I read 17 books this year. For me that’s low, but 2020, by all measures, wasn’t a normal year. I struggled with attention and focus, and there were months when I didn’t read a single page. But I’m proud I read anything at all.

My favorite fiction book of the year was Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. Last year I read 1Q84 and fell in love with Murakami’s style immediately. The same went for Kafka on the Shore. I love how he tells stories, and I want to read the rest of his bibliography in the coming years.

My favorite non-fiction book of the year was Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. I just finished reading it a few minutes ago, but I knew from the beginning that I would love it. I haven’t read many biographies, but I loved this one. I’m an American and I love the story and the promise of America, and Alexander Hamilton embodied all of it.

Other books I loved this year were The Expanse series of books by James S.A. Corey and Spark Joy by Marie Kondo. Both influenced my year in different ways and made living through this hectic year better.

• Death’s End by Cixin Liu
• Lost Connections by Johann Hari
• The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs
• Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing by Marie Kondo
• Killing Floor by Lee Child
• The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker
• The Black Echo by Michael Connelly
• Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey
• Roseanna by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
• The Lonely City by Olivia Laing
• Caliban’s War by James S.A. Corey
• Abaddon’s Gate by James S.A. Corey
• Severance by Ling Ma
• I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
• The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton
• Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
• Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

My first language was Spanish but I stopped speaking it once I learned English. In high school, I took three years of French and loved it. In college, I took two semesters of Mandarin Chinese and loved it. For the past year, I’ve been teaching myself Japanese and I’ve been loving it. I’m currently listening to the Duolingo podcast on the great Argentinian heist of 2006, spoken in both English and in Argentinian Spanish. They say the “ya” (double Ls) sound like “ja”, so llaves (keys) becomes javes. It’s interesting. On Instagram, I went down this rabbit hole on French photographers, and I followed one who today had an hours long live session where she spoke in French and I felt this giddiness as I heard her speak that I haven’t felt in a very long time. I wanted to re-learn French, and I wanted to re-practice Spanish, and I want to keep learning Japanese and maybe one day go back to learning Chinese. I watch so much anime because I just love the musicality of the Japanese language, and I love understanding some of what the characters are saying. I’m not sure why I love languages, but I do.

There are so many decisions I wish I made when I was younger, and sometimes I feel like I’ve grown too old to pursue any of them, but I’m not. I want to keep learning and I want to travel to all these countries and speak to all these people because we’re all just people sharing the same world and trying to live the best lives we can. And if I can do so by taking pictures and going on miles-long walks? Oh man, now that’ll be the life.

Yesterday, I went to my local clinic to visit with my doctor. My back had been killing me since last week, but I woke up yesterday feeling better than before. It still hurt to bend down and put on my socks, but at least it didn’t take me 20 minutes to get up from my bed in the morning like it did over the weekend.

I hadn’t seen my doctor in a few years, and when he came in to see me, he told me it was a good thing that I hadn’t seen him for that long. It’s always when something goes wrong, I thought. I talked him through what was happening, and he told me a story that helped him with his back pain. One day, he was bending over to put some sheets away when his back just gave out and he fell to the floor in pain. What helped him, he said, was wrapping a heating pad over where it hurt on his back for about an hour or two, and that made him feel better. After my visit, I drove to Walmart and bought a heating pad. I came home, learned how to use it, and sat on it for a few hours. My back did feel better, but it didn’t really solve the problem.

Only time will heal this wound, I think. Time and rest. So that’s what I’ll do.

I received my fixed Fujifilm X-T20 camera yesterday. I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I held the camera in my hands again. I attached the XF18-55mm kit lens to it, turned the camera on, and felt the same sense of joy I felt when I first turned it on back in 2018. The X-T4 is an amazing camera and it’ll be my main camera for the foreseeable future, but man, it feels good to have my OG camera back.

I haven’t been writing much in here anymore because I haven’t been taking pictures or writing in my notebook anymore. Every time I take a picture of something, though, I have a strong urge to write in here, and that’s why I’m back today. Writing without pictures documenting my day doesn’t feel right. I wanted to push through it, but that didn’t amount to anything. So here I am.

Fall is here, and the colors are beautiful. The coronavirus is still a thing, and our president has it. Some schools around us have had to shutdown because of active cases, and I feel like it’s only a matter of time before it hits us, too. The election is a month away, and I have no idea what to expect. I honestly don’t even know what I want to happen. I’m all out of fucks to give.

I learned a new word today. Phenology is the close study of nature’s rhythms. It relates to the cyclical and seasonal nature of climate, plant, and animal life, and I love it. I’ve been checking in with the moon more this summer than I ever have, and there’s a calm and stillness I feel when I look up at the sky and see the moon’s current phase. The wildfire smoke has enveloped the West in a blanket of misery and doom, but it has given a new beauty to the red sun. That just reminds me how even in the most tragic and depressing of circumstances beauty still finds a way to seep through.

The basics start with my notebook and pen. I need to get my thoughts and feelings down on the page so they won’t eat me up from the inside. When I neglect my notebook, I let my depression win. On the first post of this blog, I wrote that every morning I wanted to write in my notebook before I wrote my blog entry. I veered away from that, but now I’m ready to veer back into it. Over the course of the summer, I came to the realization that I don’t want to be a fiction writer anymore, and I felt like that freed me up to try new things. Journaling still helps with my mental health, so I’ll continue to do that, but my photography has also helped a lot, too.

I feel like—and this may sound cheesy—I was born to be a storyteller, and journaling and photography are different ways of telling a story. I wrote last month about my desire to go on a long walk, somewhere in the 500-1,000 mile range, and photograph it and then write a long essay about it. I still have that desire. I would love to write that story, even if just for myself, so that’s something to look forward to. But I have to be healthy and strong, so getting back into a steady workout routine will be key. I’m actually sore right now from yesterday’s workout, and it feels good. Just. Don’t. Stop. I have to keep telling myself that.

Work is slowing down. The teachers and the kids have settled into a rhythm. Other than the masks, it feels like the coronavirus doesn’t exist. When I was a wildland firefighter, one of the biggest admonishments I received from my superiors was to never be complacent. Complacency is what gets people killed, and I feel like our school and our community are complacent right now. I hope we all get through this safely.

Fall starts soon. I’m ready for a new season. Just. Don’t. Stop.

For the past few weeks, and possibly the past month, I’ve been depressed. I had lost the will to do anything. I stopped writing in my notebook, stopped going on walks, and stopped taking pictures. I had broken my first mirrorless camera, and that made me more sad than I could have ever imagined, so I bought a new one. I love my X-T4, but unfortunately, that hadn’t been enough to kick me out of my perpetual sadness. So then I bought a new tripod. “Maybe,” I thought, “I need to go on something more than a long walk in the park and instead go on a hike up the mountains and take some landscape photographs.” I received my new tripod on Friday, but instead of taking it out with me, I stayed home and got drunk. I have been neglecting my todo list, my notebook, my camera, my guitar, my studies, my reading, my workouts, my meditations. I have been neglecting everything that makes me happy and instead I’ve been focused on the drinking, on the shopping, on all the indulgences that make me feel awful.

Today I meditated for the first time in a very long time. It wasn’t peaceful. It wasn’t life-affirming. It wasn’t anything positive. Instead, it was angry. It was dark. It was everything I had been feeling for the past month, and in that regard, it was a great session. It always starts with that first step. It’s picking up my pen. It’s changing into my workout clothes. It’s sitting down at my desk. I wrote in my notebook this morning and let all these feelings out, and it felt familiar. It felt… I felt like myself again.

I haven’t thought about suicide since my early twenties, and I don’t think I ever will again because I know there will always be better days ahead. Things might look black and white now, but I know colorful days are waiting for me, and it’s this mentality that has helped me stay alive. I don’t know if things will get back to “normal,” whatever that means, but I know I have to keep moving my feet to get to the good days. So here’s to the good days.

I’m breaking from tradition and posting a picture I took a few days ago. I think this finally frees me up from having to take a picture a day. Who imposed this rule? Me, but I wanted to see how long I could go. A few months seems laudable. This is a picture of my mom, and I really like it. She flies back to California tomorrow morning, so tonight will be the last day I’ll be able to hang out with her. It was a short trip, but I hope it was nice for her.

My mom flew in on Sunday, and I’ve been hanging out with her and my nieces the past few days. I’ve been playing twenty questions with this lovely lady and have been enjoying the time with her. She has grown into a creative, honest, and amazing young lady, and I‘m eager to see her grow up. I moved to Montana a month before she was born, and I was there when she was just a few hours old, so I have a special affinity for her. Don’t tell anyone but she’s my favorite!

I took hundreds of photographs and filmed gigabytes of video, and I’ve been having fun going through them and editing them. I really do love photography.

I haven’t been on a walk in a few weeks. It’s been work work work non-stop, and it’s been getting to me. Emotionally, spiritually, and physically. I’ve been coming home from work dead tired and unmotivated to do anything. I know it’s bad when I miss the slowness of life. I miss breathing and thinking and writing mundane thoughts in my notebook. Now it’s filled with anger and disdain. Is starting a Google Meet really that hard? Is printing to a certain printer? Has 21st century life really moved that fast for 20th century people?

I’m tired of this virus and I’m tired of the people who aren’t taking it seriously, who are only thinking of themselves instead of others. I feel like we’re a bunch of parasites eating through the earth until there’s nothing left. We need a great devourer to eat us up and give the earth time to breathe and rebuild.