The summoning hour

4am feels late instead of early. Getting out of bed at 4am feels backwards, like I’m supposed to be trying to sleep like I’ve been surviving some some insomniatic episode. One does not get out of bed at 4am. You can still get a solid 3 hours before work. Maybe 2 solid hours, if I fall asleep right now…

Getting out of bed at 4am feels like puinshment, like giving in to someone’s blackmail of sexy apes and overdue library books. 4am is incongruous. Everything is much bigger and much smaller, concurrently, and your brain just accepts that. Getting up at 4am is getting up to catch a red eye flight to a place that only exists in theory. Places have no substance at 4am. They are just on the map but all have become a catrographer’s decoy city. It is just fog and birdsong on a dark sepia backdrop. It’s a trap.

I was awake at 4 and felt pretty good but didn’t get up. Erri, our little poopomancer, is summoning poop golems again. She builds her little brown armies outside the boxes and leaves them to guard her squared cat thrones. We aren’t sure why. She wasn’t doing this a week ago and not much has changed since then.

But we do know that she likes a snack at 4:30 before her early morning summoning rituals. Me being cognizant, but skeptical of the solidity of the room around me, laid there listening to her walking around to the food dish, to the bathroom, to the spare room, under the bed, to the catnip fish, and wondered when she would start.

4am is for clandestine deals where both parties have traveled from far away, all night, with 16 knives hidden on their bodies. They meet to exchange small packages, large sums of money, and nefarious purpose. I shouldn’t be getting out of bed at 4am. I should be back in bed with my nose pressed into the crook of Alyska’s neck and trying to suppress the myoclonic spasms I tend to get when dozing with the weight of another person on my arm.

When I did finally get up at 5am, a much more reasonable time, there were no poop golems to be found. It is possible that I, heading to the bathroom bright-eyed and bespectacled, they retreated to regroup the next night, probably at 4am. After all, any cat caretaker knows that you only find poop golems when you can’t see and it is with your feet. Erri did stop, momentarily, to contemplate the shag rug outside the cat box - it is her favorite summoning space - and I stopped her up and put her in the box which she used with no problem like the many hundreds of times she has used them before in the last 3 years, the last 3 months of that in this very house.

So I’m up writing this, as is my constant desire for a perfect daily ritual, and struggling with the “correct” motivation to keep going. Once up, staying up is no issue. I just need the proper motivation. It seems, potentially, that, for now, dispelling the golem summoning is reason enough to stay awake with the alarm.

Eventually try the draw of the 1st cup of coffee will always win and I’ll find myself with it and some ritualistic morning device be it a book or a keyboard and blank page. I think it was the coffee that helped me write a book last year. I’m hoping it won’t be the poop golems that help me write the next one.

   <img src="_FullSizeRender.jpg" alt=" Even poopomancers can be cute, like a necromancer in a pink tutu. ">  Even poopomancers can be cute, like a necromancer in a pink tutu.  

4am is for clandestine deals where both parties have traveled from illusory distances, all night, with 16 knives hidden on their bodies. They meet to exchange small packages, large sums of money, and nefarious purpose. I shouldn’t be getting out of bed at 4am. I should be back in bed with my nose pressed into the crook of Alyska’s neck and trying to suppress the myoclonic spasms I get when the weight of love rests on my arm.

When I did finally get up at 5am, a time with edges… a time that actually exists on a nearby plane of reality, there were no poop golems to be found. It is possible that I, heading to the bathroom bright-eyed and bespectacled, they retreated to regroup for the next night, probably at 4am and with more knives. Any cat caretaker knows that you only find poop golems when you can’t see and it is with your feet.

After breaking the cats’ fast, Erri did stop, momentarily, to contemplate the shag rug outside the cat box - it is her favorite summoning space of green, nylon, twists that look like grass. I scooped her up and put her in the box which she used with like the many hundreds of times she has used them before in the last 3 years, the last 3 months of which were in this very house.

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So I’m up writing this, as is my constant desire for a perfect daily ritual, and struggling with the “correct” motivation to keep it going. Once up, staying up is no issue. It seems, potentially, that, for now, dispelling the golem summoning is reason enough to stay awake with my alarm.

Eventually, the draw of the 1st cup of coffee will always win and I’ll find myself with it and some ritualistic morning device be it a book or a keyboard and blank page. I think it was the coffee that helped me write a book last year. I’m hoping it won’t be the poop golems that help me write the next one.

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Sometimes, just a staircase.

West staircase, Capitol Building. Madison, Wisconsin.

One of my favorite, and most obnoxious, photography challenges is to take an interesting photograph of a mundane thing. It helps improve your fundamentals - composition, lighting, angle, lines.

So, given a staircase, what can you take?

An Ominous Package arrives. ⁉️

First, context!

A podcast I listen to - Invisible Office Hours - did a thing with their latest season. It would release on a scheduled date but listeners could pay a little money to move the release date.

So I’ve been following these dudes for a while and get a ton of value from their blogs, podcasts, and courses. I opted to throw them a bunch of money and ended up topping the leaderboard. 😱

Which resulted in me getting an ominous package from Jason and Paul… 🎁📦⁉️

Second, hedge your confidence in case everyone hates it!

Rather than my normal photo posts, I stepped WAAAAAAAAY out of my comfort zome. So, have an unboxing video!

Death in your pocket

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I’ve been trying to summarize what has been running around and around in my head for the last year. I’ve been thinking about death and dying and what that means, and what I want it to mean. Because in the end, what do we really leave?

There are three parts to this

1. My dad’s death left an impression on me in a number of ways
2. I’ve been depressed the last few weeks
3. And I’ve been reading a lot on stoicism

The way we die

I don’t know if my dad saw it coming. He;d been struggling with back pain and chest congestion for the few weeks leading up to the stroke that hospitalized him. Even if he was had an idea, he wouldn’t have left himself be aware of it, not acknowledge it. He was kind of a half assed Buddhist in that he believed life was suffering but didn’t take the next steps to understand or lessen it in himself. Rather, he figured he should just accept whatever is handed him, he didn’t have much control over it anyway.

It’s speculation but speculation that comes from some conversations about my own depression and successful treatment of it with medication. He didn’t seem interested in trying to treat his own flat or disaffected moods.

So I don’t think he would have necessarily done anything much if he’d known. Or maybe even changed anything in his life. He worked at a job he loathed literally up until he was hospitalized. I don’t want that to be me.

A half way point?

I turned 35 this month. The most recent generations of men in my familiar all died around 70 years. That would put me at 50%. Half way through my own life. And what do I have to show for it, what really lasting thing?

I know there’s lots of intangible stuff. I have friends and family and cats that would all miss me. But I haven’t made much of a dent in the universe otherwise. And thinking about dying without something surviving beyond me is terrifying. Disappearing into a void, memories and all, being forgotten.. that’s the shit that fuels my nightmares.

Set aside that I’ve not really defined what I’d want in a legacy and that many of my favorite writers and artists didn’t start making their dent until well after 35. So, it’s not like I’m out of time. Just… being potentially half way through? Man… that gives me chills.

Remember that you have to die

You waste time as if it was a limitless resource, when any moment you spend on someone else or some matter is potentially your last. You possess a fear that is all too human but have the boundless desires of a god. You will hear many men say: “When I’m fifty I’ll slow down; when I’m sixty, I’ll be ready for retirement.” But what guarantee, pray, do you have that your life will last longer? Who is going to make sure your life plays out just as you plan it? Are you not ashamed to save for yourself only the last part of your life, and to set aside for knowledge only that time which can’t be spent on making money?

It is too late to begin living life just as it is ending! What stubborn denial of mortality to delay dreams to after your fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to plan on starting your life at a point that not everyone gets to.

A think a lot of the things I’ve been doing at Wrestling With Franklin1 orbits that which the Stoics defined centuries ago. Much of what I’m trying to do by cultivating virtue is about doing as much as I can with what ever amount of time I have available.

But it’s all about ensuring that I’m here more and there’s more here, whatever that ends up being.

It’s vaguely morbid but I bought the medallion in the pictures as a reminder, like it was taught by the Stoics, that death comes to anyone. And it isn’t predictable. Maybe it will remind me to focus and create more things, spend more time with people, do more with what I’ve got.

I don’t know what all that means or where I need to go in order to feel satisfied with what I do every day, let’s alone what I’ll need to do to ensure the next years matter, the next decades matter, the rest of my life matters.

These are just the things that’ve been rattling through my head since the 5th.

Artifacts made with @dayoneapp

The first two months.

In July of 2012, a few days before my 30th birthday, I downloaded a little app called Day One onto my iPad. At the time, it was one of very few applications designed specifically for journaling in the App Store. The interface was clean, simple, and inviting. I didn’t use it too much that first month but took to it in August after API found a tool online that would pull in additional things like Foursquare, Instagram, and Twitter.

I’ve been mediocre at keeing a handwritten journal for extended periods. With my handwriting being illegible, and only serviceable after atively working on it for a while now, I can’t actually read everything I’ve put to paper. The internet really changed that for me. I’ve written in journals on and off for years, regularly writing about myself ever since Livejournal was a thing in college. I spent something like a decade of my life on that service which, when I exported it all a few years ago, ended at about 6000 pages when done.

After linking Day One to various services and seeing all the natural media I produced in one place, I was hooked. You can see the first two months of Day One. I hit my stride in August of 2012. Funnily enough, my writing style still sounds like I’m writing for an audience. I guess nearly 2 decades builds some habits?

An excerpt from my first written entry in Day One:

I feel like refried beans. In refried beans, beans are cooked and mashed and drained of excess liquid. They are then stirred, potentially reconstituted with chicken stock, and fried over a hot pan in lard. The process leaves them whipped, pasty like the inside of a hangover in the desert. Sticky. Dry. Paste.

I feel like refried beans.

Over the years the application got new APIs here, a little integration there, but kept writing entries the easiest thing you could do. And I wrote. A lot. It’s been 1773 days since I downloaded it, with 2008 discrete entries and 1430 photos. 50 of those entries and 39 photos came from the two weeks in Chicago last year when my dad died.

It was that point where I went searching for ways to make manifest that particular journal. Though it was an absolutely terrible event, I knew I wanted something of who I was then to survive for some future me to see. I was vulnerable in a way I don’t think I ever truly am when writing for the internet. Those attempts failed, though, because of how hard it is to move one data format to another, format it, and then print it with anything resembling readable layout.

But. Last week Bloom Built added a print feature to Day One.

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To say I was excited is… insufficient… evem r especially because of the specific journal I wanted from last year. I have 5 years of journaling in that application. Thousands of pages. And the thought of laying out all of those pages, even a year at a time, is overwhelming. Hours and hours of work.

Day One turned that process into just minutes of effort.

The workflow to create the books is as easy as writing entries. You choose the journals, choose the year, create the cover art and vital statistics, and it does the rest. You upload the files, pay right on your device, and a week later you receive your life, perfect bound, and in vivid color.

They are wonderful. Hefty, smooth pages. Rich color. Beautiful and sturdy covers. And remarkably compact conidering that each of those books is about 400 pages.

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I’m just so thrilled with these that I ordered the last two year’s worth of journals - 4 books in total (I just ordered the second half of last year, I didn’t notice it got split into two) equaling about 1600 pages across all of my journals. Over the next few months I’m going to print the entirety of my journal. 5 years worth of personal history - the good, the bad, and the unedited.

Those 50 entries from Februray 2016 are still pretty raw. I read through them, hard as they were, and am still grateful of what time I had with dad then adn that I had the grit to write all the awful things in my head. And the silly things. And the frightened things. Because that was all me adn that was the last bit he dn I shared.

So… if you’re looking for a way to journal better but don’t want to lose the artifact you get at the end of a full notebook, this is a pretty darn good option. That t can tue together everything in your digitral life is nice.

But it’s the open page where you can just be is worth it in any form you can take.

Read about the application here: Day One

A wild selfie appears!

And I’m even smiling. Ish. Well. Smirking?