I learned recently that art history translates as storia dell’arte in Italian. The only significant thing about this is that I found it beautiful. Storia dell’arte. God dammit that sounds so beautiful to me. I had taken a few months off from my Italian studies, but I resumed them again this week, and I forgot how much fun it is to listen and to write and to speak in Italian. I love this language, and I wish I had more time to take it as seriously as I’d wish. I wish I had more time (and discipline) to do more, but at this stage in my life, I’d take what I can get.

It was a quiet day. I spent most of it inside my air conditioned office fixing more broken computers. I’ve made good progress this week, but mostly, it’s been full of solitude.

To break up the monotony, I walked around the neighborhood near my school a few times throughout the day. During one walk, I was greeted by an elementary school student playing with her sister in her yard. “Hi Mario,” she said, and just those words broke whatever melancholy I had been feeling at the moment. “How’s your summer going?” I asked her. “Good,” she said, then ran across her yard and began to play again. Later, I ran into a recent graduate and his girlfriend also going for a walk, and we waved and said our hellos. I returned to my office and cherished both my brief but valuable moments of human contact and the very refreshing AC.

On my way home from work, I decided to pull off and head toward the reservoir. I felt like I hadn’t been here for a while, but apparently, the last time I was here was last year on this exact same day. I went early in the morning then, and I went during the middle of the day today when temps were in the mid 90s. It was hot, but it was beautiful, and after I took some shots with my camera, I drove back onto the highway and made my way back home. After a few minutes, though, I had to pull off again.

I grabbed my notebook and began to write my feelings about what I had just experienced. What struck me the most was how decisive and nonchalant I was about this mini excursion. I had written about my anxiety before, and I thought of this again as I appreciated how far I’ve come over the years. I remember how tough it used to be for me to even get out of the house sometimes, and now I crave adventure.

I mentioned yesterday about the road trip through the Pacific Northwest I took in April, and I’m planning to head east sometime at the end of July or early August, and if the me of four years ago saw the me of now, I believe he would be proud. I am proud of how far I’ve come, and I am truly very excited to see what’s next.

Here’s to my next adventure.

“How do you like your Jeep?” the older lady asked me. We had both just parked at the grocery store lot, and as we walked toward the entrance, I said, “I love my Jeep.”

“I have a bucket a bolts for…” she thought for a minute, clearly annoyed, and said, “it’s a Jeep Patriot, right? I’ve had nothing but trouble with mine. I don’t recommend a Jeep to nobody.”

“The next car I buy will be a Jeep,” I said.

“Good luck with that,” she said and walked away.

I had seen this lady around town through the years, mostly on the road, mostly driving her Jeep Patriot, and I marveled again at how small the world feels sometimes. I recently took my Jeep on a road trip throughout the Pacific Northwest, and I had zero issues with it during it, but I like to believe that is because I like to take care of it. I’m not saying she didn’t, but as someone who deals with technology on a regular basis, I can tell when something is cared for and when something is not.

I spent most of the day taking apart Chromebooks, removing broken screens and installing working ones, diagnosing others and labelling them with my notes, and reinstalling ChromeOS and re-enrolling them to our school domain. There’s a simple pleasure in fixing things, and sometimes I wish other areas of my life were as easy.

Someone I deeply cared about broke up with me a few months ago, and for a reason I cannot articulate, she weighed heavily on my mind today. As I fixed one machine after another, I tried to find a way to fix this pain I’ve felt and have been feeling for a while. I considered scenario after scenario, but each one led me down the same path: it’s over, and I have to move on.

Some things can’t be fixed, no matter how much I try.

The National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory in my area for this coming Tuesday through Friday night. Forecasts predict triple digit temperatures, and if I still lived in San Diego, I might be annoyed but since I live in Montana, where the weather can fluctuate from snow one minute to sunny and clear skies the next, I am weirdly looking forward to 90 degree days again.

One way I will try and enjoy this heatwave is by driving in my nicely air conditioned car and listening to James A. Reeve’s newly launched Midnight Radio newsletter, “a dispatch of five thematic songs + a brief ramble delivered ‘round midnight on the first and fifteenth of each month.” His first broadcast is called, fittingly enough, Heatwave, and it is an incredible and eclectic mix of music with a whole lot of static and reverb. James has, if not the best taste in music, the coolest taste in music of anyone I know or follow. I’ve been reading his blog for many years now, and he ends many of his entries with a song that is usually new to me and very good. Both his blog and newsletter are great, and I recommend both.

“How do you keep creating something new on a regular basis?,” I asked Ganzeer in reply to a request he proposed in issue #206 of his amazing newsletter, Restricted Frequency. “I feel like I’m screaming into a void sometimes.” I didn’t expect him to reply, but there, in issue #207, he did:

The greater the void, the louder the scream must be, Mario.

Quite a few modes of creation do necessitate a great deal of solitude, and with that comes that sense of screaming into the void. It is more than a sense most of a time, but indeed a reality. I see no other way around it but to keep creating.

Keep creating, Mario, create all the things that are nagging at you to be made. Create them for no other purpose than their burning desire to exist. Keep at it, keep going, and keep creating until you have a big and strong enough body of work that cannot be ignored, no matter how vast the void may be. And more importantly, Mario, a body of work that you can be proud of, which I think is the most important thing of all.

Love your blog, btw.

Ganzeer

If this doesn’t make me write more, blog more, create more, than I don’t know what will.

I’ve been sitting here all day trying to put myself in the right frame of mind to write, I don’t know, this powerful essay, this heart-wrenching and deeply personal piece of writing that I would be proud to put out into the world, but I’ve been failing. I’ve been feeling my chest tighten and my mind racing for distraction all day, and I’ve been having a helluva time trying to reign it in and just write something. You know what helped? Reading some of my old blog posts from the summer of 2020. These essays were short and to the point, and as I re-read them for the first time in years, I remembered my mindset back then and my intention for this place:

This place is mine and I can write and create whatever I want.

I let myself get psyched out by false expectations. At some point over the last 2 to 3 years, I set the bar so high for myself that I simply stopped trying to reach it. I grew content letting this place languish, to let my, yes, talents go to waste, and why? I set the rules, and because I set the rules, I can also change them.

“Keep creating,” Ganzeer advised. That’s the only rule I need. Let’s go.

Yesterday I received my new camera and lens, the X-T50 and XF16-50mm kit lens, and I took both to Kerr Dam in Polson to try them out. This camera replaces my aging X-T20, a camera that will always have a special place in my heart because it was there with me when I rebooted this blog back in 2020. I loaded the Kodak Film film recipe from Fuji X Weekly into the X-T50, and I went at it.

All these photos are straight out of camera and have not been edited. Over the past few months I have been focusing my attention on trying to get the shot right in camera because I’ve become tired of editing photos, and this X-T50 does all I want and need out of a camera. I am in love, and I love how these photos turned out.

Also, I’m back, and it feels good to be back. I’m doing better. Thank you to everyone who reached out. You have no idea how much that meant to me. If I have it in me, I’ll write about my experiences from the last few months later this summer. Until then, thank you for reading and go enjoy the sunshine!

For the past few years, I’ve been working hard to reduce my overall screen time, and one of the things I have recently begun to do is to read paper magazines again. You know, sometimes I have an idea for something and I have no idea how it’ll turn out until I do it, and I had an inkling how this might turn out but I can never be sure how it will turn out, but now that I have all my magazines together for the first time, I am ecstatic at how this idea turned out. Turning off my phone, tossing it aside, and reading a nice article in the New Yorker or an interesting interview in the Paris Review has been so much fun. I received the London Review of Books just today so I haven’t been able to dig into yet, but I will, and I’m eager to try it out.

Moral of the story: turn off your screens and hold paper and ink again.

Two years ago, I made a deal with myself: write. Show up every day and write. Two years ago, I began to fill my first A5 Leuchtturm1917 notebook, and on Sunday night, I finished my fifteenth notebook. In May, I designed and ordered my perfect notebook box, and my design was for each box to hold fifteen notebooks. On Sunday night, I finished my first notebook box, as well.

These last two years have flown by, and I’ve documented all of it in these fifteen notebooks. Every up, every down, every great day and every mediocre day: it’s all in these notebooks. And I love that. My output here has definitely decreased over the last two years, but I haven’t stopped writing. In fact, I’m writing more than ever, and I couldn’t be any happier.

It really feels like I’m just getting started, too. So let’s keep going.

A fog has descended over the valley, and it’s driving all of us insane. I’ve felt like a daredevil driving to work in the mornings, pointing my car forward and hoping I don’t hit another car, tumble down a ditch, or miss my turn. It’s kept me young.

I had to remind myself how to do this. How to publish something online again. I had been thinking about this space, about what I wanted from it, but I’ve been focused on living, on trying to enjoy each day as it comes, to focus on now, on this breath, because in the end, ‌I will only have one last breath before I leave this world breathless. I want to exhaust my life force completely and leave Death nothing but a bag of bones.

How’s that going? It’s going. There are times, small moments throughout my day, where I catch myself and become aware of the mask I’m wearing, the mask that transforms me into a robot, a machine following a prewritten set of instructions, without thought, without awareness, and I think, what am I doing? I’m playing a part, playacting for some audience I will never see. Why? What for? I don’t know. But I catch myself and I feel this deep and hollow and foreboding hole in my chest, and it scares me, so to feel better, I put on my mask and I let myself forget. I distract myself with all the distractions we’ve created for ourselves, and I tell myself I’ll try again tomorrow.

One day, there will be no more tomorrows, and on that day, I think I will finally feel peace. But until then, I have a life I want to live, feelings I want to feel, people I want to be with, places I want to see, art I want to create. As much as I’ve been writing in my notebooks, the essays I write on this site just feel different. There’s something about them that I can’t quite reproduce in my notebooks, and so I’m here, on this first post of 2024, and I don’t know I want to keep coming back here, writing my words, living my life without my mask. And I think that’s what I’ve been missing, to an extent. A chance where I can just be me, honest and true and fucked up like everyone else.

Or maybe this fog has driven me insane, and I don’t know who I am anymore.