Sassafras Roots

I recently started reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. There are plenty of articles and interviews to read about the book and the author, so I won't bore you with details you can find better written elsewhere. I do want to share a recent self discovery as it relates to the book's material. 

I have lived by the following quote for what seems like about the past ten years: "Time you enjoy is never wasted." I forget where I heard that quote first. At this point, I may have said it so many times that a historian may credit me with creating the phrase. I think it's still relevant to my outlook today. Thanks to the message I'm picking up from Four Thousand Weeks, I'd offer an even simpler take: "Time is never wasted." 

Time is never "wasted", at all, because it can't ever really be "spent" as if it's a currency that you can have more or less of at any given instant. (How would it even be possible to "have" time in an instant?) Time is it. That is, your experience, any given moment in which you can exist, is time. The accumulation of moments appears to be a unidirectional and linear flow of time for how we "pass through it". Really, instead of thinking of time as some currency, it's more like an integral from calculus. 

All the moments you've experienced, in "deep time" as some call it, make up your life, sum into this integral. No measure of years, months, days, minutes, seconds, or smaller, can accurately and consistently describe this accrual. If, for instance, you spent a year grieving, you'd probably accrue many fewer moments to remember because of being in a lower energy state, but you'd "have" plenty of time to reflect on past moments. That year will not have gone any faster or slower by scientific measures. It may feel a lot slower from the lack of punctuated events in life. But it'd be ample time to review the story told so far, a fine activity in this lower energy state. (All this, I should add, requires ample rest. No need to force oneself into accruing more memories. There's no room for that in this state.) 

Don't worry too much about "being fully in the moment" or "being here now". You're always now, and you're always here. There's no way to do it "right" or "wrong". You might remember some moments better. Those are the ones to reflect on and appreciate anyway. 

Thank you for "spending" your time to read this blog post. Maybe it bored you or scared you in thinking about time an unconventional way. Maybe you had an enjoyable moment.

I Wish There Were Fewer Manifestos

Anyone else feel like there are too many manifestos out there? I'm not even talking about the horrid kind left behind by mass murderers, I'm also talking about manifestos of corporations, non-profit organizations, books in your book clubs, and political movements.

One of the greatest things there is is to not know. To live with wonder about an infinite universe is humbling and calming. There is so, so much that each one of us doesn't know anything about. Why prize what we claim to believe or find "true" when it's not even a sizable fraction of what's left unknown?

A manifesto demands adherence, some shared set of beliefs. The thing is, no one ever really fully buys into a statement of shared beliefs. Some statements we can tolerate being around even if we don't agree. Some we really don't agree with. Some things we accept in disagreement out of convenience or exhaustion. More often than not it's the idea of someone who's really bought in, and the rest follow along thinking they'll maybe get something out of it. If not everyone's bought in, why use language like "we" in your statements?

The next time you're reading a manifesto, ask yourself, "Do I really believe that?" Maybe you'll find out you don't. I encourage your independent discovery.

Shameless Recommendations 2021-08-17

1. Read Why Fish Don't Exist, and don't read anything about the book before starting it.
2. Play Baba Is You. It's available for major computing platforms, smart mobile devices, and Nintendo Switch. If you get stuck, don't cheat! That ruins the whole point of the game. Instead, check out guiding hint sites like Baba Is Hint which help you think about how the game works instead of giving away the solution.
3. Get a therapist or counselor even if you don't think you need one. Really. If there's nothing "bad" or "painful" to talk about, you might still learn about yourself and learn to think about your own thoughts differently with a therapist's help. If things are already bad, it totally sucks to jump through all the hoops and forms and insurance and such to get connected with a therapist. Get started with therapy before your energy state is super low from grief, trauma, depression, anxiety, whatever. Future you will thank you.
4. Eat Joe Chips. Serious but non-damaging crunch with just the right amount of give, excellent flavor dusting. Try out the assorted chips linked, and learn what your favorite flavor is. The BBQ flavor of Joe Chips (BBQ is generally my favorite chip flavor) has just the perfect balance of salt, smoke, spice, and sugar. I have not encountered anything else out there so balanced. BBQ chips are often too smoky (I usually pass up "mesquite" labeling) or not sweet enough. Not BBQ Joe Chips.
5. Go on a walk through a forest or park, and try to find one object of each color of the rainbow. Maybe you'll find a red leaf or an orange peel, or even a yellow dandelion. Make a note of your discoveries somewhere, or even take photos of each object of each color and arrange them to form your own lovely ROYGBIV. This exercise was adapted from Why Fish Don't Exist, but it doesn't spoil anything, I promise.
   

Old Internet Will Make a Comeback

You heard it here first! (Maybe not.) Old Internet activities like Blogger and LiveJournal are going to be hot again. Longform soliloquies like this one will become popular forms of expression again as we tire of our uncles having something to say about everything on social media platforms. Widely-supported, probably-already-installed, instant-loading fonts like Verdana will make a comeback, and expensive fonts like Circular which have to be downloaded and slow down page loads will fall out of favor. Maybe this time these newly-hot old platforms will benefit from wide support for emoji. 🔥 (Maybe not.) I betcha there will be some "new" site that replicates the experiences of these classic platforms.

How refreshing that Old Internet sites load pretty much instantly. The Servo or V8 or WebKit engine in your browser is overengineered to load and execute poorly-written JavaScript faster than it really should run. It's not just the web developers' faults though; basically all software is enormous and slow these days. If you keep your site simple and low-tech, it's like driving to the corner store to get some milk with a souped-up Ferrari, which is a funny image. (But did we really need the Ferrari in the first place?) Maybe just keep it simple and low-tech because all computers require energy to run and we ought to be responsible about energy consumption. "Call 4-H to find out how you can do your part."

(My favorite part of Old Internet? Hyperlinks! Maybe I just wish web pages thought of themselves as simple documents on the greater World Wide Web instead of be-all, end-all experiences. You might have already guessed that I don't think Facebook is the bee's knees.)

Go grab a stopwatch, click this link, and start the stopwatch. You can stop the stopwatch when the page finishes loading. How long did it take to load?

If You Want to Write

Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write has brought me back from spiraling nothingness before, and gosh darn it, it's gonna do it again.

"Award-Winning" Poem 2

Author’s note: it’s been a very long time since you’ve last heard from the author. The author (Arthur) is feeling the itch again, and is catching up on that by sharing some treasured poetry from the past little while. [Author's note in note: This blog entry has been ported from another blog, and minor content edits have been made for clarity.]

The poem below helped me win the "Grand Prize" in a 2020 poetry contest. 2020 is not even close to over, even though it feels like it's already been about four years. Regardless, the seasons have changed, and this poem tries to capture that. It is a Shakespearean sonnet as a dialog between a winter spirit and a spring spirit whose relationship is coming to an unfortunate end. This poem, more so than my previous "award-winning" poem, I believe was justified in achieving "Grand Prize".

It started as raw material capturing the romantic angst and yearning present on earlier entries of this blog. That was potent crude oil. In fact, I read those posts and old journal entries for inspiration and motivation for one of the sonnet's character's. Dozens of drafts and revisions—and several peer reviews—are to thank for its final, refined form. You can see the raw fuel of this creation below.

Anyway, here is the poem.

VAIL (a spirit of winter)
A glacier crawls more quickly than the dark,
When all my waking thoughts surround your flame
I'd break my cracking chest and sighing heart
To know just one more day could stay the same

VERNA (a spirit of spring)
A new day dawns, I must now flee to grow,
To fly like wind, unbounded, free, and true,
To taste the dew, see all there is to sow
By letting go, the sky turns gray to blue

VAIL
Let go? I feel I'm frozen in the past

VERNA
Be gentle with yourself, the present's there

VAIL
I cry to see no way our future lasts
But want for you to fly in warmer air

VERNA
I see your heart as hearth, and mine the sun
This is to say, goodbye, my wintry one

"Award-Winning" Poem 1

Author's note: It's been a very long time since you've last heard from the author. The author (Arthur) is feeling the itch again, and is catching up on that by sharing some treasured poetry from the past little while. [Author's note in note: This blog entry has been ported from another blog, and minor content edits have been made for clarity.] 

Well, hello there. It's me, Arthur. I've missed you. Let's catch up. Below is a poem that won me the "Grand Prize" in a poetry contest in 2018. It's provided with the judge's assessment of the poem for full gravity. 

The Grand Prize Winner:

As blue bark unthaws
Steam rises into gold rays
And the dawn path clears

Such a beautiful and effective haiku! The imagery of the first two lines calls on me to imagine such a vivid image, I see the frozen blue bark, the steam, and it rising into the golden rays of the sun. Then the third line challenges me. Since I have such a vivid scene already painted, my instinct is to try to picture what the "dawn path" is, visually. For me, the challenge of the third line is magic. I would love to hear what others imagine when reading it.

Now for my own commentary. I wrote this haiku for my long-dead Twitter account as part of a series in 2015, where I intended to write a haiku on Twitter every day. (I managed to complete 301 out of 365 days.) I do like the haiku, but I'm honestly surprised it won the contest. But the judge liked it, and getting the judge to like you is part of why I ever got a "1" in the Solo & Ensemble Festival where I grew up. (I played trumpet.)

Insomnia Log 9

Author's note: I generally try to leave old "insomnia" entries alone so they maintain their frenzied, unfiltered observations. They capture a version of me I don't see very much anymore. However, this one was riddled with typographical mishaps, so I made minor adjustments. Where appropriate, I added contextual hyperlinks. I performed these edits as part of my 2026 blog migration scheme.

There's a humming coming from somewhere in the room. Doesn't seem like it's the one lamp on. What could it be?

Sometimes I scroll through my text message logs with individual persons (redundant? seems clear), especially when no new messages come in. Is there a way to link back to old messages and say, "Ha, remember when we said these silly things?" I suppose a screenshot attached to a new message would work. Would people be interested in that besides me? If the log spans years with few large gaps, you probably have a friendship with someone. Or at least plausible evidence of one. I think these blog posts are mostly long chat logs with myself.

I haven't written here in a while, and this was the most likely type of entry to be posted first. I've had plenty on my mind to keep me awake, not least of which current events. Some feeling in me feels like it's waking up (again). It's shaky and too unclear to name. I'm seeing evidence of it here and there. I wept when driving across a long bridge today, at water with large white and gold (or was it blue and black?) spots on it below tumbling purple clouds. Further weeping at a crashing beach below a yellow ring of sky below those same clouds. My most common exhale lately is a sigh. Puzzles seem fine when there are only a few moving parts, and then you learn the full scope and it's daunting. Example: making a 10 x 10 x 10 Buckyball cube; mess up the alignment of one row and the whole thing could be ruined! Similar feeling for sorting through and getting rid of my various junk: one box seems to open another, and eventually it's a good idea to put things away and nothing really happened with the box contents. If only eBay could teleport your items away.

Listening to Courtney Barnett's The Double LP: A Sea of Split Peas has me wanting to play guitar again. Incidentally, yesterday I found a cassette tape of my recordings that I label "Late Night Radio Hour", because in between songs I pretend to be a radio DJ with a soothing voice. This is normally a secret I save for the third or greater time of meeting someone, so shhhhhhh. I covered Courtney Barnett's "Boxing Day Blues" (my favorite song of hers) on that tape, but my guitar Stella is very out of absolute tune (but in relative tune), so I sung, like, three or four half steps down, sheesh.

I want to find more random blog posts of people talking about their favorite things. I often search for things like "favorite Radiohead Amnesiac song" or "favorite Magic expansion", but those rarely yield anything. Often I get forums, which I find noisy and unhelpful. I really want to see people with enough courage to just lay down their favorites publicly, and not give a damn about what a "poll" or "top ten list" or "forum discussion" says. I'll answer my own questions for other searchers with the same questions above: 1) "Like Spinning Plates", especially the live version in I Might Be Wrong, and 2) Lorwyn. Bandcamp has a nice feature of marking which song on an album in your collection is your favorite.

While we're at it, I want to find more random blogs that aren't about anything really, or ones that take huge tangents to get at what they are trying to say, or ones that dive deep into topics of personal interest to the author. One example is The Pokémon Sprite Guy, whose blog I found two years after it ended, but whose delivery in writing I really enjoy. That's another criterion: the blog needs to keep being updated! (Hence a stab at writing this very post.) My good friend S and I have scenic detour conversations, and the nonlinear form makes time irrelevant. S had a blog of no-topic musings, but I can't find it anymore. [Author's interjection: S has a cool new blog mostly concerning probabilistic numerical methods applied toward economic problems. It's well-considered and infotaining.] I think I want more "content" out there that is written by people who just like something, not because they want followers, "highlights", or money, or something bogus like that. I'm talking something like Geocities or the original vision of the World Wide Web, where if you wanted a page about your favorite thing, you wrote it, in your own voice. [Author's interjection: I find it fascinating that the cool blogs I linked in this entry are all Blogger blogs.] Now we just click our interests and are served "content". I'm tired of that. Maybe with enough musings here I'll have covered all my interests in some detail. I like to read about others' interests in their own voices, so I'll pay that forward. For the three of you who know who I am, you might even learn something new.

Mostly I don't like signing into Facebook, and I don't want to deal with Messenger. Snapchat makes me feel like I have no life. Twitter is so noisy. [Author's interjection: Do not use Twitter/X.] I want to asynchronously catch up on my friends by reading stuff like what I'm writing here, but I know that the platforms above are easier to use. They just don't give me the same sense of knowing someone like you'd get out of reading their writing or having a real conversation with them. I guess they're not really for that purpose, but it seems shallow to say they are exclusively status-promoting tools. Oh well, I'll relish the longer form stuff as it comes.

Some more favorite things I have searched for, and my answers to them:

• Radiohead album: Amnesiac
• Magic set: Lorwyn
• Album of the 1990s: The Real Ramona by Throwing Muses, followed closely by King by Belly
• Painting: The Nostalgia of the Infinite by Giorgio de Chirico
• Book: If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland
• Pokémon game: Silver
• Pokémon: Diglett Cubone
• Color on a guitar: Surf green
• Candy bar: Zingerman's Candy Ca$hew Cow Peanut Butter Crush, but Butterfinger does the job for the most part

Infinitely Yours,
Art