Sacred and terrible
Some scraps from my digital notepad; a new batch of links; wisdom from other people
Reader,
What’s in your Notes app? Or do you use other tools to record the passing days? I use the Notes app for lists and lyrics, but Notion is where I store most other things. Occasionally, that visceral need to put pen to paper resurfaces and I break out a notebook.
In Notion I keep a digital notepad of passing thoughts; the most ordinary of revelations that sweep through my mind, seemingly at random. Years back I titled this now-longest-of-pages ‘Temp notepad’, which I assume isolates it in my mind from more permanent and categorical notes. In so doing I created a home for my freedom to jot — anecdotes, inspirations, opinions, narratives, philosophies. It is, in fact, the garden where much of Miscellanea is mulched and matured.
Notes prevail in their tendency to pressure meaning from that which would otherwise be fleeting and unconsummated, which bears some profundity in our contemporary present, in which many potential meanings are subject to the frictionless damning of posts into the digital ether, the scroll, the swipe.
Below I share a few of these ‘temporary’ notes which, vaguely speaking, concern our humanity, “sacred and terrible,” and stem from, as Marilynne Robinson puts it too, “the continuously variable inward weather in which we live from birth to death.”
On acceptance and self-deprecation
Friends and family: I want to remember you as you were; not as you wished to be. For all your longing reminds me of my own, the silted scratching of disrespect — the grim analyses we reserve for our selves.
On drinking with family
The way you gotta liquor yourself up to be with the ones you love, not because you’re uncomfortable with them so much as you’re uncomfortable with yourself, and so you drink yourself to be yourself to be true around your family. Everyone doing the same as you, not exactly drunks, but earnest-loving-family downing the ego.
On social media
A bunch of show-offs... How can we ever love each other well if we’re all always being presented with fragments of projections of ourselves, constantly fed the false selves we want each other to see?
On ghosting
I guess it’s just become acceptable now to completely ignore people; to completely shirk the responsibility of correspondence; to wholly ignore our humanity — instead becoming ghosts gone ghosting. We are all translucent, ready to be painlessly trampled over, ran through.
On writing about fatherhood
I don’t know how to write about fatherhood. So much of what’s happening to me is just flying over my head, a thousand birds that never land — and I never learn how to fly. Flightless I father her, and without a wing to wave, I write of anything but.
Perhaps I need a quill or two that I might be less ‘in over my head’, more weight-less and roaming the skies for what escapes me. If I were up there maybe I could grab on to an idea, some feathery scrap of insight or revelation.
Perhaps too though, a flightless and grounded fathering is Fathering in deed. With the weight of gravity comes weight indeed: expectation, responsibility, sacrifice, work, love.
Links
📚 Looking for something to read? I’ve read 32 books this year — see them all in the Miscellanea Bookshop.
🎵 I recently went to a vinyl swap at my friends’ brewery. In addition to somehow ending up with Frank Ocean’s Blond, I went home with Courtney Barnett’s End of the Day, which is an instrumental soundtrack to her documentary, ‘Anonymous Club’. Great ambient guitar vibes while you read or do chores or whatever.
🤷🏻♂️ In the Who Cares Era…
👍 One cool way to care: Good Conversation is Not Small, It’s Specific
“It is better to say ‘I am suffering’ than to say ‘This landscape is ugly.’”
Simone Weil
“After a lifetime of blaming others, it is exceedingly difficult for us to finally acknowledge that the only person who has consistently been in all the scenes of that long-running soap opera we call our life is us, and, as a necessary corollary, that we bear some large responsibility for how the drama is turning out.”
James Hollis
“A person of love is also a destroyer. This is absolutely the essence of the universe.”
Haku Zynkyoku
Last week I announced that I was giving away a copy of Wildsam’s Gulf Coast guidebook. I’ll soon be hand-delivering the guidebook to the winners, my friends Kara and Ben, long time readers and worthy recipients whom I know will make the most of all it has to offer. Stay tuned for more giveaways in the future.
I absolutely did the drinking with family last week at our annual golf tournament. Was a great time because of booze!