It bothers you, so you work hard at it & many years, through lots of pain and failure
You are now good at the thing & it comes easy to you
You look around and you see that most people suck at this
Why don’t they just get good?? Being good rules!
You can’t say that, that’s rude, and dismissive. So you don’t say it.
But it’s awkward,,, to be around people whose problems would be solved if they simply committed to solving their problems
You have to conclude they don’t really want to solve their problems, not like you did
It’s lonely to be around people you can’t entirely be honest with. So now you have to start looking for new friends.
Thankfully, you are Good at Stuff, and being Good at Stuff is a great shortcut for meeting others who are Also Good At Stuff. You have a shared unspoken bond
It’s mostly great! although you also find that a lot of the people who are Good At Stuff are... naturals. A lot of them had great parents, families, support networks. Many of them don’t know what it’s like to Have Sucked. Over cocktails, you find yourself missing your old friends
It dawns on you that you don’t belong here either.
So, less bitterly than the last time, but with the same underlying sadness, you leave this city and head off again, this time more randomly, directionless-ly, wandering to see if the world can still surprise you
You wander a great many lands, see a great many sights.
You develop a growing fondness of life itself, all-laughing, all-colorful, and a begrudging respect for its hideous cruelty, its senseless destruction
everywhere people are different,
everywhere people are the same.
You go to a great many parties, with wondrous lights and sounds. You meet delightful people of every race and tongue
You spend hours and days in total stillness, by the vast and endless sea, until you forget to remember who you are
And still your restless heart trembles
What is this dissatisfaction you feel, you who have bitten so deeply into the fruit of life?
Who are you to feel unease, when everything is easier for you than for others?
Is this a burden or a blessing, a boon, or bane?
Why won’t it leave you alone? What does it want of you?
After a great deal of wandering, you find the ruins of an old, abandoned city, derelict and forgotten
curious, you make your way to the center, towards a great tower, kindred and beckoning.
Perhaps it was a church to the gods, you wonder, or maybe a throne room for the kings
Gently you push open the giant stone doors, which creak and groan with the weight of centuries
Spread before you are not jewels, or riches or gold, but a vast, endless sea... of books. Books of all shapes and sizes, lovingly bound, meticulously kept
It’s a library!
Excited, you grab one book, and another. You devour tome after tome, astounded by the souls of these kind strangers you have never met and will never know. Somehow they seem to know you by heart, in a way nobody else ever has, in a way you have yearned to be known all your life
As days turn into weeks and months into years, it becomes clear to you what you must do with your life.
You pick out an empty book... and you begin to write.
Rewatching Iron Man (2007). I remember watching it for the first time at a friend’s place around 2010 or so. Opens with AC/DC
“I don’t want to see this on your MySpace page”, soldier fiddling with digital camera, extremely sharp. All of this first 3 minutes, super snappy editing
the montage of Tony’s life at the apogee awards is excellent exposition
the cut from “he’s always working” to him gambling is also excellent, giving the award to Caesar… seducing the journalist, introducing Jarvis, the house… Potts… 9 minutes!!
I gotta do a thread of things that are marketed/ wrongly, which is almost all things
1. math is the study of relationships between things. you can use known quantities to figure out unknown quantities. so math is about learning to know the unknown. it’s literal sorcery, to the uninitiated
2. honesty – genuine, spirited honesty– is a source of tremendous power. people will tell kids that honesty is good but they ironically won’t admit that they don’t really know why, apart from some vague handwavey “well lying is bad and bad things happen”aka “we live in a society”
there’s this powerful anecdote about how a firefighter once saved his crew when they stepped into a burning house, and something felt off to him, and he said “we need to get out NOW!”, and the whole house collapsed… turned out the fire was way bigger in the basement
usually this story is told in the context of, the power of intuition. the man sensed that the fire was “off”. later he figured out that it’s because it was abnormally hot, abnormally quiet given the heat, and the fire just wasn’t responding to the water as it normally would
but today I’m thinking about it from the fire’s perspective
from the outside, all burning houses kinda look the same, at least to casual observers
but on the inside, a basement fire is much more powerful, much more dangerous
not everyone has experienced a scene growing in prominence/significance so I think it might be worth taking a moment to talk out loud about it so that people can consider it and think about what they want
it’s very difficult if not impossible to have some kind of scene in a public space that does some kind of interesting/important work without getting the attention of the wider world around it. reflect on this, really consider about it, because it will inform your choices
maximising both interestingness and privacy is very difficult to do. interestingness tends to require interfacing with as much of reality as possible. there *are* certainly pockets of deep interestingness that are cloistered-hidden, but by definition, you won’t find them randomly
Ok I’m getting tattooed in a few minutes. I have a request: I’m choosing to get all dramatic about this experience and treat it as a kind of shamanic initiation ceremony. Leave me a message that you would want me to carry past the threshold? What should I remember
I have earned the respect of every tattoo artist in this studio and multiple dudes with full sleeves etc. officially a bad mf ❤️🔥. always been etc etc