(written in substack) I can’t help myself, I love to go meta. Earlier this evening, my wife took my son out for a walk, giving me about an hour of time to focus fully on going through my drafts. I ‘composted’ almost 20 of them, either publishing them to my /archives/ blog or tacking them on to existing posts somewhere. I felt a huge sense of relief at having fewer drafts ‘onsite’. I feel like I can breathe better, not having all of that clutter in my ‘workspace’.

Now, the next task I have ahead of myself is to read the remaining drafts, side by side, and get a sense of the bigger picture of what they’re all about. I’ve reduced over 50 drafts down to 17. What would be really thrilling to me, as an intellectual challenge, is if I could condense all of them into a single post somehow. Incidentally one of them is temporarily-titled “a time for consolidation?”

That 2024may30 post goes…

1, I tweet/write a lot, which is great but also I am tired.

2. tiredness is often emotional knottedness, and I that’s correct in this case

3. its tempting to hope to slice open the knot, but it’s likelier that the knot is actually a stallion frightened of its shadow, that needs taming, ie,

4. I’m probably misdiagnosing the problem.

5a. I then try describing the problem– just describe stuff bro– too many notes, many feel dated, don’t feel comfortable deleting because of past grief at over-deleting…

5b. deeper problem is that the notes aren’t as good as I want them to be. I want to be shipping often, but I struggle to meet my still-not-well-articulated criteria.

5c. I get overwhelmed at the prospect of cleanup… have to approach that ‘one surface/area at a time”… also express frustration with the reality that people are fickle/shallow/overwhelmed and rely on silly proofs

6.couple of important questions here, in 5b a question of how do notes get better? and how to articulate the criteria? 2 emotions at once?

alright, that’s one down. a big part of the problem is “past grief at overdeleting”– which I have another post about, so let’s dive into that one

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1. ppl know me as a kind of mad archivist with sprawling threads of remembrance. part of me wants to say “i’m an author! a professional! the mess is justified! it wouldn’t seem so messy if I had an office!”
2. these threads are written with grief at the loss of old blogposts, notes, drafts, etc. lost my early-teens blog when dx died. my 90wks notebook in the saf. and my own blog deletion that i handled poorly. i wrote a lot of details about this but i’m not sure i care to share them with my substack readers. all you really need to know is that i was truly devastated by a series of losses, and was very determined to not lose more.
3. i’ve almost definitely overcorrected. i’ve become a bit of a hoarder. a fairly high-functioning hoarder, but i think the truth is that i know i can function even better if i got to the heart of all of this. while writing this i also experienced some gratitude. when you zoom out and see the full picture it’s like, oh, okay. some of my best work has been a grief response. that’s kind of beautiful.
4. it’s interesting that i felt compelled to talk about mysteries here, and perception. i think it began with the picture of ruins, the ellen ullman quote about how we build computer systems over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

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there’s another post that’s sort of a meandering stream of consciousness. quotes dickens’ long voyage, about being guilty… does my guilt even help? no! reminded of fasting and hunger. some signals are just… unhelpful patterns. then i reported cleaning my desk “nah there’s too much… how about if we do a bit for fun → mostly-clean desk within minutes and substantially more peace of mind”

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now there’s a couple of posts about notes, sorting notes. lets call them notes1 and notes2. in notes1 there’s a footnote that’s basically about the grief thing. and saying “i need to learn to delete things”. deleting that footnote now, lol. not flippantly; but with the knowledge that it’s represented elsewhere. i’ve combined them and posted them to my archives to reference later.

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alright, i’m calling it a night for tonight’s work session. today has been one of the most productive days in months, maybe all year. i’ve composted a lot of stuff. my archives have gotten a little more swollen while my workspace has gotten less cluttered, and i took some time to reacquaint myself with what’s going on.