notebook / @tww

(Also) Reading:

One month.

Rather intelligently, I think, composing this after the dog-children eat in a flurry of play-growling, toy thievery (while educating dog-children in the nuances of tug) and bouncing a la goats or somesuch barnyard animal. Kirby’s efforts to scale the couch continue - though, if he doesn’t think about it, he can make it in a single bound.

Life lesson in there, probably.

Forward motion being made on The Work in my pre-breakfast working time. Embracing the weird, Realizing - no, accepting - that my issue is not from not getting to work in the afternoons but in it being so long between morning workblocks: too much time for that self respect gauge to deplete, particularly in otherwise mind-numbing afternoons - though, by that point, I’m so exhausted that I barely have a mind to exhaust, just an emotion to invade.

Note: work on making afternoons and evenings about refueling and replenishing, not further depletion and opportunities for the invasion of bad mental actors.

Encore: This week, on THE GROUND LOOP: “What haven’t you tackled, creatively, that you’d like to try?" — plus my first listener query (as answered by a dog-child).

Kirby was just referred to as “violently adorable” and that might be my favorite compliment yet.

Status, 06may2021.

Never underestimate the clarifying powers of a perpetually-updated current projects list.

Dear Apple Watch,

I tried.

But, Series 3, you’re just not what I need right now, not in the least because, as The Verge so ably put it, Updating an Apple Watch Series 3 is a nightmare in 2021 and I lack the monastic patience to partake in that particular endless and thankless process.

Plus, I found that I just prefer capture notes in my cheap memo pads with my Fisher space pen (and retrofitted clip from a Pentel Sharp pencil). Easier for me to process the loose capturings on tear-off pages, even if my handwriting is shit.

But, I did order a Casio G-shock GA-700-1BCR, because I do miss wearing a watch and need one that I won’t destroy (I love watches and have a penchant for demolishing them; might as well get the “fallout shelter” iteration of a watch - if I fuck this one up, I can consider myself done with wrist-based time-telling).

Back to using the Samson q2u dynamic mic for pods: have to have the gain too high on the condenser mic - and the intemperate temperature of my office seems to have fried the cardioid pickup. But that’s OK: the condenser mic was an experiment, I didn’t pay much for it, and I’ve found that I prefer the way my voice sounds with the warhorse of the q2u. Used it on the latest GROUND LOOP episode.

The dog-children demand sustenance. On with the day.

It was an eventful (and pleasant) evening and, alas, climbing all the way onto the couch for a sleep proved to be too much for young Kirby.

New: THE GROUND LOOP, my weekly mini-pod thing where I answer a frequently asked question that I’ve never been asked, returns with What haven’t you tackled, creatively, that you’d like to try? - and my first listener query.

And, in an instant, the day became a joke.

Deep in conversation with my youngest kid.

Reading:

Endo appointment was a typical one, a case study in the fine line one must walk between sacrificing just enough and sacrificing too much: T1D, I’ve found in my almost five years with it, is nothing if not a perpetual balancing act, a give and take, between living and staying alive.

(You will not take my breakfast cereal: this is a line that shall not be crossed.)

Kirby endured his first thunderstorm in a melange of abject terror and chewtoy coping while I passed a significant threshold in The Work: 12,000 words… cut.

But: there is forward momentum, diving deeper into the tale, bit by bit. Reached a point where I was comfortable doing so, apparently having crossed that Saunders-threshold of the positive-negative meter (he writes of it briefly somewhere on the web, and at length in A SWIM IN THE POND IN THE RAIN) which gave my brain / instinct permission to continue forth.

A modicum of intuitive permission? Sounds about right. Maybe the goal is to add to that permission each day - a little bit further into the water, as Mr. Bowie would say.

Recording THE GROUND LOOP’s return this afternoon; you can find earlier episodes here.

Listening: DROPSONDE, by Biosphere… SIGNALS IV-V-VI, by Sabled Sun.

On the bright side, this beauty arrived today.

Working to mentally shift my text+sharing to this morning post, as opposed to throughout the day (dog pictures and other stuff will continue as is). Things like yesterday’s “Though I always say that I can’t tell if a writing day was a good one until the next, I’m reasonably confident that this morning’s work will pass muster” would’ve been better had I waited until this morning to add “and yet, my confidence was misplaced.”

As spring and summer shift into gear and my time becomes more devoted to the needs of others, I have to keep reminding myself that I wrote my first book on a tight deadline, delivering 300 pages in five months, writing two hours every morning (I was, and I do, think about The Work at hand every waking hour of my 18-hour waking day; the actual writing time being the processing time for those accumulated day thoughts); the second book, of just under thirty pages, took me a year, as I attempted to add more writing time and, in so doing be “more productive.”

Lesson: fuck productivity.

Six-month endocrinologist appointment today. A long drive up there, catch up on some pods. Hopeful of [this news](Apple Watch Likely to Gain Blood Pressure, Blood Glucose, and Blood Alcohol Monitoring https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/03/apple-watch-blood-pressure-glucose-alcohol/) that the next Apple Watch will add blood glucose monitoring, that unicorn of the last several years, though I’m not clear how they’ll pull it off (it has to be subcutaneous, no?) and/or if it will be a better option than the Freestyle Libre, my current implantable bluetooth device.

P.S. Don’t waste your time on WITHOUT REMORSE: it’s a disappointment, made even more so by what should have been a perfect combo of Jordan’s acting talents and Taylor Sheridan’s scriptwriting pedigree.

Though I always say that I can’t tell if a writing day was a good one until the next, I’m reasonably confident that this morning’s work will pass muster.

A Kirby snores at my feet and these are the week’s spaces of existence.

On DEADWOOD: THE MOVIE (Spoilers, probably), 26apr2021.

RED DESERT / CP1 Paces / Time, 27apr2021.

THE SOCIALIZED RECLUSE, Ep0004 - Wallace Stroby, 28apr2021.

The Day After, Podmonth Edition, 29apr2021.

Rebuilding, Ad Infinitum, 30apr2021.

Wrist-Cyborg Returneth (and Other Adventures), 01may2021.

See you tomorrow.

First it inspired me to order a collection of Chekhov’s short stories, and now Gogol’s: Saunders’s A SWIM IN THE POND IN THE RAIN strikes again - a must-read.

For a bit, for a spell, forever, IDK. Handy with puppy reminders (FEED), timers (WORKDAMNYOU), and using Drafts on the day’s run so I don’t destroy another memo book in the space of a mile and a half. A slight reduction in inboxes, combining already-extant Drafts box with the memo pad. Ordered a tactical wristband/case for added puppy-teeth protection and not having to change the band from running to life and accidentally dialing 911 again.

The Jorkie and The Kirby are on their morning steeple chase. And so begins the day.

Update: I can report that my love for my Lamy CP1 has only grown throughout our first week together. Easily my favorite of my fountain pen stockpile.

Thinking this morning of my time in music school, particularly of when and why I left. The why is simple: I realized that I made a mistake in path - though it got me to the point of realizing my actual (apparently) path, so I suppose it wasn’t a mistake so much as a costly fork in the road, a path decided upon by a fortuitous intersection of need to escape and momentary talent — a talent enough to get me to that next step, though two steps below the landing.

The when:

It was with that landing in sight - but with no way of reaching it, let alone the top of the stairs - that I left, broken down, an open wound - as is the wont of institutional creative educations - with rebuilding a distant pipe dream: my process of rebuilding being to leave, to rebuild myself how I saw fit, with whatever Jekyll and Hyde healing concoctions I could scrounge together, towards a new creative identity.

Because that is, for me - and for better or for worse -, my identity.

And I suppose that that’s what I’m doing still, day in, day out, a decade and a half on, spackling the cracks but leaving - on the good days - just enough space for, as Mr. Cohen would say, the light to get in.