it’s 3pm my son is napping on me. I’m kinda tired but also I’m committed to doing a wordvomit. I guess let’s investigate tiredness. One thing I know about physical lethargy is that- it can feel paradoxical, but a light workout can be energizing. Why is that? Improved circulation, endorphins, raised body temperature, lower cortisol, and other more subtle things. A thing that’s striking to me when I workout is how my breathing changes- I start taking deeper breaths. It feels like my lungs are bellows and my body is a furnace. And there’s something about it all that makes me feel like living is tending to one’s inner flame, which has many dimensions to it- physical, emotional, social, intellectual. And when I look back at the history of my workouts I see what looks like a yo-yo pattern, I tend to work out too much (often out of some sort of misplaced sense of machismo/bravado, a desire to “make up” for lost time…) which then eventually leads to me crashing and burning and then being sedentary for a long time. If I were to design a better life for myself it would have more physical activity but like gently “raising the temperature” rather than “going hard”. There’s no need to go so hard. Go smooth.

The phrase “improved circulation” is also reminding me of when I read some Christopher Alexander a couple of years ago while looking for inspiration for dealing with my notes. And now I’m remembering that he also used lungs as an analogy- he said something like, the body is only whole when the lungs get to breathe… lemme look it up… a lung is whole only so long as it is breathing air from outside the organism. It has to participate in the goings-on of the reality it is a part of. The same is true for man as a social animal, who has to be in some sense circulating through the social environment that he is embedded in, even if it just means saying hello to his neighbors, making small talk with shopkeepers and such. (tiktok) And now I’m reminded of people talking about depression- sometimes we lack the energy to do anything, and yet doing nothing makes that worse, because we “fall out of circulation”. What helps is to have friends/loved ones skillfully intervene, encourage, help us with our errands, or even invite us to accompany them on theirs.

had to do other things and now it’s 1143pm, but let’s pick up where we left off. earlier i was mostly lethargic. now it’s been a long day and i’m tired. part of me was tempted to start a whole new wordvomit but i figured that it would be quickly to continue where i left off. and that brings me to talking about continuity. i have a draft of a post somewhere about the beauty of continuity. i was watching some caroline winkler on youtube and she talked about something related re: coziness in a lived space. you can’t quite make a place cozy just from one shopping trip on a given day. rather, you want to accumulate things over time, from different contexts, different environments. you want variations in texture. if you like you could have a home that’s mostly the same of something– mostly the same color, or mostly the same texture, but if you’re going to keep one thing constant, you’d want to experiment with other things. i’m reminded now I wanted to write something about swensen’s sticky chewy chocolate. i think it qualifies as an ice cream sundae– it’s chocolate ice cream with chocolate syrup, some chocolate fudge, some whip cream. it might seem like chocolate overload, but it works somehow, i think mainly because it’s texturally compelling. you can use your spoon to pick different ratios of chocolate and cream and fudge and so on. I remember the last time I had it, I thought to myself, mm, I’d like my work to be more like sticky chewy chocolate. What would that even look like, applied to writing? well there’s… variations in scale– tweets, essays, books. It could apply within a larger project like a book or an essay, to have different kinds of emphasis, different lengths of text. that’s thinking about it at a structural level. what about in terms of the content itself? similarly we can focus on different elements– we can talk about people, we can describe objects, we can describe phenomena, ideas, emotions, stories. I’m reminded now of a branding video i saw for HP years and years ago that I really loved. It helped opened my eyes to how it’s possible to be coherent across many different assets along many different dimensions, and I thought it was really savvy how it laid out many possible different ways to focus on things.

I often get frustrated with how my work feels more-incoherent-than-id-like. I know not to expect something very coherent, my work will probably always look more like a busy junkyard than something pristine like an apple store. i can’t really imagine what an apple store version of my work would look like. i can’t really imagine myself liking it, even if it were done well within that aesthetic. and now i’m reminded of a comment i saw on the caroline winkler video again– she was a guest on another channel (HGTV), and comments said things like “it’s the same ideas but with less existential dread” or “it’s like being in the room with my sister while she’s having a job interview” – caroline has her own vibe and aesthetic very well articulated for herself. I think I mostly kinda do too, but within particular constraints. I’d like to see it express itself more fully. i’ve thought that maybe i should return to making music, and i should start doing more drawings again, just to get a sense of more range. been also thinking of doing powerpoint presentations, just to get some aesthetic flavor. pinterest has been interesting. using images and sounds etc i think can really help create aesthetic resonance. i have playlists for my books. maybe i should start a playlist for frame studies. that might be fun.

let’s wrap up… what’s the overview here? circulation, chris alexander, sticky chewy chocolate, caroline winkler… how do i take all of that and apply it to my work? well, what is my work? oh, right now i’m tryin this thing where I be more purposefully prolific. I think part of the hope of doing that is to “maintain states” over time better (since i’m revisiting things frequently), and i’m hoping that that will help me make more connections across things, weave things together, find the ‘rugs’ that tie things together. i feel like i’m so close.