“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.