Been jamming to this song over the last day. Love it.

Didn’t know there was a French version of it and now I’m hooked!

This might be the best version. So damn sexy.

• I want to learn bookbinding because I want to make my own notebooks. I want to scour the world for a specific type of paper that fits me and use that to make my notebooks with. Imagining this search for the perfect paper excites the hell out of me.
• Technology is exhausting me, and I just want to spend all my time holding paper, writing on paper, drawing on paper.

• Drawing these circles in my notebook was one of the most therapeutic things I’ve done in a long time.
• I want to buy more books but I’m running out of space in my apartment.
• How much does LASIK eye surgery cost? I don’t want to wear glasses or contacts anymore.
• I don’t have any tattoos but I kinda want some tattoos. No idea of what, though.
• I want to buy a record player and build a vinyl collection of all my favorite albums. Then I want to sit and listen to these records and do nothing else. Just listening.
• I used to spend so much time in libraries, and then I used to spend so much time in bookstores, and I’ve stopped doing that because I live in Montana and everything good is a long car ride away. I can’t walk to these places on a whim like I used to.
• One of my fondest memories from college was listening to my friends talk about movies and argue why The Departed was an awful movie and why Infernal Affairs was better. I really miss those times, and I really miss having a more active social life.
• All my friends are married now and have kids, and I don’t think I’ll ever be married or have kids, and I’m okay with that. I still wish I had a more active social life, though.
• I think the thought of sitting at an outdoor cafe, drinking a good cup of coffee, and watching people walk by for hours is a day well spent, and that’s all I want to do when I’m older.
• I’ve been thinking a lot about death. Don’t mistake me: I want to live for another 30, 40, 50 years, so not like that. More of this idea that so many of us are afraid of dying that we don’t ever truly live. That, in a way, we’re more afraid of living than dying. At least, I am. That we can’t ever truly live until we’re comfortable and fully accept our mortality, with dying. Memento mori: remember that you have to die.
• Sartre wrote that he hoped “the last burst of my heart would be inscribed on the last page of my work, and that death would be taking only a dead man.” I’ve been thinking a lot about that over the past few weeks, and that’s how I want to live, how I want to go out. The problem is that I don’t think I have to courage to live like that, but the other problem is that I’m running out of days to live like that.
• Montaigne wrote about “The Master Day”: the day that is judge of all the others. It’s the last day of your life, the day that completes your story.
• With that said, I wonder if I will spend the rest of my life talking about living or actually living. I’m hoping for the latter, but who knows.

Thank you, Ted Gioia.

“The US’s first-ever trial in a constitutional climate lawsuit kicked off on Monday morning in a packed courtroom in Helena, Montana,” writes Dharna Noor in The Guardian.

I am so proud of these young people, and I am so proud this lawsuit is happening in Montana. I love Montana, even though I’ve had my issues with it over the years, and I actually did not know that

Montana’s state’s constitution has since 1972 guaranteed that the “state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations”.

That is incredible. I hope this lawsuit kicks off the proper energy and motivation for other states and countries to bring more lawsuits like this to the courts. A man can hope.

Speaking of having nightmares and living in the moment, my favorite writer, the man I have looked toward for guidance and inspiration during my entire adult life, has died.

I have no words.

Bahala na, as taught to Jenny Odell by an artist born in the Philippines, is a Tagalog phrase that translates to “whatever happens, happens”:

That may sound resigned or passive, and indeed, an American psychologist argued in the 1960s that the attitude described by bahala na had similarities with American fatalism. But when the Filipino psychologist Alfredo Lagmay interviewed people around Manila about its usage, a more interesting picture emerged. What he found was a “positive, functional response to uncertainty,” something that meant meeting the present with everything you had at your disposal, a sharp-eyed sallying forth even when you didn’t feel totally prepared or in control. It was a form of acceptance that was actually the opposite of giving up because acceptance was the beginning of observation and response.

Jenny Odell, an author I love, continues to describe bahala na in a way that’s similar to what I’ve learned in my recent adventures with Zen and Stoicism:

Both declinism — the belief that the past was better and the future will be worse, and blind optimism — the belief that the past was worse and the future is inevitably better — absolve us of our responsibility to act now, in this gap between the past and future. In contrast, the improvisational spirit lives inside that gap, and it can be surprisingly full of ingenuity and joy even when the situation is dire. As something we share with our nonhuman brethren, the capacity to form new responses is how you know you’re alive, today, here. So when my mum says, “whatever happens, happens,” what I hear is not resignation but a mix of humility, trust, and curiosity. And I think it’s like this — through love of the present, and of ourselves in it — that we actually win the future.

All we have is now. The past and the future don’t exist, now. We live now. I don’t know how else to describe it. The present moment is the only moment that matters; life is made of the present moment. To live well, live now.

A few weeks ago, I saw this video of Costello the octopus potentially having a nightmare, and I’ve been haunted by it ever since. Ever since becoming vegan in 2017, I’ve become a lot more spiritual when it comes toward animals, nature, and the Universe. I see no need why anyone should kill and eat animals in this modern world of plenty, but that’s a losing battle I won’t fight now.

What has affected me so much right now is that last night before bed, I put on Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown on Max, and I watched the season 5 episode where he goes to Hawaii. There’s a segment where he and a few other Hawaiians go hunting for octopuses. They used a sharp spear to coax the octopus out of its hole in the ground, and when it tried to swim away, Anthony grabs it and begins to explain that the way to kill it is to bite the brain. However, he couldn’t find it, so we see him bite the octopus, bite the octopus, bite the octopus, and eventually, the octopus dies from exhaustion.

Seeing the tentacles flair and writhe was one of the most gruesome things I had ever seen. Usually, stuff like this doesn’t affect me much. I was an EMT for many years. I’ve seen some gruesome things in my life, but this, this is haunting me. Octopuses can have nightmares; I’m having a nightmare right now.

One of my favorite YouTube channels is Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games, and a few days ago, he released this video of some of my favorite video game music (Zelda! Xenoblade Chronicles!) being performed live in Japan by an orchestra as part of the Press Start: Symphony of Games concert series. If you’re a fan of these video games, or really, video games in general, you should definitely watch this. A whole nine plus minutes of Xenoblade Chronicles music? Oh my goodness.

To continue the thought from my previous post, Robin Dunbar explains how friendships die:

Friendships die when we do not see the people concerned often enough to maintain the relationship at its former level of emotional intimacy—and especially so when neither side can quite muster the energy to do anything about it. So the tendency is for such relationships to fade quietly, almost by accident rather than design. The road to friendship is paved with good intentions to meet up again, and no doubt a good bit of guilt—we must get together sometime… but somehow sometime never comes because too many other priorities intervene.

There’s that energy I mentioned before. Friendships die when neither side can quite muster the energy to do anything about it. Don’t want friendships to die? Do something about it.

This reminds me of this New Yorker cartoon from this week’s issue:

In a chapter titled “Why friendships end” in his book Friends, Robin Dunbar writes about a study conducted by Michael Argyle and his collaborator Monika Henderson that examined the rules that underpin friendships. They identified six key rules which were essential for maintaining a stable relationship:

• Standing up for the friend in their absence
• Sharing important news with the friend
• Providing emotional support when it is needed
• Trusting and confiding in each other
• Volunteering help when it’s required
• Making an effort to make the other person happy

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve been working hard this year to improve my friendships and my social network as a whole, and I have found Friends by Robin Dunbar to be an invaluable resource to help me understand what makes friendships work and how I can be a better friend to those I care about.

I’ve lost too many friends over the years from the simple fact that neither side devoted enough energy in maintaining the relationship. All it takes is a bit of energy, and that has been where I’ve been trying to redirect my attention and focus onto this year. I can’t say that I’m the most popular person in the world now or anything, but I can say that it has been fun to make plans with my friends, to hang out with them, to confide in them, and to share some part of our lives together.

This has been really tough, though. Even though these people are my friends, I still feel that fear of rejection, of cancelled plans, of maybe mistaking where I think my friends lie in my friend circles and where I lie in theirs. Calibrating that has been interesting. Keeping friendships takes a lot of energy, and I think I’m ready to expend as much of it as possible on them.