A part of me is always chasing a particular feeling. Sometimes I call it “aesthetic resonance”, though that’s not the whole of it. Sometimes I might say “elegance”, although that seems too broad and vague. It might be what Christopher Alexander called “the quality without a name”, which is something like “aliveness”, “zest”, gusto”, but more than that, beyond that. I am always searching for it.

I have gotten glimpses and tastes of this feeling before. Something of it is always present when I’m doing my best work. When I came up with the phrase “Friendly Ambitious Nerd” as the title for my first ebook, it was there. When “Voltaic Verses” hit me more recently, it was there too. A sense of “rightness”, “correctness. I’m currently writing this essay on my middle screen. I am seated at my desk. It’s 833am, Saturday, February 11th 2023. It’s a somewhat cool morning. My glasses are off. I have a couple of stray files on the desktops of other monitors. I have what looks like 20 chrome tabs open in another window, with a video of “The Rock vs Goldberg: Backlash 2003” paused and open on youtube. Why was I watching that? Right, I was looking for a WWE-related gif to make a point about something on Twitter, and I couldn’t find it, but I ended up opening loads of WWE-related tabs. Should I close them? Would that distract me from my process? I don’t think so. Let’s close them.

A phrase I’ve used when talking about trying to work with these drafts is that I’m looking for “animating spirit”. And animating spirit isn’t something that you can find cobble together from bits and pieces like Frankenstein’s Monster – it’s the breath of life, the spark, the sizzle.

I’ve also said before that there’s a pain of being inarticulate… having thoughts and feelings that feel vague