This is vomit number 7 in today’s streak. When this is done we’d have written over 7,000 words in a single afternoon. And then we can experiment with continuing, but that’s really beyond the current scope of what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to exceed our previous record of 10 in a day. That would be really nice. But even if we don’t do it, it’s nice to have had a second attempt at hitting our personal best.

Which is cool. Which is a deep signal about what we care about, what we’re interested in. Honoring a gentleman’s agreement with himself. Only when we learn to trust ourselves will we be able to be responsible with the trust of others. Yes, it is indeed a little sad that it’s taken this long to get here, but that’s irrelevant. What matters is that we keep moving forward, that we grow each day– so that each day we’re better off that we were the day before, each day we’re doing more justice to this opportunity that we’ve been given.

I was wondering about all the todo lists I’ve accumulated over the years. All of these statements of interest, all of these hoops I’ve created for myself to jump into, expectations to attempt to live up to and fail. I wonder what I should do with them. I suppose we should review them together and then eliminate anything that doesn’t feel particularly interesting or exciting, anything that feels like it was created just to impress other people. We don’t have to care about other people. Our relationship with each other is more important than the relationship I have with anybody else, so that has to be the highest priority of all.

What are al these actions? Nyeh, it doesn’t really matter. We’re not even going to look at those for the time being until we’ve exhausted everything we can exhaust within our immediate reach. I suppose I could glance into my list of questions and look for questions to answer, but… that feels a bit premature, it feels a little hollow. Or is it? I can feel my subconscious rolling its eyes at the thought– because the truth is that it doesn’t really matter.

Does anything really matter, no not really. What should we bother with? Living beautifully, living with joy, breathing deep and laughing big, deep belly laughs, having lots of fun, dancing and singing and exploring. What do we want to explore? We can explore anything! Should we read books? Maybe. Shall we talk about the books we’ve read? That sounds somewhat interesting. Let’s ruminate on that as a topic for the next vomit. Let’s use the remainder of this vomit to talk about all the immediate todos we’d both actually like to do.

One is to review the books we’ve been reading. Antifragile, Neuromancer… The Matrix (not a book), Benjamin Franklin, Lover’s Dictionary.

Let’s also talk about our relationship with the Internet, and with content on the Internet, and people on the Internet. Reddit, Hacker News. There’s something about my relationship with those things… I suppose we could also talk about addictive relationships, and how we get caught in loops and patterns we don’t like.

Maybe before that let’s talk about the power of narratives, and how we’ve been trying to experiment with narratives to figure out something that really appeals to us. Which is what? I suppose the parenting analogy might have emerged as a consequence of that thought. There was also that bit about Conan the Barbarian (the video game), let’s talk about that one.

400 words to go with this vomit but I still don’t want to cheat and get out of it. This is where we’re going somewhere new now, because we’re choosing not to get distracted. Normally this is where I’d open a new tab- but hey, to our funny luck of sorts, the Wifi router isn’t really working properly, so we’re forced to stay in this space a little longer. This might be an accidental experiment that works really well for us in the long run– I don’t want to project too far out, but it does feel like it. We’ve talked about this before– how strange it is to realize that we write more on pen+paper than we do online, because online is always a ctrl+t, f or ctrl+t, r away from a ton of distractions. We get embroiled in this endless rabbithole and then we find ourselves feeling tired and unfulfilled. Lots of sound and fury signifying nothing, nothing happens, nothing gets done.

Yeah… so I think I’d like to experiment with doing more work without an internet connection. Let’s disable the wifi again tomorrow maybe, or the next time we’re at work. Let’s make that a task that we can refer to and focus on and then complete. An hour without the Internet, everytime we’re at work. Yes, that sounds like a great way to ensure that things get written and subsequently published. We’ll run into a few snags, won’t we? Yeah, we’ll need pictures and stuff. I suppose we could do one tomato of information gathering and then do the writing. We’ve prescribed this for ourselves in the past, but we never got around to following it.

Why? Because I’m weak, I suppose Because I’m an incompetent parent/manager, and I give in too easily everytime my inner child wants to play and frolic. [1] And this isn’t even particularly enjoyable play, it’s just high fructose corn syrup. It’s just distraction that tires us out and prevents us from building the skills that we know will give us deep fulfillment, deep flow. I ought to take a page out of the Tiger Mom’s playbook, minus the ridiculous aggression and anger. We’re older together, more experienced, and when we’re more alert and alive– and away from distractions– we know that flourishing is many, many times more pleasurable than simply going through the motions of pleasure.

In fact, it’s quite plausible that all of the attempts at pleasure are kind of… repression-induced rebellion. My subconscious takes over and decides to smoke and eat junk food and sleep late and so on because it want to rebel against my flagrant attempt at over-control. Well, I let go. I give in. I’m willing to listen. And I find… that maybe it doesn’t even actually want junk. It just wants to be heard. Early signs seem promising. But I don’t want to project, I don’t want to assume. I have to learn what the Tiger Mom learnt– humility.

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[1] Meta: Why? Because nobody taught me? Because I was never really in a context where I was encouraged to learn how to do this, maybe? Maybe because I’m just replaying the behaviors that I learnt through imitation?