on social media. Many, me included, were a bit thrown off. How can a proud free electron step into the cesspool of mainstream social media. Is he just using pro-SEO rhetoric? Is it greed? Is it ethical dissonance?

Manu’s comment hit an unexpected cord: "The web can only be healthy if we believe in its intrinsic quality of connecting content and people". I should not feel surprised or upset at Derek’s move. His ideas don’t hurt democracy, but his friendliness to the means of distribution does. Germany said fuck to Russian gas. I say fuck to Meta, twitter for the same reason. It’s all oligarchic pipelines.

I’ve read a bunch about anti circumvention law, ingerence, tech monopolies bricking devices all over the world… Most Americans are not even reaping the benefits of the US chokehold. Unfortunately - think than can last for another long while unfortunately. We need to go back the a state of homeostasis first. We’re all too distracted, or lost in our emotions. I caught up to neighbor Scott who a year ago responded to my amusement about Trump new round: "It’s funny for a minute, I like good comedy. But now I’m already reaching my limits". I’m there too.

I’m on my phone too often while pushing the stroller. A disturbing image of a father I wish to not be. Spring break is coming. I struggle with vacations. Walk after walk. Stroke after stroke. Eyes closed on the ERG. Good from. Bad form. I adjust my posture. I change my stance and improve things marginally. While keeping in mind that this is all mental activity.

I’m inhaling my youngest's cuteness while pretending the world is growing up in is fine.

I’m deleting my /now page. Not because I’m mad at Derek but because my blog feed is an adequate answer to “what I am up to these days?”. Thought after thought after thoughts. It does not stop. It does not stick. At least not with my gold fish memory buffer. I always have something on my mind and that’s driving what I do everyday. I still don’t have a great big plan. I watch and engage. A few bullets would be an insult to the complexity of the flow. If you want to bullet, ask AI or god forgives, go on LinkedIn.

Stamat started blogging. 20+ years in the making. He’s hungry, and foolish. He is a friend. A seeker. I sense the need for therapeutic writing in his first post. For me today, writing is somewhere between exorcism and bowel movement. It is freeing. The opposite way of all the digital gardeners, cultivating their own thoughts. I wish them bountiful harvest. I’ll return to my compost pile.

Is it still a heat wave when it lasts 3 weeks? Such an early hit was a test of conviction as I felt more grateful than ever to live on the central coast of California.

Little Wyatt asked his mom who made the trees who looked like they were hot too. "They are hot too. Nobody made them. They came to be a long time ago. Nobody was around back then". There’s moments like these where reality and fiction blur.

Software friction gets at me. Analog friction is felt through our senses. Digital friction is a borrowed concept. Not actual friction (although sometimes I do head butt my phone or slap my screen). Haptic and animation are poor renditions of real world friction. A red light is annoying because I’m sitting in the sun breathing dust and exhaust pipes. An error 500 hits different. Yes, I’m also sitting in the sun. But still.

The garage door was open. Cyber truck parked in front next to an old souped up Honda civic on which spiderwebs are noticeable taking over. Hard rock was playing on a speaker, reasonably loudly. A 50 year old man with a watering can shuffles around with a watering can. He stops in front of an agave and turns his head as the cult seven nation army riff quicks in. He returns to his plant and sits for a while. He asked the agave: "Que necesitas? Mas?" . He then poured gently the entire can over the span of the whole song.

I once picked up a dog bowl from the street. A seemingly brand new made of some kind of recycled natural fiber. I’d eat out of this. It looks much more adequate than the plates we rarely use, because they suck. Food slips out of it, they slip on the table, utensils fall out of them while carrying them out... My wife hates the dog bowl which has been used as a key container and now is in the garage as a container for sunglasses. A fun ontological puzzle that catches my mind as I pick a pair before heading out.

We showed up at the beach under equipped. It was 20 degrees cooler than where we live, only 10 miles away. I hope this is not a recurring metaphor for too many situations in life.

A dad wearing a "mental vacation" hat in a kid playground - reminded me of my wallpaper in my in-person startup work day: “this is just a website”.

My one year old pulled one of the plants that was dead in front of our house for at least a year. It was sitting on top of a half assed hole. The roots were dry. Semi-busted Irrigation was just keeping the bottom of the hole wet. Using a toddler gardening kit trowel as my sole instrument, I made the whole deeper and got a new plant in. I felt immense satisfaction. Another point scored for digging holes. I dug another one for another plant. The soil around my house is pure clay 6 inches deep. I love the fact that half the neighborhood had to witness me going through this. My kids were running around, clay smattered all over the sidewalk. If the first two survive the first month I’m redoing the the full landscaping around my house, without asking permission to HOA. It’s not like there’s much option regarding viable plant. Drought resistant, or drought resistant. I just want something vaguely green and alive as a moral booster, and something to care for. To feel less alone in my fight against the sun.

That two letter plugin is useful but I wouldn’t go as far as saying it’s a multi trillion dollar opportunity. The market seems to disagree. Apparently I’m not seeing what a lot of people are.

It’s not the size that matters, it’s what you do with it. Let us remember this timeless dick joke. The comedy hinges on the simple and factual observation that desirable outcomes don’t necessarily correlate to input. Thus justifying that very little can yield enough. Conversely, a lot can yield nothing or very little. Means of computation have rendered this type of estimation tricky. Some have argued that manual task are a way to stay grounded. Writing as a form of manual (read non assisted) thinking. That’s the highest pretension of my blogging, revealing the limits of my own thinking.

My one year old pinkie toe has a greater sense of purpose than my entire body. It’s fantastic to see it reach, stretch and stabilize. It has a life force I tried to artificially infuse to mine. My left one in particular, are shriveled, deformed, trying disappear un each foot. My mission to bring them back is not going well. Taping helps a bit. So does managing callousing too. Intentional outward stretching is more than laborious. Like if there was never communication possible to this extremity. When manipulating them with my toes, my brain barely registers anything.

At this stage of beard growth, my mouth recedes by a centimeter in my face. It’s an odd and fun feeling. I feel less wind and I sense more « face ».

Compared to my millennial fellas, I have not traveled much. The few places I have been to I was not truly present. The logistics of tourism and my allergy to money made enjoyment and presence almost impossible. But I have soaked thoroughly in the places I lived in. Walking, jogging, biking, shlepping my bad mood around.

Bumper sticker of the month: inherent bummer

How to get a kid to sleep: sleep next to a kid.

An impressive squat rack stood aside of a set of kids bike. A typically crunchy California image. Among the stuff, a large flag-like banner reads « built tough » with a few other posters with slogans in the same vein. I know the guy: 3 kids and seemingly sensible. Not exactly the kind of tough guy the scene would suggest. He might be tough but compared to the steel plates he’ll remain physically and emotionally fragile.

Every staycation I crave a garden. I love the vibe of neighboring town of Los Osos. It’s more laid back than San Luis. SLO is posh. We got an Apple Store, that says it all. Since our move I very rarely feel the itch to open Zillow. I relegated real estate to conversation with neighbors. Prices and rates are fun chit chat. I couldn’t resist and looked at the nearby inventory. Submerged by feelings and numbers I could not comprehend I wanted to take a note of the moment. In the process I realized lacking the words while acknowledging that this exact emotional experience might be very common these days.

Kali Yuga is the final, current "Age of Darkness" in Hindu cosmology, characterized by spiritual decline, moral corruption, and materialism. It began roughly 5,000 years ago with Lord Krishna's death and lasts for 432,000 years, with over 426,000 years remaining.

The jokes about living the Kali Yuga crack me up. However real or bearable, cyclical time rather than linear feels about right when I let hard boiled absurdity guide my mind.

I was equally amused and delighted to learn that shamans, mystics, and our species beliefs in divinity have stemmed from psychedelics, and more importantly vitamins deficiency/starvation. After bringing this theory to my wife she remarked that I missed my chance to meet god during my years of intense fasting and aggressive cycling.

My wife wrote another very long story. Laboring in the shadow of her past. I read it while on the trainer. I took me 40min and 250 calories according to Fitbit, to ingest and then retain 10% of the 20 000 words. Not that I consider nostalgia a toxic impulse, I do not translate it into hopefulness. My comparison to Russian novel didn’t sound far fetched but didn’t land well. Not that her blogging is anywhere as dark or voluminous as Crime and punishment. The lingering and minutiae seem to indicate a stuckness. On top of that the closing left me unsatisfied in its framing. After such a convoluted mix of poor decisions and feelings closing on Thomas Merton could have been a lot more cathartic. The man’s inclination toward retreat from meaning in the midst of a tumultuous life is fitting but his actions and prose marked felt like a more aggressive departure. A cliff that I feel she is still far from. But her ability to string memories over such length, on a whim, and in a few days remains an impressive feat in this age of AI where most don’t remember last night’s dinner.

Her mother insisted that she should spend more time cooking for her kids instead of writing. An hilarious comment from a Trump voter, unapologetic ChatGPT user and pickle ball enthusiast. It’s a fools errand to talk somebody out of their feelings, mine included.

I got into a few days of funk struggling to ease into vacation. Day two is always hard. Forced Idle. Restraint and complaint. Work is far enough to feel something positive but the uncertainty of relaxation creates a weirdly unique anxiogenic blend. I took my lion mane hoping for some release assistance. It does something pleasant during workdays, or at least the placebo does. That night I was indulging my kids pre bed snack and took a mushroom night pack that came free with my lion mane order. The night was good but the day after was a bleak walk in the fog. I presume that the 10g+ of mushrooms I ingested in the previous 24h did something. There is a special dullness I’ve come the identify every time these occur. Always too late.