Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 27

In Progress: THE LIVING

(127/397): Every sentence of Annie Dillard’s THE LIVING – a beautiful novel brimming with characters I can’t help but love (even the ones designed to be loathed) – could be an opening sentence: she is the conductor of a world-class orchestra possessed of such remarkable powers of nuance and color that THE LIVING becomes not just a great work of art, but a transcendant one.

While I could ramble on about her poet’s sense of rhythm and lyricism, it’s the dark side of that poetry that makes THE...

Memory Cartridge: BART VS. THE SPACE MUTANTS (NES)

Found, a decade or two hence, still inside the system as I pulled the NES from its pink milk crate home / storage facility during the great cabin exodus of Summer 2019 – a mosquito encased in JURASSIC PARK amber? (Though we know how well that turned out.)

Memories without looking them up: weaponized cans of spray paint to vanquish – or at least start the vanquishing process? – the eponymous Space Mutants who took over the populace, thus requiring the use of a certain type of sunglasses to se...

Hearing Things (Or Maybe Not)

Last couple of days a miasma of anxiety and hyper-vigilance (note: blood sugar surging). Haven’t had one of those days in a long time. Sounds from the house – creaking, groaning, like a tremor – falling greyhound statues, aftershocks – in the surging humidity / sounds from the out of doors – critters landing on the roof above me, critters leaping from assorted garden furniture / accoutrements of outdoor whimsy, a (The) Morkie enraged – and my brain tangling and amplifying all into a single c...

Read It Later / Read It Never

Happy Monday: it’s finally raining.

Desk drawers cleaned, file cabinets purged and organized… Work continues on the re-implementation of a modified GTD approach (Project: KaijuBrain) to work and to life in a bid to balance and recalibrate. Sanity prevails, maybe.

Latest: an actual defined purpose for Pinboard / Pinner: I can no longer let myself use it as yet another inbox chock full of unread-and-never-to-be-read “read-it-laters,” but must rather utillize it as a reference cabinet for alrea...

Your Sunday Dog Picture for 29sep2019

Newsletter 0069 is on its way; regular ramblings return tomorrow. Happy Sunday.

Short Assignments

Though it’s been at least a decade since I first read Anne Lamott’s BIRD BY BIRD, I must still remind myself of her essential lesson: that in order to endure (read: survive, with sanity intact) The Work – no matter how massive, depleting, relentless, needy, and rejuvenating (often in tandem) –, the journey, one must view it through a “one-inch picture frame” of next steps, one after the other, unfolding, bit by bit, until the end is reached.

Heat and muggy have returned for an encore: the r...

Multiple Braaaains

The Morkie and The Jorkie are at the groomers. All is quiet – disconcertingly so. Marley snoozing on the couch, a new album of Coltrane outtakes playing. And here I am.

With the exception of a wander/maunder on the NES SUPERMAN game, the theme of this week’s Informalities seems to be productivity systems, specifically, the importance of what David Allen terms “an external brain.”

… Analog Brains: Notebooks (still in love with my Baron Fig Confidant Plus) / Scissor-Halved Index Cards in my w...

Comfortable Shoes and Drillbit Hammers

Dogmatic digital minimalism as pointless as dogmatic digital maximalism; as George Carlin says of religion (paraphrased and devoid of his singular sense of rhythm): a comfortable pair of shoes – but it doesn’t behoove you to jam your comfortable shoes onto the feet of others. Self-righteousness creeps.

Towards sanity: a tweak to habit here, a tweak to habit there. Evaluation – continuous, unceasing – and re-balancing. Finding what works, finding what doesn’t and getting on with my day; the...

On Efforts to Mine Depth From the Malignant Shallows

In spite of both being an avowed (and repentant) news junkie and starting these pieces so that I might have a platform to write and think about – among other things – politics in a form beyond tweet or outraged gesticulation, I’ve rarely used this space to actually write about politics.

(Nevermind a desire to make whatever limited skills I have with words of tangible, contributive value by writing speeches for any sane person running for office)

Two things at play here, maybe: One, a belief...

Memory Cartridge: SUPERMAN (NES)

Only a few scant memories here and I’m not certain of their accuracy – they might be amalgams of other similarly awful licensed games – awful, though not lacking in a certain charm… of sprite / Funko Pop-Superman conversing with the Statue of Liberty; of pressing the Up button a lot; of purple fedoras – I think; of the flying sequences – Kirk Alyn live-action-animation 1948 serial- inspired?; of telephone booth transformations (the Up button?) … Was this a rental that I purchased just becaus...