That was on top of listening assignments (music degree and all that) as well as score study. It was a lot. There was probably more paper in my bag than a letter carrier would have on a given day. I would read at every break. Any moment that I wasn’t in a practice room or at work or in front of a class I was reading. And I chose none of those books.

I can still remember being out of school and going to a bookstore for the first time and being able to pick the book that I wanted to read. It was exhilarating!

But that feelings was NOTHING when compared to the first time I was slogging my way through a book and realized that I could just put it down. Or toss it. I didn’t ever have to come back to it. All of those completionist urges? Gone. I was, indeed, My Own Boss™.

I felt that this week as I was reading a book that just wasn’t hitting. I have a lot of other books waiting to be read. So that one will go back to the library and I’ll toss it on the Did Not Finish list (which is pretty short).

That feels like real freedom.

Perfect for a day that feels more like late September than late August.

I like novellas. The giant, sprawling, epic stories lose me at some point. 1000 pages of Picasso biography? Sure. But I have always preferred more concise works when it comes to fiction. Well, and music. String quartets. The solo guitar. I love a good opera, but those are few and far between for me, much like epic novels. And so I stick to chamber music and novellas.

This novella? This is right in my wheelhouse.

The plot isn’t all over the place, but it’s certainly not linear. We learn a lot about the main character as we sift through his life and the tragedies of his existence. Every page finds something that resonates. There’s no moralizing. The prose is compact without being sparse. There are no gotchas or twists. It’s very honest and very direct. In that sense, it reminds me of A River Runs Through It.

That book? A River Runs Through It? I’m envious of anyone who gets to read that for the first time. I read it every year. It’s beautiful. Truth disguised as a poem disguised as a novella. That’s why, I think, I love novellas so much: they are that much closer to poetry. And poems are conduits for Truth.

Train Dreams will make its way into my collection, but I’m glad I got it from the library. Any excuse to spend time there and use its services is a good one. This book is about a 2 or so hour read for someone who went to grad school. Probably more for some and less for others. Definitely a new Must Read recommendation.

The best thoughts aren’t shower thoughts; they’re dog walking thoughts. Thoughts that come while in motion. The scenery doesn’t change quickly like in a car or even on a bicycle. It rather invites reflection. Probably why most people don’t do it. Or if they do, it’s with earbuds jammed in tightly and a podcast droning on to keep their own thoughts from getting too loud. Thoughts uninvited. But then there are a few like today’s.

Somewhere out there, someone who knew the version of me that was 20 is going about their life. They don’t know ME. They know the person who was 20. Given the number of times this person who was 20 has changed and reinvented himself, it’s nice that anyone remembers that kid who quietly ceased to be. He wasn’t bad. He wasn’t great, but he wasn’t bad. And maybe there is a really, really good memory attached to him. Maybe that’s how he persists.

That’s comforting. We all need that. Someone to carry the memory of who we were even if we never see them again.

Learning to play chess. We all learn how the pieces move, but that’s not playing chess any more than learning a G Major chord is learning a song. It’s a complicated game, but we live in complicated times. The pieces are familiar. The strategies are hundreds of years old. It can be picked up and put down on a whim. That’s also something we all need.

Listening to a lot of ambient stuff these days. Really enjoying Jolanda Moletta and her Oceanine album. It’s good journaling music. Check it out HERE

There’s a weird feeling when someone who makes something you really like isn’t a person you’d want to spend any time with. I think when we find things we connect with, there’s a desire to connect with the creator of those things. It seems that many who can create at scale and find some kind of success posess traits that aren’t in line with the way I live. This has nothing to do with the above album, by the way. This is about something else that I enjoy and on which I have spent a good deal of money. Separating creator and creation is pretty important. Just ask Frankenstein’s Monster.

Tomatoes are landing in the garden. I don’t know what it is about that 3’x3’ square, but it is Tomato Central. Fantastic!

Analog processes are back. Physical processes. Activities that require a place which implies a time. What was it the producitivity nerds used to say? “You can’t mow your lawn while you’re on a plane, so don’t think about it when you’re traveling.” There’s a bit of wisdom there. One has to work pretty hard to shake wisdom out of things that are so closely tied to capital, but it can be done.

The journal is all on paper. Notes go on the notepad. The desk is where things happen. The keyboard for the computer gets stowed first thing. The journal comes out. Quick flipping of the tarot cards. Maybe some music coming from the machine, but that’s it. It’s a good bit of time before any attention goes to the screen. This has to be The New Way. Not some kind of utopian future, but today. All of it.

Artifacts. Talismans. Tools. Physical reminders of who we are and how we move through the world. Past and present. All within inches of a dystopic network.

A few years back, I found Labyrinthos and their iOS app. Since then, I’ve started each morning with a quick three card spread: Thinking, Feeling, Doing. I’m not really sure where I got the idea or why it stuck, but it did.

Look, I’m not big into the occult or even the minor woo-woo stuff. Something like this? It forces a moment of reflection and it’s interesting to see what the mind attaches to as the cards and their meanings land. It really can change perspective.

I haven’t read up on it, but I’m willing to bet that Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies comes out of this same place.

The obsession I have with simplifying and getting my hands onto physical things has moved me away from the iPad app. I’ve reorganized my desk to allow me to more easily use my paper journal and paper organizer. Not sure if I’m ready for a paper calendar again (probably not as I still coordinate with other humans). Somewhere in this process, I picked up my Great Lakes Tarot deck and decided that I’d start my morning that way since I was journaling at the desk now. I guess the goal is to get to almost zero screen time until I sit down to get to work on things that need a computer. And that computer? I want it to live in a specific place.

It’s all part of a larger pattern.

All of that said, I’m a Textual User Interface and ASCII Art nut, so I built a quick python script that pulls from a couple of projects that had ASCII Art tarot cards and tarot interpretations in plain text so I could feed my spread into a terminal and get this:

“But you just said…”

I know what I said and I meant it. This is just cool. Remember the whole Code as Art thing back when slashdotters wanted to be knows as “Code Poets”? Yeah, that was dumb too. But this was fun to make. Yes, I did use the robot to invert the ASCII art for me. Took it less than 10 seconds. Would have taken me at least 2 hours of copy/paste or writing some weird regex.

Rituals. Coffee. Journal. Tarot.

Vacations weren’t for us. I’m not sure if it was a money thing or if it was about their personalities, but I only really remember two vacations before my parents split. I don’t know if I missed anything or not. Other kids seemed to enjoy them.

Instead, we would go a state park that was about 30 minutes from home. It had a reservoir and a little beach area with sand. It was the perfect place for a group of kids in elementary school to run out the seemingly enless supply of energy they accumulated on a bright summer day.

Today, I’m older than my mom was when she took us to the beach. To be fair, my kids are older than I was back then. It doesn’t line up.

When I go to that park, I sit on an outcropping and I can see the beach from my spot. If there are people there (when I go, there usually aren’t) I can hear them playing and screaming as they run into the cold water. It takes me back in an instant. I can almost taste the chocolate covered rice crispie treats our neighbor made every time we went. It was a special occasion food reserved for the beach in the summer.

I wandered a lot. I roamed. I saw other places and met other people. I’ve lost track or lost a lot of the people I was close to when my life started. It’s still strange to me that I’m back here where it all began. A very different person. Lifetimes have passed.

The park is still peaceful. A joyful place. Though I will admit, I prefer it in the winter when it is mostly abandoned.