Author: Reality Laughs

Yeah, there is that song by Kris Kristofferson. Made famous by Johnny Cash, sure, but the definitive versions are those sung by Kris Kristofferson.

Sunday Morning Coming Down.

Listen if you want to be depressed—the man knows that world first-hand. I once lived in that world, too. I do not wish to return.

I like that version, though there is a live Kris Kristofferson version of the song I acquired from the internet long ago (and can’t find now) that punched me in the gut.

I am now decades away from that life. Thank God, because it wasn’t me who made that happen. The Big Guy put an unseen hand on my shoulder and said “Sit down here for a while and have a cup of coffee” and I was too beaten to say no.

So I stayed. That is all I did. I wished to stay, because a room full of strangers and bad coffee was better than what I had going for me. So I stayed.

And that made all the difference.

Stay.

Postscript. Ahhh. Here is the version I love, performed by Kris Kristofferson and Steve Earle. Both lived that Sunday morning lifestyle and felt the big hand on their shoulder, too.

Slept in and awoke after dawn.

What is my quest for today?

Write in the morning. Use the best hours for the most important task. Light exercise at lunchtime. Then project management in the afternoon.

Slow-paced, no time pressure, just organize and re-organize thoughts and documents — this is the way the path reveals itself to me.

Tools are unimportant. Word is fine. Make, move, delete folders of documents on my laptop? Is fine. (Remember that, because you had a blinding flash of “Airtable would be good for this.”).

No. As soon as a tool becomes the thing, I’m optimizing for the tool, not for the task. Optimize for thinking. Perversely, simple text files introduce — rather than eliminate — thinking friction. Or maybe they reduce so much friction that my brain doesn’t have enough time to cogitate the permutations.

Anyway. Happy Saturday. It will include a hamburger mid-day because I want one. No running today, because today is a rest day. Some bodyweight stuff (squats, pushups etc.) will be fine.

Nice day.

Dear Diary. 🙃

That note above (“Dear Diary”) is me expressing exasperation at the shallowness of what I write in five minutes. Let’s allow shallow to exist and see what 10,000 shallow blog posts/diary entries/whatever these are can do to drain the shallow out of me and get to the real.

Wake up. It’s dark outside.

Unspeakable necessities. Turn on the heat. Feed the dog. Make coffee. Let the dog out for her unspeakable necessities. Sit down and have a sip of coffee. Get up and let the dog back into the house. Sit down again with my cup of coffee. Pull up the WordPress app on my phone and start to write.

This is the rhythm of a cold spring morning.

The house starts to warm up, and the coffee reassures me.

The writing nudges me and I ask myself the usual unanswerable questions. Who am I? What’s going on in my life and what does this all mean? As if meaning is necessary beyond the immediate, of course. We live. We die. Be kind and honorable and valuable to those around you. Better not swerve to far in the woo-woo direction lest I drive into that shallow metaphysical ditch filled with crystals and secret wordcel esoterica known only to the Initiates.

Today is a day. Do what is right for today, this day. For yourself first: physical and spiritual daily maintenance. For your family next: support them and encourage them, for they too have their own paths to follow.

Co-workers. Encourage them to grow or find their own True Place where they can thrive. Reason/season/lifetime. The poem says it all.

Community: be a good citizen at all levels, starting from block to neighborhood to city to county to state to nation to world. But don’t try to save the fucking whales metaphorically or literally at the expense of yourself or those close to you. Put on your own oxygen mask first, then reach out to help someone else. This message escaped me for too long.

That’s daunting. I can’t do it all.

Just drink your coffee then have some breakfast. Shower and go to work. One step at a time. Just keep your heart open and thank God for the day when you momentarily rise above the mundane and see the wonders arrayed around you.

Slept well. Didn’t have dinner last night because I ran and I’m never hungry after running. Up later than usual and I have a busy day today.

Dear diary, etc. etc.

The daily writing and publishing habit may be having second-order effects. One is that my running plan for the half marathon started early enough that there is a clear path to success by slow and steady training. And I am doing it. Regular schedule: three times a week. Regular place to run. Regular plan: distance increases by 10% weekly, rounded up to the next half mile. Sunday is the long run.

I don’t have to think. I just do. There is no debating with self about what to do, whether to skip or postpone, etc. I just go. Twice now it’s been raining. I ran in the rain.

I attribute part of this to the positive feedback loop of the Last Resolution Standing thing I am still in. Day 82, 7 of us remaining from 159 starting. I’m oddly proud of that.

Ok. Time to extend that incremental relentless behavior pattern elsewhere.

Awake since 3 am. I guess I should concede to reality: my body has no interest in sleep. Like Marcus Aurelius, I want to stay in bed because it’s warm and feels nice, but I will heed his admonishment. It’s time to get out from under the snuggly warm blankets and do what humans must do.

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”

Meditations, 5.1.

It’s dark. Raining.

I don’t want to read. I don’t want to write. I don’t want to lie in the dark quietly. I don’t want to get up and make a cup of coffee and just sit. I don’t want to eat, even though I’m a bit hungry. I don’t want to listen to music or podcasts. I don’t want to think. I don’t want to do. I don’t want to be in action, be poised for action, or be at rest.

All states of being are unsatisfactory, except being under the warm blankets in bed, in the dark, awake. And that is unsatisfactory, too.

Oh well. Let’s get up and make a cup of coffee. Something will happen. The dog will think it’s breakfast time for her. She will want to go outside, stick her nose out into the rain, and nope her way back inside.

Postscript. Awake for 90 min, to 4:30 am Decided to get up, and was about 6 steps toward the kitchen when I thought “oh, I could sleep” and went back to bed. Slept until 6:30 am. Good.

Good morning. Up before dawn. It was a dark and stormy night and it’s a dark and stormy predawn morning. Well, gentle rain. I wouldn’t call this a storm.

Who am I and what is my right place?

Right place? More and more it seems to mean me just sitting and injecting an extraordinary amount of time to finding clarity.

Prune away noise, find a path.

Interestingly I have made repeated forays into the thicket of semi-organized files on my laptop. It’s too easy to save, too easy to tell myself “I will organize it later.” Now I am cleaning, deleting, organizing, de-duping.

It may have something to do with the Last Standing challenge, now at 80 days and 7/159 participation. I’m still standing.

Slower. Clearer. Confidenter. (Sic). More willing to visibly judgmental.

Not afraid that I will be harmed if I discard something. A wrong path clearly defined and confidently pursued is not wrong. It is a method for eliciting useful information.

Not afraid of discarding physical items. Keepsakes, even.

Awake before dawn, even though I would have liked to have more rest. All the way awake.

Feed the dog, make a cup of coffee. Sit, a bit disoriented, dreading the day ahead. It’s because of work: too much of it, and I’m fairly sure it’s not in my Right Place. Some of the upcoming day, sure—it’s Right Place activity. But not most.

The first stand-alone product has become clear to me. It is the same knowledge product idea as everything else, but this is scaled appropriately and small dimensioned so I can make it.

I must build it.

The market is small, but . . . proof of concept. And personal satisfaction. It would make me happy to say “done” to this, as small and obscure as it is.

The product is a subset of the big product that I am making. That’s a good sign: don’t want the big thing because you don’t need the big thing? Just buy the part you want.

I know I threatened to go private in order to get honest. I haven’t done so yet.

That event is important to note: either my initial hypothesis is wrong (honestly requires privacy) or I’m not willing to be honest (yet).

Or some third thing, because artificial binary choices are misleading. (Obvious example: there hasn’t been a topic that I felt the need to lock up as a private post, so the “yet” word is operative).

I like plaintext tools and Markdown because it’s fast and relatively distraction-free. I don’t like it because as of yet I have not found useful tools to integrate illustrations into what I write. Or, at least, I haven’t learned how to use the many plaintext tools I have tried, and the several that I continue to rotate through.

I want to write fast. I want to write chunks and assemble the chunks easily. I want to be able to publish the chunks molecularly as I build the organism.

The urge to publish molecules and a desire to escape bloated WordPress (I was once reasonably familiar with WordPress including diving into PHP when necessary—no more) led to a leisurely exploration of static website generators, text editors, git, and many other exciting (!) tools. It lead to note-taking apps like Roam and Obsidian. All of this took me away from what I want to do: get stuff out of my brain and out on the web.

It’s back to Word on OneDrive. Let someone else get it from Word to HTML and onto a web host. Word let’s me outline easily. (Yes I tried innumerable outlining tools). Word lets me embed images easily: drag and drop.

The lesson is: so only what only you can do. I am good at diving deep—getting all the way wet—in a subject area, and I know viscerally when I have reached the bottom of the ocean for that topic. Research materials on one side and an open document on the other.

I am good at simplifying complexity into diagrams. Omnigraffle pretty, Visio ugly. This is truth, so don’t fight me on it.

My computer is slowly getting lighter and easier to carry around as I delete one application after another. Wally in Dilbert told me that deleting a file from the hard drive would make my computer lighter. It must be true.

But clutter is disappearing too. One book I am writing had a shitshow of disorganized files. Sweeping everything to one place, making that place OneDrive, and then methodically cleaning up the file tree made the project coherent again—and something I want to work on. The mess, and the pieces of the project in disparate places, repelled me.

Memo to self:

• Only do what only you can do.
• Solve the rest of the problems with money.

Irony. This website works for precisely the reasons I describe above. One tool: the WordPress app on my phone. The backend is WordPress but I don’t care and I put up with it.

Just like Word. One tool, good enough, tolerate the fact that it’s somewhat shit, and get on with it.

I will solve the conversion of Word to HTML with money. I will let technology come to me with well-considered alternatives and switch when it’s irresistible.

(The desire to leave Mailchimp is irresistible. I just don’t know where I’m going yet. Substack or Beehiiv probably, because of reduced friction).

No. It is not possible to convey more emotion than Maria Callas does in this performance. Even if you do not understand the words you can feel the despair. I weep every time I hear it, sometimes more than others.

Go listen to any other performance—there are plenty on YouTube. They are flat compared to Maria Callas in this performance.

“Look at me I am talented” or “I’m just doing my job here” or “I am an artist.” Fleming. Tebaldi. Any other big name. Technically competent, sure. Impressive? There are many. Evocative and laying her soul bare? Emphatically, no.

I was introduced to La Wally by the movie, Diva. This performance by Maria Callas brought me to deeply appreciate opera, rather than dismiss it as a frivolous curiosity or movie plot feature.

From there, I went to marinating myself in Wagner overtures and preludes. Hours and hours on endless repeat.

I can’t say I love opera. I don’t listen to much, and I am selective in what I choose. The predominant theme of tragedy (as in La Wally, as an example) is not something I choose to absorb, and you are what you think. Listening to Ebben? Ne andrò lontana makes me weep. Every time. Strong medicine.

But OMG. As the pinnacle of cultural achievement? Opera is Exhibit A.

The only other individual piece of music that compares is Misere by Allegri. I recall a flight to the East Coast with Misere (performed by the Sistine Chapel Choir) on repeat. At about 1:10 there begins a Moment, and I would shed a tear every time it rolled around again.

Sacred choral music (and especially Misere) is beautiful and uplifting. If I choose to hypnotize myself with music, that’s what I look for. Otherwise, silence.

OK, I’m a pagan. At the moment it’s Rachmaninov’s piano pieces that are on endless repeat. So sue me.