For the past few weeks, I’ve been copying down the notes I took while reading Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind in my notebook. It’s been a marvelous journey but a journey that is not yet over.

While you are practicing zazen, you may hear the rain dropping from the roof in the dark. Later, the wonderful mist will be coming through the big trees, and still later when people start to work, they will see the beautiful mountains. But some people will be annoyed if they hear the rain when they are lying in their beds in the morning, because they do not know that later they will see the beautiful sun rising from the east. If our mind is concentrated on ourselves we will have this kind of worry. But if we accept ourselves as the embodiment of the truth, or Buddha nature, we will have no worry. We will think, “Now it is raining, but we don’t know what will happen in the next moment. By the time we go out it may be a beautiful day, or a stormy day. Since we don’t know, let’s appreciate the sound of the rain now.” This kind of attitude is the right attitude.

— Shunryu Suzuki

All that matters is right now. This moment is all we have. Let go of the past and the future and simply focus on this moment, on this breath, and appreciate this existence. Death is waiting for us; life isn’t. So, live.

I admit, I’ve lost whatever blogging rhythm I built up since before I got sick in January. Not promising anything, but here’s a silly post to remind me what posting something new feels like.

It’s been a while since I’ve shared manga I like, and last week’s issue of Chainsaw Man made me laugh. Granted, I have a very childish sense of humor, so the joke at the end of this issue worked on me.

Obviously, spoilers ahead.

That final eww!! It had me on the floor! 🤣

I watched this performance by Hania Rani last night, and I immediately fell in love. I found her Bandcamp, and today, I bought two of her albums:

Without question, they’re good, and I love them. Along with Hania’s albums, I bought these four albums:

This music puts me in a certain mood, a mood I like to live in. Maybe you will, too.

I knew I was getting better when I noticed I was dancing to my music while I cooked dinner the other night. The last time I had worked out was on Friday, January 20th, and when I woke up the next day and felt that scratch in my throat, I knew I was in for a rough week. Little did I know my rough week would last almost four weeks. Two posts ago, I wrote how good I felt and how my new habits and routines all seemed to be clicking at once. I recounted in my next post the beginnings of my sickness and how I thought I was getting better. A few days after that post, I worked out again, even though I wasn’t feeling 100%, and I worked out again the next day even though I was feeling worse than I did the day before, and that decision, unfortunately, exacerbated my sickness and made me feel worse than the first week living with my illness. This sickness knocked me out, and I was at a point a few weekends ago where I seriously considered writing my eulogy. I felt that awful. But here I am, in this third post about my health, confident that I’m closer to 100% than I have been since my last good workout on the 20th of January.

I worked out on Monday of this week, then again on Tuesday, and I felt really good after both workouts. Unfortunately, things at work carried over into my personal life and I haven’t worked out since. In my notebook, I’ve told myself that this is a transitionary week, a week where I try to build my old habits and routines slowly, a week where I give myself some slack, and that’s what I’m holding onto now. Things were going great before my sickness, and I have wondered where I would be with some of my goals if I didn’t get sick, but I can’t think like that. Life is all about how well you can adapt to all the bullshit coming your way, and this sickness—something that felt like pneumonia multiplied by a million—was the epitome of bullshit. But I’m better now, as close to 100% than I have been since that third week of January.

There are lots of things I want to do, want to accomplish, but they all depend on good health. There’s only so much I can do when all I have the energy to do is filling trash bags with used tissues and cough drop wrappers. I still managed to get up to my alarm every morning and write in my notebook, but even then… I am ready to get back to work and get back to living the life I want to live. I am almost at 100%, and I want to focus and do what I want to do instead of what I’m being forced to do.

I appreciate each breath of fresh air, and I hope I have many more before it’s all said and done. Let me focus on that and enjoy this moment of life.

For the past week, I’ve been battling a cold that has kept me from living the life I want. I first felt the sickness coming last Thursday when I felt that familiar yet godawful tickle in my throat that developed into a full-blown old man’s cough by the weekend. I remember I slept for over 9 hours one of those days and I was still tired.

My only saving grace was that my new Playstation 5 arrived that Thursday, so while I recovered, I played a lot—and I mean a lot—of God of War, so much so that I’m only three trophies away from earning the marvelous platinum trophy, a feat I usually don’t care about but I do in this instance. My whole entire week has been focused on recovering from this sickness and playing this game on my new toy, and it’s been nice. Unproductive as hell, but nice.

I returned to work yesterday for the first time all week, but I could only manage half a day before I clocked out early and went home. I woke up this morning hacking half my lung, but I feel better. During this sickness, I’ve still been going through my comforting morning routine, and that meant that I cold achieve this little accomplishment I can hang my hat on:

I can’t believe it’s “only” been 100 days since I started meditating again. It’s been a much needed companion for me these past few months, and I’m grateful for it. I’m still not at 100%, but I’m getting there. I have been able to sit at my desk and work all morning today, for example, and that feels good. I’m still not able to workout or do anything that requires 100% focus, but I’m getting there. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel again, and that feels very nice. I’m hoping for a restful weekend so I can be back at it again by Monday.

Here’s hoping.

I feel good. Great, even. Many (but not all) of my new habits and routines I’ve been building over the past month seem to be clicking all at once now, and my days feel good, and because of that, I feel good.

I woke up to twenty—twenty—low heart rate notifications on Friday, an obvious record for me. Last week, Apple Fitness+, my workout service of choice, released kickboxing workouts, and I spent every weekday last week going through them. Normally, my heart rate maxes out at around 150bpm during my most intense workouts (HIIT mostly), but I noticed during my kickboxing workout on Thursday that my heart rate maxed out in the 170s. During my sleep that night, I practically entered hibernation mode, and I woke up the next day feeling strong, lean, and healthy. When I weighed myself on Saturday, I dropped another pound, making that 4.5 pounds lost since the start of December. My goal then was 10 pounds, and I’m almost halfway through achieving it.

Fitness is only part of the equation. Good sleep also matters, as well as how I fuel my body. The last book I read last year was Thrive: The Plant-Based Whole Foods Way to Staying Healthy for Life by Brendan Brazier. The Thrive Diet is basically an alkaline diet, where the focus is on eating foods that are not too acidic. The first few chapters go through the science, and frankly, I didn’t give a shit about that. Brendan spent those chapters trying to sell me on his food philosophy, and it felt like a snake oil salesman trying to sell me on bullshit. But! The last half of the book was devoted on recipes, and these looked good. They were high on good, natural foods, something that jived well with my vegan diet—I diet I started on January of 2017. Over the last few weeks I’ve been slowly—oh god slowly—adding these recipes into my recipe app and acquiring as many ingredients as I could in my small town. Last week, I finally finished adding all the recipes into Mela, and I started to finally make some of these foods.

And oh my god.

The few I’ve made have been more than just good—they’ve been great. The almond flaxseed burger was orgasmic, and the chocolate blueberry energy bars helped me see in multiple dimensions. After I took my first bite of the burger, I messaged my friend and told her, “I love being vegan.” She didn’t say anything because she was busy eating meat, but oh my god, that night’s dinner is forever ingrained in my head. It was also the same night where I watched The Menu, which added an extra dimension to the viewing experience (what a great movie, by the way).

This week, I hope to keep pushing myself as hard, if not harder, during my workouts, and I hope to keep making more of these Thrive recipes. The book also has a 12-week meal plan (that I also digitized), and I’m not quiet ready to start that yet (some recipes require ingredients I can only find on Amazon so far), but it is on my radar. There are these pizza recipes I really want to try but they require buckwheat flour, and why don’t more stores carry buckwheat flour? What the hell? Anyways.

It’s been a good 2023 so far. Let’s keep going.

Yesterday, a little kindergartener spent the day in the main office because she was in trouble. We sat her down on a desk in the corner and kept an eye on her here and there to ensure she did her work. Occasionally we would see her poke her head out, and every time we would tell her to return to her desk and get to work.

“Can you call my mom?” she asked my friend, the secretary, during one of these moments.

“Why?” she asked her.

“Because I don’t like school anymore.”

I wanted to burst out laughing, but I kept it together until she returned to her desk, out of sight.

“Can you call my husband?” another co-worker said. “Because I don’t like work anymore.”

We had a good laugh, but eventually, we went back to work, too.

Later, the little girl left her desk again and asked my friend, “Can I go to the potty?” My friend looked at her for a moment, but before she could say anything, the little girl continued, “Because I keep farting.”

I couldn’t hold it together. I covered my face with my hands and laughed as quietly as I could. Once I saw her leave the office, I lost it. I laughed until my eyes watered.

Sometime later, the principal came out of his office to ask me to do something. “Before I do that,” I said, “can I go potty?” He looked at me funny and said,

“Yes, Mario, you can go potty.”

I smiled and said, “Because I keep farting.”

My job is the best.

Om Malik, in a post titled Why internet silos win, writes:

It doesn’t matter whether it is Twitter, Instagram, or Mastodon. Everyone is playing to an audience. The social Internet is a performance theater praying at the altar of attention. Journalists need attention to be relevant, and experts need to signal their expertise. And others want to be influencers. For now, Twitter, Instagram, and their ilk give the biggest bang for the blast. It is why those vocal and active about Mastodon are still posting away on Musk’s Twitter.

If we didn’t care for attention, we wouldn’t be doing anything at all. We wouldn’t broadcast. Instead, we would socialize privately in communication with friends and peers.

I’m using Om’s post as a jumping off point for something I’ve been holding onto and thinking about for a while. I’ve written my thoughts on social media before, and I see these current thoughts as an evolution on what I’ve written before. Mostly: I’m not an online community kind of guy, and I need to finally accept that.

When I jumped on the Mastodon bandwagon a few months ago, I wrote that I had mostly been enjoying myself. And that was true, I guess, but that feeling didn’t last very long. It wasn’t really who I followed, it was the whole idea of a timeline, or the feed. The feed, this box filled with 280 characters or 512 characters or an unlimited number of characters; this box filled with cat photos or moss photos or pretty sunsets; this box filled with people trying to sell me stuff, to influence my behavior in some way, to convince me that their views are right and their views are wrong; this box can go to hell.

I don’t need it, I don’t want it, and I need to get away from it.

Last month, Robin Sloan had this to say about Mastodon, words that have stuck with me ever since (I’m quoting all of it):

Don’t settle for Mastodon

I suppose this is an anti-avenue, because: Mastodon is not it.

When you tell me about Twitter vs. Mastodon, I hear that you got rid of the flesh-eating piranhas and replaced them with federated flesh-eating piranhas. No thanks, I’m still not swimming in that pool!

I’m not saying you shouldn’t create a Mastodon account, or that you can’t enjoy fun, percolating conversations on that platform. I’m just saying that it does not, to me, represent a sufficiently interesting experiment, because it accepts too much as settled.

The timeline isn’t settled.

The @-mention isn’t settled.

Nothing is settled. It’s 2003 again!

Nothing is settled. But what I don’t want to happen is probably what Robin wants to happen, and that’s for people to create something new to replace what’s already here. A new social network paradigm or something similar. What I’m thinking is: no, no we don’t. I don’t think all of humanity was meant to connect to each other in this way, something M.G. Siegler wrote (and I quoted and wrote about) back in October of 2021; mainly, that the problem is us, human beings.

A few weeks ago I went to my friend’s house and we played Uno, Old Maid, and Go Fish with her son and husband, and I had a blast—we all had a blast. We joked around and told stories and I lost my “crown” to my friend because he won the last game of Old Maid, and it was genuinely and simply a lot of fun. What I’m arguing for myself is that I want and need my “tribe,” my smaller community of good friends and family that I can see and hear regularly, and not these formless, shapeless outlines of people behind a screen. I know social networks provide something different—especially for marginalized communities—but this is what I prefer, a real life community.

Aren’t you being hypocritical? I hear someone asking. You have a blog, you’re still on Facebook and Instagram, you’re a Bookshop.org affiliate and are trying to sell me something, so why should I listen to you? You’re right and you shouldn’t. Nobody should listen to me. Like I said, my thoughts on all this are still evolving and will continue to evolve. But I am still going to try and figure out what’s best for me. On the last day of 2022, for example, I collected my login information for my Mastodon, Micro.blog, and other accounts, I saved them in a CSV file (two-factor codes and everything), I deleted my login information from my password manager, I deleted all my cookies and history from all my devices, and I tucked away that CSV file deep in my Documents folder. I am still thinking about maybe printing this information instead, but for now, this is what I’ve done. My intention is to never again login to these services, to never again contribute content to these services, and to simply let them rot until the end of time.

I guess what I’m yearning for is a more genuine human connection with those I already know and will meet in the future, and a way to pull away from these boxes the Internet or tech companies or modern culture as a whole wants to put me in. And to do that, I need to reclaim my attention, to focus on my hands and what I can build with them, and less on those things sucking away at my eyeballs and stimulating my reptile brain.

But what about your blog? Aren’t you writing for an audience or for the chance to build one? Yes and no, I guess. Again—I don’t know. I have an unending physical need to write. I have had it for decades now, and writing online forces me to write something different than when I write fiction or when I journal in my notebook. I don’t think I would have ever written any of these thoughts if I didn’t have my website. They would have been short notes here and there in my notebooks, and maybe a throwaway line a character says in one of my novels. And besides, I’m guessing most nobody reads my blog anyway? So like who cares? But yeah—I don’t know.

I’m still trying to figure my shit out. I have a long list of ideas in my drafts folder I’d still like to write and explore, and I still enjoy writing and publishing things on my own website—more for myself than for others, honestly—so I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. And that’s a good encapsulation of what being a human is like, I guess, and that’s what I want to be doing more of, being more human.

Last week, Ted Gioia wrote a good article about Barnes & Noble’s recent turnaround, and in it, he quotes James Daunt, the current CEO of Barnes & Noble:

Back when he was 26, Daunt had started out running a single bookstore in London—and it was a beautiful store. He had to borrow the money to do it, but he wanted a store that was a showplace for books. And he succeeded despite breaking all the rules.

For a start, he refused to discount his books, despite intense price competition in the market. If you asked him why, he had a simple answer: “I don’t think books are overpriced.”

I don’t think books are overpriced. Books, to me, have always been the one exception I’ve made when it came to my budget and how I spent money. If I really wanted a book but I really didn’t have the money, I bought it anyway. I understand how irresponsible this sounds, and it is… or was. I’m fortunate to be in a position where I can afford to do this now without amassing any form of consumer debt, and in fact, the one reason why I’m not buying books all the time is because I live in a small apartment and I don’t have the space to keep them all. So I have to be a bit judicious about it (says the guy who bought more books yesterday).

I don’t think books are overpriced. And they’re not. Most paperbacks cost somewhere around $10-15, and hardcovers are maybe $10 more than that. For what books offer, that’s relatively cheap. I like buying paper books because I like writing in them (see here), and I like holding them. I’m not opposed to eBooks—hell, at the end of 2020, I wrote about Standard eBooks, and just yesterday they released about half a dozen new books, some of which just entered the public domain, and I downloaded many of them. Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis sounds AMAZING. I simply prefer holding my books and writing in them. There’s a simple pleasure whenever I start a book for the first time and I bend the front cover behind the back of the book and I hold it in place as I read the page on the right, then as I get deeper into the book, I do the same but with the back cover—ahhh, I love doing that. Anyways.

I don’t think books are overpriced. Even though I only read 10 books last year, I spent $1,273.84 on books anyway. That’s a helluva lot more than I spent on music, I can tell you that much. I spent most of that money on Bookshop.org, and yeah, they charge more for books than a place like Amazon, but again, I don’t think books are overpriced. I’m happy Barnes & Noble is doing well. Whenever I make my way to Missoula, I usually try to stop at the local Barnes & Noble (after first checking out Shakespeare & Co., the best bookstore around), and I usually come away with something good (they had Spanish versions of Don Quixote and One Hundred Years of Solitude last time I was there, so I bought those).

I love books, and I love spending money on things I love… so yeah, that’s how I spent $1,273.84 on books last year. Fuck’s sake, that’s crazy, lol.

What a way to ring in the new year than by watching this incredible, incredible movie.

I went into The Banshees of Inisherin not knowing anything about it, something I’ve learned is the best way to approach movies nowadays, and I’m glad I did. I’ve never gone from laughing my ass off one second to literally crying the next.

I want to watch it again, to really study it. I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve rewatched a movie. I’ve been so caught up in the chase of the new that I need to remember to slow down, that we’re all going to the same place anyway, so why not enjoy the journey until then?

If you haven’t watched it, I highly highly recommend it. If you have, then you know. “There goes that dream.”