two kinds of transience
how having more blogs will ... definitely ... have me write more
The hydra grows
A few months ago in a characteristic fit of grandstanding I announced this here substack newsletter/journal/blog in which I’d definitely write a lot about my thoughts and feelings. And then I kind of did? There were definitely posts, but seemingly shipped out on a whim (which I still don’t disagree with). Certainly not as loquacious as implied, nor really all that thoughtful. What’s my retort to this?
Yet another substack, obviously.
Before I get into that, I’d like to talk about two kinds of transience.
A new song I grew to love; a bird perched in the light on my morning walk; a dinner party with an interesting theme; the imagery of oneself while reading as a hungry caterpillar; how all those ideas and experiences made me feel.
I feel inclined to call this the “lived transience”. What it feels like to live from moment to moment, as it arrives, and as much intellectualizing of that as feels right. Viewing of the mundane as something special because it is something special.
The other kind of transience, which I’ll clumsily name “built transience”, doesn’t feel special until you look at it later. A grocery list for the week; pros/cons lists of different software; tips from a YouTube video; struggles encountered throughout a new project. The guts of how we get through it. Of course these can include a feeling of lived transience, but they don’t necessarily. It’s a journey somewhere far and the supplies to take us there, and it is about the journey, but it can’t be a journey unless you have a destination.
Viewing of the special back when it’s still mundane.
Who’s who?
Though tempting to separate emotion from logic, as some kind of artist I know that feelings are inextricable from the work. We live as we build and we build as we live. Despite this, in practice my daily notes segregate pretty cleanly between {what I’m making and how I’m making it} and {how I’m feeling + how I’m feeling about what I’m making + what I think about all that}. My digital garden is also like this, with some fairly straightforward notes on technical studies and musings about life all coated with a veneer of objectivity. All I’m doing is recognizing the mistake that it is to conflate the two. Not that they can’t, and shouldn’t, cohabitate sometimes!
So here’s a little patch to the system. It’s a little hilarious that this is a project update of sorts, but it also represents a new way I have of viewing my internal world, and is therefore worth dressing up a bit.
Substack 1: A weblog
A journal, blog, diary
Ephemeral personal essays on thoughts and feelings and realizations in the moment about living life
Updating you like you’re my email pen pals
Flowery words because they make me feel nice
Substack 2: A working journal
Project-based work log and technical docs
Nitty gritty works in progress and process
Put out there on the off chance that someone else has the exact specific questions about something that I do
Casual, low-brow language, what the Chinese call “口水话”
Sump
Machines often have a receptacle at the bottom that gathers all the miscellaneous runoff. This makes sure the rest of the machine can keep running without getting clogged. For a building in a wet climate, it can be in the basement; on a ship, it’s the bilge. Normally a sump is regularly cleared out or its contents continuously pumped out and discarded.
But I’m a weirdo and I’m interested in what’s in my sump. You probably already know this if you came from my website or if you’ve read this blog before. I want to record learnings somewhere before I’ve learned enough from them to throw them away. I want to capture a form of exhaust from working on my personal projects and share how they are while they’re still ugly. I want a low space that collects and keeps and shares.
I’m hoping this scratches the itch I’ve always had to have an “everything dump” somewhere else, while leaving me room here to muse about my/our life with pretty words. If you’re here mainly for that then carry on! If you are deranged in some way, or coincidentally working on the same kinds of things, feel free to join me in that low space as well. If I had to guess I’ll post there a lot more.