i’m tired and i don’t have much time. i need to publish something or i’m going to go mad. i have a lot of tabs open. one tab is the wikipedia page for scaffolding. i remember, i wanted to write a post about how i feel like so much of my work is scaffolding for the work i want to do in the future. and the tricky and challenging thing is to not get too obsessed with the scaffolding, not to produce more scaffolding for its own sake. but, at the same time, scaffolding does have a beauty of its own, and i’d like to point at that. so maybe i’m thinking about two separate works.

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i have a lot of pinterest tabs open. most recently i was looking for inspiration on making beautiful noisy messes. a lot of my stuff is noisy, and a lot of my stuff is a mess. i spend a lot of my time and energy thinking about how to make it less noisy and less messy. this has often felt like a tremendous struggle, and not always a satisfying one. so i got to thinking… what if it didn’t have to be that way? what if i found a way to make the noisy mess… beautiful? when I start to feel inspired in this way sometimes I create a pinterest board.

at the time of writing it appears I have over 3,000 pins across about 60 boards. Doesn’t seem like an overwhelming amount, compared to my twitter where I have just under 250,000 tweets. but of course, i only use pinterest once in while, whereas i’ve been tweeting every day for years.

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i have a couple of tabs open that are… what is this? soundcloud? i was searching for something and found that people have mentioned me before on podcasts on soundcloud [1, …

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As a writer I continue to live under an internalized tyranny of shoulds. I’ve written about this in several places, in several ways, about how I have all these expectations about what I ought to be writing. even right here on this substack, i wrote i don’t wanna to talk about how… i don’t wanna be in this position, and i wrote resonance over coherence to try and break free from the tyranny of expected coherence, and i wrote branching paths for similar reasons

jason mraz beautiful mess

da vincis notebooks

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scaffolding:

writing is one of my favorite things in the world to do. i could write a lot about my past history of writing, all my happy memories of writing- in my parents house in the middle of the night, at my school library, at starbucks, writing in my notebooks when i was in the military, writing on my phone on my commutes, quora, reddit, twitter, blogs, writing at work. i could write a whole post about that, and was tempted to, but now i feel like i want to condense that into a paragraph and move on.

a lot of my writing lately feels like scaffolding.

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(2024jan17)

I’ve been thinking about messes. There’s a few layers that i want to think about. and i have a very practical goal, i’m not really interested in developing elaborate theories, i’m looking to have a better experience dealing with my messes.

sometimes some people say “my life is a mess”. I don’t think I would actually say that about my own life. My house is I’d say probably above-average messy right now – maybe about 70th percentile? whereas my body of work is… it’s maybe also about 70th percentile messy in terms of “how much disorder/entropy in the system”, but the challenge is that there’s a lot of volume, so I always feel like I’m dealing with messes all the time, even though I really don’t think I’m a particularly messy person.

funnily-ish, i feel like i’ve attempted to write some version of this essay multiple times now, and i always abandon it. i’m setting an intention right now to not abandon this one, to ship it in its imperfect state at the end of the night. (update: I didn’t.)

alright so maybe let’s just talk about my digital messes for starters. right now i’m sitting astride my new massage table (I love it so much) with my wife’s laptop and looking at a chrome tab. I find myself sitting back to take it all in. I have 5 tabs open on this particular window, which isn’t all that bad. closed three of them. now I’m looking at my bookmarks. there are three folders: “rarely used”, “infrequent”, “ebooks/docs”. immediately i’m thinking, why do I have separate folders for rarely used and infrequent? they both have a lot of links in them so i’m looking at the rest. for some reason I have a link to my patreon, which seems unnecessary. deleting that.

i’m starting to get a clearer sense of why I never publish these posts. it’s because i get distracted by all of the material i end up clicking through. ok here i just spent what felt like half an hour getting my discord accounts sorted. i had two accounts it turns out.

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abandoned