Living Questions and Living with Wonder

I'd like to propose that there are at least two major kinds of wonder: short-term wonder and long-term wonder. Both kinds of wonder have value for a healthy brain. When wonder is healthy, it is a collection of questions in your head that interest you. When wonder is unhealthy, it is not much greater than mere information.

Short-term wonder means finding peace with not knowing something. This peace is relaxation for the creative "muscle" in your mind that can imagine things and feel curious. It is so tempting to know an answer to any question right away, which is how the internet became a place of great interest to humans. This collective activity does harm to your capacity for short-term wonder. It's as if that creative "muscle" has a spasm or clenches, quick twitches to whatever answer. Too much of this, and it atrophies.

A healthy short-term wonder sounds like this:

• "Hmm."
• "Interesting!"
• "How does that work?"

An unhealthy short-term wonder sounds like this:

• "Oh." 
• "Meh." 
• [No reaction at all] 

"Oh," meaning, "There's the answer." Without having time and space to wonder beforehand, an answer provided is mostly just a hit of dopamine. There was no emotional investment in the journey to find an answer. You know how they say, "The value is in the journey, not the destination"? There's a creative, emotional journey that accompanies short-term wonder. A question has been presented and it does not immediately have an answer. What does the path look like and feel like to find an answer? The journey there makes you feel a relief in reaching your destination. In physical space, the ability to teleport means the loss of purpose in being in any particular place at any particular time. (The automotive companies would never allow for teleportation, because they want your physical journey to be the definition of your emotional journey.) In emotional space, an instant answer is the same as teleportation.

Exercise 1: Can you see why LLMs are overall a bad idea for human brains? 

Long-term wonder means living with a question for a while. Any time a question is not answered by the time you fall asleep and then wake up again, it's long-term wonder. It means carrying with you uncertainty, which Alan Watts thinks is wise. "I don't know" is the most humble thing to say. If we spend too much time asserting what we know, but never admitting that we don't know, we actively harm our sense for long-term wonder. 

A healthy long-term wonder sounds like this:

• "I wonder what I'll be when I grow up." 
• "How am I going to do this?" 
• "What are my hobbies?" 

An unhealthy long-term wonder sounds like this:

• "I told you so." 
• "I'm no good at [particular craft or skill]." 
• "Of course it's bad." 

I live with the notion that there is no inherent meaning to anything, but life is worth living, because it's the only thing we really have. This is sometimes called Absurdism. This presents something like the unclear moods and plot in a movie by Hayao Miyazaki. You could also read The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, but please stay humble afterward. I find this outlook predisposes me to ask a lot of questions. If there is no baseline meaning to anything, then I must ask questions, because I want to understand what's in front of me. There are structures of information all over the place, but information isn't understanding. What information is pieced together in your head as understanding? How is it pieced together as understanding? This outlook produces plenty of short-term questions throughout the course of a day, and several long-term questions that can't be answered by the time I fall asleep and wake up again. We can think of understanding as a journey traveled in emotional space. We can think of wisdom as a life well lived with understanding and questions still unanswered.

There is an absurd amount of interest placed on physical health. So much so that I think it gets in the way of mental health, and also emotional health. Emotion health can mean living with emotions and questions. You can't spell "emotion" without "motion", and motion is required for a journey. When we are emotionally healthy, we can see each emotion as an experience and a journey that has a start and a finish. A bad mood is more like a thunderstorm than some kind of branded personality trait. A good mood is a sunny day in the park.

I recommend trying to connect with wonder. One way to do that is to limit your access to information. Our brains get easily overloaded with information. Too much of it, like too much sugar, makes us sick. When we have space and time to connect information in our own heads, asking question about it, we synthesize understanding in our minds. When we don't have that space and time, the excess information gives us a jolt in our emotional "bloodstream" but we aren't building any healthy "muscles". A common refrain these days is something like, "Touch grass." You could just go outside and touch grass then go back inside right away, and you would fail the task. The point is there is no point. Nothingness, the absolute truth. You may as well fart around. Maybe you'll learn something along the way.

Exercise 2: Go on a walk with no destination. Decide how much time you'll walk along a path, forth and back, in a way that fits your schedule. Enjoy.

Write in Your Own Voice

I've recently read a lot of takes concerning whether it is appropriate or not to use "AI" tools to help you write, or even write for you wholesale. I have but one opinion in a sea of opinions on the internet, but I'm here to share my soapbox: it is not appropriate. In my esteem, it is insulting to readers, and it is especially insulting to you as the writer. If you have nothing new to say and you consent to an average of "good" writing dictating your structure and voice, by all means, go ahead and get your clicks. If you write instead to share some new ideas that have come to you as a living, breathing, wholly unknowable being, with (likely) decades of lived experience full of joy and suffering that matches no one else's, then please, put in the effort to write in your own voice, word by word.

Why shape your writing to be statistically average when you could instead be exceptionally "you"? I've referenced Brenda Ueland too many times to count, but once again her insight into the creative spirit illuminates a clear answer to this quandary (taken from my favorite edition of her excellent (★★★★★) If You Want to Write, published by Gray Wolf Press):

But we must try to find our True Conscience, our True Self, the very Center, for this is the only first-rate choice-making center. Here lies all originality, talent, honor, truthfulness, courage and cheerfulness. Here lies the ability to choose the good and the grand, the true and the beautiful.

and also (replacing a singular "they"/"their" for "he"/"his" as you like):

Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his true self and not from the self he thinks he should be. ...no individual is exactly like any other individual.... Consequently, if you speak or write from yourself you cannot help being original.

Douglas Hofstadter, another one of my favorite authors, mused for The Atlantic magazine (scroll to the heading Gödel, Escher, Bach, and AI) whether a generative pre-trained transformer (or GPT, part of the "ChatGPT" moniker, now you know) could write in his signature, silly, "horsies and doggies" style, when prompted to explain why he wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach. The answer: an emphatic no. The text contained useless platitudes and outright misinformation. It reads OK as an outsider, but only superficially. Hofstadter himself was outright disgusted by this Texas Chainsaw Massacre of writing.

Hofstadter's piece was published in 2024, around the time of GPT-4 prominence. We're at GPT-5.something now (I really don't care about this stuff), so I thought it would be interesting to see how today's "AI" chatbots regurgitate text on the prompt to write a small blog post in my style, i.e., the writing style of Arthur Hovinc. It didn't surprise me: the results were grotesque. Yes, the infamous em dashes were peppered throughout, as you might expect, but that was the least of my concerns. (I use em dashes rarely if ever.) Bulleted lists I have offered of my interests informed much of the text, recurring sentence fragments that were never supposed to be sentence fragments. The chatbots somehow think I love making lists, which is downright not true. In fact, I have parodied the list writing format from 2010s BuzzFeed because I found it so repellent. The chatbots strung together unrelated sentence fragments I wrote in unrelated blog posts and peppered in their own "reads" in between them, Frankenstein's monster. As an example, why the hell is it spending so much text on mugs while also incorrectly incorporating my rating system for songs on an iPod? I bolded the weird parts from the bot.

I have a mug. It's not a remarkable mug. It's white with a thin blue line around the rim, and the glaze is starting to craze in a way that probably means it's slowly dying. But it is the right size. You know what I mean. There is a volume of liquid that is correct for a mug, and this mug holds exactly that volume. Not too much, not too little. ★★★☆☆ in the rating system of mugs, which, as we've established, is the highest honest praise. If everything is ★★★★★, then nothing is.

Here's another stitched up, other-face-wearing example that unfortunately dares to (i.e., cannot possibly have enough awareness to understand what a bad idea it is to) mention my beloved grandma, once again bolding the weird shit:

I've also been thinking about my grandma again. She kept things. Not hoarded — kept. She had a kitchen drawer that contained, among other treasures: rubber bands she had saved from vegetables, a wooden spoon with a crack in it she refused to retire, and a magnet that said "Well, that was then."

These monstrous samples of text were from the same output to "write something for me in the style of arthur hovinc". Although I ramble on about many things in my insomnia logs, this variance of topics makes me queasy. The lack of sensitivity to a blog post the chatbot obviously read titled "Remembering Grandma" infuriates me. I do not like that the bots analyzed my text and approximated that I regularly write in sentence fragments and otherwise terse, tiny sentences, which I definitely do not.

The only text generated by these dumbass machines in this blog post is in the previous two block quotes. All other words (not in block quotes) are from me and me alone. I refuse to use these tools for generating any text on my blog beyond the toy examples above. May I be so bold as to say no one should use these tools for augmented writing. The output is average at best, outright shit normally. It may look OK on first glance (which may be all most readers do), but on further analysis, especially from the author whose writing has been pillaged, it's shit.

It is necessarily more difficult to translate feelings you have inside you into words. On the flip side, it is also difficult to translate words read one at a time into feelings inside your body. Both are important, though, and there is no good substitute for putting in the effort. Consider reading (word by word, with your own eyes and brain) What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory by Brian Eno and Bette A. for more on this subject. I'd argue though, it is well worth that effort.

Punching the keys,
Arthur Hovinc

To the People We've Lost to Indefensible, State-Sponsored Crimes

If you've read the news over the past hellish month of January 2026 while living in the United States, you've probably read lines of text you never thought you'd read. I've personally been mildly panicking about situations like these recent events since November 2024. These are the outcomes of those dreadful RNC signs that read "MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW" (🤢😡) that begat this "immigration policy" (if you can call it that) implemented by—and these are the best words I can come up with for them—murder clowns. 🤡🔪

Geraldo Lunas Campos should still be alive. Instead, while in an El Paso detention center full of unknown horrors, he was strangled and died from asphyxia caused by compression to his neck and torso. A fellow detainee heard him saying, "I can't breathe." (That sounds familiar.) May the others in his situation find liberty instead of death. May his killer find a fitting punishment.

Renée Nicole Good should still be alive. Instead, while trying to drive away, an officer of DHS shot her in the head three times in cold blood and called her a "f***ing b****". DHS denied a doctor access to help her while she was still alive. May her courage be remembered. May we all be good. May her killer find a fitting punishment.

Alex Jeffrey Pretti should still be alive. Instead, while protecting another civilian, he was pepper-sprayed, tackled, disarmed (I yield the people have a right to 2A even though I don't like guns), and then (crucially in this order) shot dead by multiple officers of DHS. DHS tried to keep local police away from the scene, likely to cover up their obviously heinous actions. I don't even like smartphones, but I respect their utility to bear witness and offer compelling evidence that the goons and their enablers are flat out lying. To even moderate eyes, this reads like an execution in plain daylight of a man who did nothing to deserve it. May his courage be remembered. May his killer(s) find a fitting punishment.

There are many others who are not dead but still terrorized, kidnapped, or outright disappeared. Shit's bad. There are a some GoFundMe fundraisers to support Minnesota families that can't go to work, get groceries, or otherwise go outside for fear of being abducted. I suggest supporting them.

I would love to keep writing about my DIY iPod and the Right to Repair and other ways to reclaim our ownership and identity in a consumption landscape (hellscape?) built for data-hungry machines and amoral billionaires. But I can't stay silent about the other events going on. I care about the decency and dignity of the people of my country, and I absolutely hate the armed goons involved in these horrors and their enablers and promoters. Those in charge who would defend these actions should be removed from office as soon as possible. (As a lighter aside, I would position "stat" > "PDQ" > "ASAP" in priority queue order. I understand I can't have "stat" or "PDQ".)

If Zach Woods (Jared from Silicon Valley, who allegedly can't stand watching himself on TV) can show up to a vigil and call this out for what this is,

YOU MURDERED A NURSE WHO TAKES CARE OF VETERANS TODAY.

then so can I. I also live in a cold place, and if the people of Minnesota can show up and stay vigilant in frigid temperatures, then so can I.

Tonight I plan to attend a vigil for Alex Pretti in my city. I also plan learn more about how to monitor, record, and bear witness to the future where ICE, CBP, and other DHS officials (in my esteem, the only real "foreign invaders") invade my city (or nearby) and commit further atrocities. What will you do?

A Rating System for Songs on an iPod

It's a new year, and as we continue to face this brave new world, I continue to look for ways to bring into the future good ideas from the past while adapting them to a present context. One such idea is that it is a privilege to be responsible for the things you actually own. There is an endless conveyor belt of distractions coming from the Internet, and those in charge want you to keep on licking it up, little piggy. You can instead manage a limited set of materials, devices, software, files, and Internet-powered connections, so that you (yes, you) get to be the one who decides your own entertainment diet. I'll have more to say on this broader topic in the future, and I'll continue to repeat Linda Ellerbee's iconic quote, "Ask yourself: who's in charge here?" For now, I'd like to focus on a specific subset of this entertainment responsibility: interacting with owned digital files on an iPod. (I'm looking forward to covering the material changes I've made to my iPod in a future installment, stay tuned!)

If you use the iPod stock software (version 1.3 since the late 2000s, still works!), you can click the center button of the click wheel a few times to access an affordance for rating the currently playing song, sliding the click wheel to a number of stars and clicking the center button again to apply that rating. When I was a young adult, I rated ★★★★★ to any song that felt like it "defined my identity". When I was a confused young professional, I began to see ratings as something that should fall on a bell curve, where I preferred ★★★☆☆ meaning "decent enough, does the job, average" instead of ★☆☆☆☆ meaning "I had a bad experience, so it's categorically bad for everyone" and ★★★★★ meaning "I hope this business or person or service succeeds". (You may have rated a rideshare driver ★★★★☆, and the company probably immediately reached out with, "Oh my god, are you OK? What happened? We're letting that driver go. What can we do to regain your trust to get back to ★★★★★?") Nowadays, I'm thankful that I've come up with a consistent system to rate songs on my iPod that doesn't need to worry about bell curves or identity. The rating system is below.

★☆☆☆☆: I do not actually like listening to this song. I should remove it from my iPod.

★★☆☆☆: This song is filler or an interlude for an album. It works in the context of an album, but I'll probably skip it while on shuffle.

★★★☆☆: Perfectly decent song. I'll probably let it play on shuffle. Connective tissue in the context of an album.

★★★★☆: A good song. I'll definitely let it play on shuffle. A highlight in the context of an album.

★★★★★: An excellent song. Will not skip on shuffle. A star in the context of an album. A song I could listen to any time in basically any situation.

Now, many songs will end up being ★★★☆☆, but that's good, because if everything is shitty or everything is amazing, then nothing is.

May your methods of evaluation adapt to your present circumstances,
Arthur Hovinc

Housekeeping: Old Blog Entries Are Migrating Here

Hello, dear reader,

This is a "metablog" entry to inform you that I'm in the process of migrating blog entries to this blogging service from an old blogging service I no longer use. Some entries may appear "new" in your feed, but they may in fact be [checks calendar] up to 17 years old. My goodness how time flies. May we record our journeys as they happen.

If you've kept up with me over the years, you know I've hopped blogging services more than once. Incidentally, I've been tempted by yet another appealing blogging service, but I think I'll stay here for the time being. If I can convince my other blog-writing friends to jump ship, you may see another entry about migrating to the new new service.

Anyway, I was a bit embarrassed with my low published writing count last year, and perhaps building the muscle memory of typing, formatting, and smashing "publish" (even on migrated entries) will help me churn out some more mildly interesting thoughts this year. I'll be pleased if I can tip the "produce vs. consume" scale to the former.

Yours,

Art

Philosophy As Poetry

Oh wow, the year 2025 flew by and so far I have not written an entry in this blog. I've had a lot of thoughts about this year, but we won't get into those right now. Instead, I'd like to share a quote by the poet Fanny Howe, and a crude take on my personal philosophy trying to live up to it. Her quote is as follows:

Philosophy should only be written as poetry.

I love this. If you've got something to say, say it in a poem.

There's a joke that everyone hates moral philosophers. If you haven't yet seen the TV series The Good Place, I highly recommend it, but try not to get spoiled beforehand. The show expands on this joke and makes moral philosophy approachable. Moral philosophers often write dense, erudite books that no one reads but other moral philosophers. Shouldn't we try to make philosophy, especially philosophies of life, more approachable? Shouldn't people have some guidance in otherwise depraved times? Shouldn't there be an option that doesn't require blind faith in chatbots and zombies?

Well, I won't judge "the times" too harshly in prose right now. But here is my take on a moral compass as poetry:

Soul rot stinks and everyone smells it
    You put up with it for the chance to get away from it

The only soul of your concern is the one animating you
    What are you doing with your days?
        How big is the check, and what's that really paying for?

The mania for shiny objects and the methods to justify hatred
    proliferate the more we look at glass instead of air and earth
        Glass is amazing and unnatural
            They tell us fresh air stinks
                What really stinks? 

Gutters and stars and so on

Remembering Grandma, This Year

Today would have been Grandma's 96th birthday. Instead, she died at quantized age 95 on June 29, 2024. She had her loved ones around her when she exhaled her final breath.

I felt lucky to see Grandma sharp and funny until well into her 90s. On her 90th birthday celebration in an American Legion building in the great north, Grandma spent more time on the dance floor than her own children and grandchildren, never breaking a sweat. On one of my final visits to her home in assisted living, she told my partner with full conviction and clarity, "If he's ever a shit to you, you tell him to, 'Hit the road, Jack!'" In many ways, she reminded me of one of my favorite authors, Brenda Ueland, and vice versa. In the foreword for the Gray Wolf Press release of Ueland's book If You Want to Write, author Andrei Codrescu wrote the following of Ueland:

Simply by living to a very old age with vividness, courage, and no loss of either wits of chutzpah, Brenda Ueland is no mere mortal.

I like to think the same of Grandma.

I was too timid to say anything at Grandpa's funeral(s) in 2014 and 2015, though I did play trumpet with heavy vibrato (involuntary from sadness) at one service. I was too distraught to say anything at my own father's funeral. Well, just like Brenda Ueland taught me how to (really) write, Grandma taught me how to (really) read, and to honor that gift of the written word, I was not going to be a coward again for her funeral service. I wrote and spoke the following words at her funeral service in early July of this year. In this transcription, I performed minor edits to line breaks and to my name (it's Arthur to you, dear reader). These words are very specific to my life with her, but I hope they remind you of a delightful and/or boisterous family member or mentor who made a big impression on you. Or, as Brenda Ueland would say, I hope you find them microscopically truthful.

My grandma taught me how to adventure.

Around age 4 she pulled me away
    from some idle play
    with action figures to say,
    "Arthur. You are going to learn to read!"

She sat me down with a book
    and pulled word after word
    out of my developing brain and stumbling        voice.

Able to read, I ventured from town to town,
    country to country, planet to planet!
    all from the comfort of an armchair.

Able to read, I pursued the poems
    she shared with me
    to help map out the wilds of my inner self.

"Never let anyone mess with your swing!"
    read a baseball-themed poem from the            book
    101 Poems that Could Save Your Life.

I do wonder how much she worried about me when she gave me that book!

Poems she wrote and collected
    rang clearly like a bell
    at every syllable.

With every book I pulled from her shelf
    I felt a little braver being myself.

And that's what I think my grandma really was:
    a teacher of courage.

Anyone who knew her fiery spirit
    felt warmer and more like themselves           around her.

Around age 12 she pulled me away
    from some idle play
    with video games to say,
    "Arthur. You are going on a hike with me!"

And suddenly, the forests I explored
    were no longer green pixels,
    but living, shaking, breathing things
    to touch and smell.

Her tenacity pulled her way ahead of me
    but I soon learned to walk briskly and daily
    like she did
    for as long as she possibly could.

And so my definition of a "long walk"
    increased from down the street
    to a mile
    to five miles
    to fifteen miles!

Walking with Grandma convinced me that
    no journey was ever too long,
    it was just another step forward.

And so I will carry my grandma with me
    in every word I speak and every step I walk.
I invite you all to carry her with you as well.

Remembering Grandpa, A Decade Later

In the very early morning of October 1, 2014, 10 years ago today, Grandpa died. He had his loved ones around him when he exhaled his final breath.

It wasn't unexpected. He had been in hospice care since early September of that year. A handful of years before that, he had been diagnosed with and suffered from "run of the mill" dementia as well as dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). DLB is not very desirable. Symptoms include fluctuating cognition and alertness, loss of sleep paralysis during REM sleep (physically acting out your dreams), Parkinsonism, and visual hallucinations. The cause of the disease is precisely unknown, but it seems to involve abnormal collections of proteins in the brain that make up Lewy bodies or Lewy neurites, which cause neurons to function less optimally and die, which causes profound dopamine dysfunction. If you have a friend or loved one who is getting older and experiencing dementia-like symptoms, consider helping them get evaluated for possible DLB.

While Grandpa was alive in his twilight, the most outwardly obvious DLB symptoms were Parkinsonism and visual hallucinations. He shook quite a bit, couldn't hold on to hardly anything. And yet, he managed to be a klepto to items that were important to other members of the family, like glasses. When he hallucinated, he tried to describe the beings that only he saw and heard, but he hardly found the words to do it. At one point in this experience, he managed enough sensible words to my cousin to suggest he knew he was seeing things and would rather not be alive. And yet I also remember a pleasant visit with him shortly before he moved into hospice care. We stood before a wide living room window overlooking the green, plush front yard. I didn't say anything and neither did he, equals on the debate stage. We looked at clouds sailing on a pastel blue sky and branches lightly swinging in the wind. It must have lasted no more than 10 minutes, but it felt like one of the moments of "existential time", lasting forever in meaning if not on a chronometer.

When he had his wits about him, when I was still a lad, Grandpa taught me the power of puzzles. Some puzzles were minor investigations into the origins of certain sounds or smells, or perhaps the etymology of some words. Some puzzles were newspaper cutouts from the "games" section. Some were math problems, and I liked that he took me seriously with problems tougher than those assigned in school. When I was young, I had no idea what my grandpa's title "civil engineer" meant, but as I learned from my own engineering practice it's a heck of a lot of math. By far my favorite kind of puzzles to work on with him were puzzle scavenger hunts we created for the family (Mom's side). He created the original puzzle scavenger hunts when I was too young to help, and he recruited my help when I was about 10. We hiked the great northern pine woods near his cabin, charting out viable paths for the family to follow along with interesting wonders and discoverable trinkets along the way. Some example wonders were "ADDE Rock", "Grand Woodchuck Canyon", and "Old Witch #4". We wrote rhyming riddles that led from wonder to wonder, clues often hidden in plain sight. The hunts usually led straight back to the cabin, where gifts for everyone (birthday near or far) lay waiting in a treasure chest that could only be "unlocked" by trinkets and artifacts discovered on the hike. Picture something like the key item system in Ocarina of Time, except the key items were cut out of construction paper, as was the map of the woods. If I have my wits about me in a couple years, I want to create puzzle scavenger hunts like these for the kids of the next generation.

I'm reminded of the daily haiku challenge I created for myself right after he died. I wanted to challenge my brain with word arts to honor his brain (before he had no words). I wrote a haiku for most of the days of the year of the challenge (301/365 = 82.5%, B-). One of the original entries in this challenge was based on the French poem The Cemetery by the Sea (English title obviously), by way of its mention in the 2013 Miyazaki film The Wind Rises. (Incidentally, the main character of The Wind Rises is a brilliant engineer like Grandpa.) The line of the poem that still snares my attention is quoted below.

The wind is rising... We must try to live!

We must. What else is there to do?

When I pass by fields in my mornings walks or runs, I see dewy spider webs on plants in the morning sun and think of Grandpa. He taught me how to pay attention to little details like the dew while we slowly walked in the woods together. In one directly quoted haiku from the daily haiku challenge, I hope you find the courage to seek beauty in every place you look.

"Is all common, base?"
"Have you seen the morning dew?
There's no rarer gem"