feeling the river-cut rivulet paths of the many focus eras of my life. from when I wrote songs daily, to poems, to jokes, to fiction, to physics, to code, to commercials… there are so many possible paths for a thought to ping around in, and they all come out at different times. I never know which response will tumble out, or what further transformations will occur once I look away. and I wonder, half-asleep, how the paths intersect, and how much of what feels like wasted effort on dead-end paths has created the impossible calamities of creative eruption, and which electric habit-paths from 20 years ago factor silently into getting from present-day question to unforeseen answer?

Queen — Who Wants to Live Forever

Nick Slater, in Current Affairs:

Is the inability of most Americans to emigrate really that big of a deal, considering all the other problems of the present day? Isn’t complaining about this just whiny American privilege? Plus, given that most people prefer to stay where they are, then if the United States had non-exploitative healthcare, a stronger social safety net, and a housing market with any semblance of sanity, why would you even need to move elsewhere?

If those questions have entered your mind, banish them! They originate from the premise that human beings should only hold rights that can be “justified,” and those rights should be grouped into hierarchical categories. If people want to move from Place A to Place B, then you are presuming they’d better have a good reason for it. They better meet the right criteria of “deserving,” too. And before they fight for the right to move, they better fight for more immediately pressing rights like universal healthcare. This kind of logic is profoundly authoritarian. Not only does it constrict people’s ability to make choices about their own lives, it also serves to fragment and isolate various struggles for freedom, which can then be stymied or crushed altogether.

[...]

There seems to be a general understanding, even if it’s often smothered, that freedom should be humanity’s default setting.

What happens when it becomes obvious this is not the case in the United States? Americans have long been indoctrinated to believe they enjoyed freedoms that were the envy of the world. This lie has always been obvious to some—Native Americans, Black Americans, LGBTQ Americans, and others who have never enjoyed the luxury of pretending otherwise—but today the gap between “how free we think we are” and “how free we actually are” has never been clearer. The vast majority of Americans have no meaningful freedom to choose their job, care for their kids, or even protect their own health. And despite capitalism’s promises to provide all the lifestyle choices you could ever desire, few of us have the option of trying our luck elsewhere if we want. There’s something sobering about the thought that, for most people, moving to Canada is as realistic as moving to the moon.

julia jacklin - comfort

the rest of this album is more intense than this closer, but it's one of the better acidic-sweet songwriter albums I've heard in a while. sparse, painful, thoughtful. there's a song where she howls at the end that reminds me of how good it feels to howl melodically, and also how rarely I get to do that anymore.

the last, best show I did as a solo musician was over a decade ago now; I played songs of mine on guitar and piano in the basement room at blackbird coffee, to maybe 50 people, howling and crooning my way through years of creative effort, capable and confident that whatever I was doing, I could do it well. several people told me it was one of the strangest and most beautiful concerts they'd ever been to. I stopped performing live shortly thereafter, because of a hundred reasons, mostly because the tension of maintaining the practice of all these songs without feeling there was any payoff in sight became too much to live with. some dreams die so that the body may live.

I haven't had a space of my own to feel comfortably alone in, in almost a year. I haven't had room to sing at the top of my lungs for most of this year. I'm very grateful to the people who have housed me and put up with me for this very strange interval, and if I can keep up with my work, there's every likelihood I can have a place of my own by January. it's expensive, simply occupying space. I don't want much. just to howl at the room.

This drives me skyward:

No she isn’t, you detached and detestable democratic fossils. She and Biden both suck in similar ways, and you owe the country more than one apology for running toothless establishment conservative cowards rather than letting the rising and broadly-supported leftist movement of full healthcare, immediate climate action, decriminalizing drugs, eliminating police, and improving labor conditions in a more meaningful way than marginally increasing hourly minimum wage, AND prosecuting white nationalist terrorists including the current administration… just to name a few things both Hillary and Biden functionally ignored in their campaigns.

You do not know the fuck about which you speak, Philippe, and you should retire so someone better-informed can make decisions for the future.

I looked at the election counts for the first time just now, and I gotta say, for trump to get tens of millions of votes this year, for it to be even CLOSE, is....................... abysmally frustrating re: this nation and its population of absolute fuckers

whether he wins or loses, we are drowning in people with dangerous alignments shaped by unreality

Steve Krouse, in Lunch with Alan Kay: how to become educated enough to invent the future:

Alan also said at lunch that one problem young people make is “having goals.” It’s too early to have goals that “consume one’s horizons,” because young people don’t even know what they don’t know. I think this kind of epistemic modesty is a great idea. I can probably benefit from shifting the focus from my overly-specific goals to “more meta” goals, such as becoming “educated” in a broader sense than I previously thought was possible. The more perspectives I can acquire, the better I’ll be at not fooling myself, and the more I’ll be able to appreciate the richness of the world.

I've had an extraordinarily-difficult time forgiving myself for not achieving certain goals I set in my late teens. And without being condescending at all to those younger than I am now, or to myself back then, I finally agree with this: a goal is just an idea you had. It might be a good one, it might be terrible, it might lead somewhere interesting, it might ruin your life. Following your feelings and interests is good, but committing early to something that "consumes your horizons" is... not a great idea.

There's a lot of pressure on us to specialize, to start a career, to become something, anything as early as possible. I beat myself up for a decade because I didn't become a professional musician by age 20, but my god; the chances of that happening given where and who I really was were so slim. It wasn't my fault that my life took other — difficult but often quite interesting and fulfilling — turns. The only real effect of refusing to give up that ghost dream was that making music drained of its pleasure for a long, long time. What a shame that is. But it's okay. I forgive myself my passion, because it came from a beautiful place but was wrung out by horrid cultural forces.

cleaning out my email incrementally from the last few years, found this from 2017

lmao

David Mitchell, Ghostwritten:

We create models to explain nature, but the model winds up gatecrashing nature and driving away the original inhabitants. In my lecturing days most of my students believed that atoms really are solid little stellar nuclei orbited by electrons. When I tell them that nobody knows what an electron is, they look at me like I’ve told them that the sun is a watermelon. One of the better-read-up ones might put their hand up and say, “But Dr. Muntervary, isn’t an electron a charged probability wave?”

“Suppose now,” I am fond of saying, “I prefer to think of it as a dance.”

There’s comfort and trouble in having too-solid a model of reality. Some people’s politics are corroded by having too clear a sense that reality is like this, and any deviation from that model must be corrected, rather than observed and adapted to. On the other hand, we can be dimmed by resignation to things as they are; we may not know all the answers, but we know it can be better than this… but it doesn’t seem like it’ll really happen.

It’s important, I think, to recognize that the models describing political and material “realities” of the last half-century have been discarded or disproven. We don’t know what will happen right now; that’s terrifying, but it also leaves room for optimism. We think we know what electrons are, but nobody does. We think we can predict political outcomes, but we can’t.

I’m choosing to be slightly optimistic, today. I voted for Biden and every available leftist/leftish candidate, and I know a lot of other people will, too. Trump and Co only have a foothold because they’ve worked tirelessly to create and promote an alternate model of reality. An unfortunate number of people have bought in, and I don’t know what we’re going to do about it in the long run. But it’s not fated for the present state to continue. The future is not yet foreclosed.

I’ve cut off my access to twitter for the day. I voted, I’m reading a good book, and I’m going to work in a bit. Tomorrow I’m supposed to start a new job; I’ll tell you more about it if it works out. The foundations of my life shifted radically this year, and I know yours did too, in different ways. They’re going to shift again. I’m going to tell myself we’ll find a way through it!

Helena Deland — Someone New

When I post a song, I try not to dwell on it too long; if I think of something to say, I will, but usually I just recommend it. This is a great record; it wends and stalks tiger-style through bass-string grasslands, drumstick raindrops drawing lines into the distance.

...That's the first thing that came to mind, anyway!

"so that I, too, can feel like someone new"