I just nuked my old website and started building this one mostly from scratch. The old stack was too bloated and it started to affect performance. I love speed, efficiency and minimalism (or maybe elegance is a more apt term).
It has been over 3 weeks since I stopped drinking and one of the ways I’ve been able to make it stick is seeing it as a challenge to find “something else to do.” If you ever wrestled with your own alcohol consumption habits you’ll know that it tends to become a full time job (except you spend money instead of making it). So then the challenge really does become “what is there to do?”
So far I’ve chosen chipping away at my habits, which currently centers around moving my body, resitance training, and eating nutrient dense food. Making that switch I feel my mental faculties returning and a lot of my thoughts centered around where to go from here – artistically and practically.
A writing practice is one of those habits. There’s something quite dulling and low key unnerving about the siren of oursourcing your thinking to Chat-GPT. Sure, it’s a great tool for exploring concepts you probably wouldn’t have thought of yourself, but there’s an overarching regression to a bland mean that occurs, mostly because the PG-ness of the outputs are heavily skewed to be polite and unoffensive.
And all the great art has edges.
It actually feels good to be writing stream of consciousness style again. There was a period of time several years ago, where I would start writing and it would spill out chaotically and would be very hard to follow. It was a symptom of having lost my mind and really a trauma response to the reality of having the bottom of my Maslow’s hierarchy of needs gutted to pure survival mode. I couldn’t even follow my own writing and I didn’t want to subject people to incoherent unstructured rambling.
I won several national writing contests in middle school and high school so I feel like there’s some sort of promise here. I have a nostalgic reverence for things that require focus and concentration. These activities feel like a necessary rebellion to the onslaught of social media trained ADHD. And the cheat code is to make it enjoyable for myself.
So here I am beginning the writing process. Much like art, it feels vulnerable, especially since I am getting into this groove, and so far haven’t had much to say -but I already sense the possibility of the promise of writing as a tool of deeper exploration. A few paragraphs is enough for now. Anything more than zero is progress – whether its bicep curls or leaking your thoughts out into the ether.
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