Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 21

Control / FLOW

In which a blood sugar battle is joined, but that’s a tale for another time.

Chipping away at the towering gates of the to-read stack: two 90 minute-sessions divided into two 45 minute chunks, themselves divided into a 15 minute chunk – for non-fiction (and between non-fic books, my continued journey through Montaigne's essays) – and a 30-minute chunk – for fiction.

In the 15, currently: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's FLOW: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OPTIMAL EXPERIENCE. 70 pages in, give or take. Fascinating; a standout, a glimmer of recognition:

"Thus the flow experience is typically described as involving a sense of control––or, more precisely, as lacking the sense of worry about losing control that is typical in many situations of normal life." – Csikszentmihalyi, p. 59.

It's in my (conscious or unconscious, both, maybe) efforts to apply that sense of control unearthed in the flowstate – or, rather my efforts at getting and keeping myself in that state of autotelic ("A self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward") / exotelic ("activities done for external reasons only...") balance during my two working hours in the morning and the two in the evening – to those non-working hours that frustration, resentment, and self-directed disappointment reign supreme.

I've often called the writing of This Fucking Book (working title) a Sisyphean undertaking; pretty certain now that it's not during the writing part of my day but during the non-working hours that I get my Sisyphus on.

Recommended (the book, not the futility of attempting to control the uncontrollable - or the blood sugar battle).

PreLost Time

A long-delayed weekly dinner engagement with friends precluded my working last evening so I moved that chunk of time-life / life-time to the afternoon, before dinner, and learned one thing: I really prefer working without the sun reminding me of all the things I (think I) should be doing instead. Fortunately, the dinner with friends was, as always, worth it, an enjoyable means of keeping me socialized and thus staving off my transformation into a hopeless feral state for another day.

Recognition that this attempt to make up for time that would have been lost might contradict earlier post this week that said I don't believe in making up lost time. But if the time wasn't lost to begin with, how can I make it up? Wasn't I preventing the loss of time? Pre-lost, the thoughtcrime/precrime/whatever it was called – been too long since I've seen MINORITY REPORT – equivalent of petty larceny.

Regardless, lesson learned: I'll work in the afternoons if I have to but I'd much prefer to use those waning hours of sunlight and humane dosings of insulin to do useful things, like vacuum or tend to the lawn and its seemingly endless cadre of leaves.

Still trying to come up with something to add here throughout the day: a second piece in the evenings – a way to wrap up the day? share bits from the day's adventures in impeachment scrapbooking? Not sure. Don't want to complicate matters and dilute the enjoyment I derive in hurling these thoughtlets into the morning's ether but I can't shake the feeling that there's a solution somewhere in the mist that I've yet to decode; for now, these meagre predawn offerings to the digtal will have to suffice.

Forward, Into Life's Middle With 'A Short Length of Rope for Securing Something'

Considering my recent accessorization / augmentation of my glasses with a lanyard – befitting my greying temples – to be a signal of my acceptance / acquiesence of the transition into my middle years. Either that or I'm just tired of losing said glasses, a possibility which made the lanyard, a $2.00 bit of black rope with elastic loops, seem like a more sound investment than some tag / bluetooth-enabled homing device, etc etc. Picked it up the same day that I filled my prescription for the CGM / Libre – the lanyard worked a lot better out of the box than that first Libre sensor did (still calibrated, with sensor number two; five+ days until the dreaded swap for a new one and my fear that said transition will be more similar to the first attempt than to the second) and I haven't wasted multiple eternities hunting for misplaced plastic eyes in over a week.

(Note: I treat the lanyard like my slippers and don't wear it out of the house. Recluse-wear, not for public consumption. (Perhaps the day I wear it in public will be the day of total acceptance/acquiesence?) That said, should I ever be faced with the opportunity to own an antique shop or to help De Niro-in-RONIN get a bullet out of his gut, I've got the look covered.)

Of Morkies Groomed / Of Time Carved

Phantom haptics from the Watch but I'm probably just imagining things.

Morkie grooming day equals a borked morning routine. But that's ok. Learning to live with it, to work with it / within it – far better to let the interruption interrupt only what it's interrupting than it is to interrupt my time when I do have time with pissing and moaning about the interruption.

(This is the time to piss and to moan about said interruption.)

At the risk of sounding like the Orange Malignancy (I cringe every time I write / say (same difference) "We'll see" now; yet another thing he's destroyed), Many people have told me that "Oh, you can just make up that time."

(Note that these many are, broadly speaking, the time-thieves themselves, those whom I allow through my fortifications and for whom their time-thievery is akin to breaking into an unlocked car.)

The point: I don't believe in making up lost time. Time lost is time lost: even if I were to "make up" that lost time, it wouldn't be the same time that I lost; it would be a replacement, an Az-Bats, a pretender to the mantle. What might have been captured in that time is gone...

... recognition here that maybe something new could appear in the faux-block that wouldn't have appeared in the real one but I'm not cognitively developed enough to appreciate that possibility...

... and all that I can do is get back on my route, on my path, and continue on with the day until the next opportunity to devote myself to the development of my perceived purpose – unplugged vampiric tendencies, sundown to sunup – arrives. Maybe it's not so much that I devote time as that I carve time and that the attempted make-up time is like whittling styrofoam with a spoon and hoping that the results are just as permanent?

If that's not a concluding visual, I don't know what is. But I might be mistaken. Wouldn't be the first time – and it certainly won't be the last

Seeking: Clarity Upon an Open Project Block

Working when the sun's not up the best way to ameliorate the guilt which shouldn't be there in the first place but it is so for now I'm working with it in the hopes that, eventually, it will fade away.

Notion for this thoughtlet first appeared in last night's side project session (with the newsletter being sent Sunday mornings, it was, for the first time since moving to this routine, an empty space) but it became apparent within a minute or two that to start these pieces in the evening was inimical to the point of their creation (to produce work quickly and diligently each morning for the sole purpose of having created it, agnostic to the reception or lack thereof) and therefore disingenuous.

But: as I like the middle chunk of a work block to be something other than The Book, there needs – to make this schedule work and not result in wasted time and energy – to be another project.

A comics series, maybe? There's one or two bandying about. A long-form essay? Short stories? Eh: I like Cormac McCarthy's quote about short stories: "I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing." (Though this is me we're talking about; it might take years...) More material for this site – especially as I've entered another one of my woodshed/broadcast modes and only posting to the digital ether from here –? Eh. Maybe – but it's unclear right now; just know that I want it to be something challenging, something I haven't done before; time, then, to sift through the backburners, the idea folders, and see if there's anything beyond fool's gold waiting inside. A podcast? I do miss interviewing cool people...

No matter what, I've got to stay true to these scheduling blocks, to this routine: it just feels right. There's a rhythm there, a quiet propulsion, that anchors my day, that keeps the guilt at bay. Pardon the rhyme.

P.S. Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson is a national fucking treasure) is my favorite character on WATCHMEN so last night's episode was a treat even as Lube Man's (working theory: he's the FBI guy that arrived in Tulsa with Jean Smart) absence permeated every frame.

Product Testing Adventures in Pneumonia Avoidance

Happy Saturday; I remain calibrated.

Since moving my office / Sanctum from the unheated upstairs room downstairs to this former paint shop in the back of the house, the reality of forthcoming winter has loomed large: cement floor, one heating vent, large windows.

Thus my obsession with channeling warmth because I'll be damned if I'm going to let something like pneumonia keep me from working in this space, especially since I've gotten it more or less exactly the way I want it to be...

After goldilocksing the shit out of the great space heater hunt – much as I had done with the great pen quest (the Lamy Safari with fine charcoal nib still the winner; haven't looked back) of years previous, the current winner – after a cardboard cut (just now healed) from the box of the intended, more expensive purchase, immediately disqualified it – stands revealed: a little $30 fan heater (cheaper than the Safari) that has met and exceeded my required qualifications for Sanctum space heater supremacy: eco-friendly / steady distribution of warmth / quiet / fall and overheat protection / most unlikely to short out the whole room and/or incinerate all inside while also – also – keeping the under-desk dog bed area warm for necessary and fickle editorial assistants. That its box didn't draw blood was also a plus.

And so the sun rises: my feet are warm, my space a sanctuary... newsletter 0076 drops tomorrow.

Micro / Ellroy / Garden

More difficult to push myself to write these pieces the last couple of days. Always feel better after I do, but maybe it's time for a schedule re-think...

Though I love what the the team is doing and what the platform stands for, I ended my Micro.Blog experiment last night. Realized that it's not necessarily a better social platform that I'm looking for but less complication, less thought. For better or for worse, Twitter is the simplest way to get there.

More thought: ending the Micro experiment might be the path back towards enjoying posting here again. Already enjoying it more just in the space of writing these paragraphs - no point in fucking with my schedule, AGAIN. Happy with just one self-hosted blog – two gardens to cultivate = one too many?

Still moving forward with additional types of postings here. Flesh it out, or maybe not. Just going to roll with it and try not to overthink it.

About a hundred-odd/even pages into James Ellroy's latest, THIS STORM, and suddenly want to see Michael Mann adapt an Ellroy tale. A study in contrasting visions of Los Angeles – Ellroy's operatic darkness and Mann's cold, technical pragmatism. Might be awful or might be triumphant. Either way, would love to see it.

Back to reading the complete poems of Emily Dickinson in bed: though I understand only a line or two of Dickinson's genius, Ellroy's too manic and exhausting for that essential pre-sleep drift.

Happy Friday.

Memory Cartridge: INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (NES)

(When I set out to write this, I somehow managed to convince myself that I remembered far more than I actually did. Evidence ensues.)

The brief and the fleeting. Indiana Jones as ZELDA-knockoff – a strange hybrid that never quite gelled, despite the theme music which may or not have been there – with whips and mining carts, I believe. Trading off tracks, in and out of holes, pixel fedoras and leather jackets. Were you able to swing from anchors in the walls or am I confusing this with SUPER CASTLEVANIA IV? Not sure if I made it past the first couple of levels; not sure if I'm remembering any of this correctly. Might be remembering the game as I wished it to be, not as it was; 25-30 years, give or take, since I last played it. Fucking hell I feel old – less a memory cartridge, more a memory sieve.

Maybe someday I'll get ye olde NES working again, use that 80s TV that's been hanging out in the backseat of my car since the great cabin exodus of '19, and actually play the games I write about before writing them but I still can't find the controllers, RIP.

Solid Glitchy Mouse-Stream

Last night, after the latest episode of WATCHMEN (finally caught up; waited until K finished her first read of the original comic before we went beyond the first two episodes), our first, historically appropriate – and programmatically contrasting – foray into Disney+ with STEAMBOAT WILLIE – still wonderful.

Impressions after seven minutes: a solid platform – glitchy launch notwithstanding – with the makings of an excellent one; not a Netflix killer, but a great channel, more than worth the seven bucks a month (more on that below). Not without its issues, though, at least for now: on the XBox One app, it seems to forget that I've added things to my watchlist; it'd be nice to have the ability to group shorts based on character – as an amateur historian of pop culture, I'd love to watch all of the Mickey Mouse shorts in order; and the whole "this won't be available until 2021, add it to your watchlist now" is a bit of... um... charitable padding?

Off-topic streaming relief: since HBO Max will cost $14.99 a month, I can simply cancel my Amazon channel HBO and switch to Max. (In theory, anyhow - and things might change).

Back to Disney+, The Economist on why Disney is charging so little for platform access:

"For all of Disney’s success over the past century, it has never had a direct relationship with most of its individual consumers, let alone known which specific content and characters they like, and to what extent. Through Disney+ this will change...Generating another $50 per year in SVOD is trivial compared with the ability to sell more $5,000 Disney family cruise vacations and $1,100 annual park passes.”

Never underestimate the need to build better amusement parks.

Towards a More Blissful EarBliss

Update: new Libre sensor works great. Must've been a faulty one. Device graduated from name of Leech to Joan. Tabitha and Joan, working hand in hand to keep me from being dead. Readings actually useful (learning, for instance, that I seem to have a hypoglycemic moment in the middle of the night; time to lessen the long-acting insulin, I think). A relief; replacement sensor for the uncalibrated, wild one on its way. Also: working in the evenings is as wonderful as I theorized. Now to get myself accustomed to it for when the haze of first love subsides and the inevitable pangs of "but you should be" hurl their calling card in my face.

And therein, the basis for this morning's ramble: made it a habit to unplug from 1945 until 0745 each day, with the exception of streaming entertainments (including, of course, Disney+) and weather checking. However, a dissonance: I enjoy sharing the music that I listen to while I work - especially now that I’m on Micro.Blog... (at present, the eponymous album from the experimental jazz group The Kilimanjaro Dark Jazz Ensemble)... and, while I've enjoyed sharing albums as I listen to them via Micro.Blog, I don't want to have to violate my rules of engagement with the connected world after the sun goes down.

Current thinking: instead of sharing music while I work, use the open space here on Sundays to publish a list of the EarBliss from the week; this might be the best way to go. Going to develop it a bit further and launch this Sunday, probably – though it might end up in my newsletter... For now, will continue to keep my listening list in my journal, then review and figure out a form, iterating in public, probably.

Unplugging, basically from the start of PM Writing (+/- 1830) until the end of AM Writing (+/- 0745). Think that settles that; onwards, then, to the day's run and surfing the waves of the Libre's blood-data.