requiem for requirement

picture if you can
the picture of a man
who loses a pixel of his soul
every time he picks up his phone
to post a picture’s worth of proof
of what
he does not know
what he does know
is that for every void he fills
another is created
even knowing this
he cannot stop digging
deeper and deeper
to say
nothing at all
because somewhere
he was convinced
that would be enough
to prove
the destination
was every bit as real
as the journey
it wasn't

Privacy’s pixel degradation

There was a time when you could step into solitude and trust it would hold. A quiet beach, a lonely trail, an empty basketball court with your kid—places where no one was watching, where you could simply exist without an audience. Now, any moment can be interrupted by a camera-mounted murder hornet, and in an instant, that sense of being alone is gone. You’ve become content.

A camera can steal your soul. Call it dignity. Call it autonomy. Call it identity. Every person owns themselves. In many cultures, a person’s image is inseparable from their identity. It isn’t something that should be taken without consent.

What unsettles me about drones isn’t the technology—it’s the disappearance of relationship. No eye contact. No conversation. No opportunity to say yes or no. Just anonymous observation from above. You don’t know who’s flying it, why they’re there, or whether your quiet afternoon has become someone else’s footage. That changes the experience, whether a single pixel is ever recorded or not.

I don’t want confrontation. I don’t want violence. I simply want a world where a father and son can shoot hoops in the middle of nowhere without feeling like they’re performing for an invisible audience. Maybe that’s old-fashioned. But privacy isn’t nostalgia—it’s a basic expression of human dignity, and without it, we stop being people and start becoming property.

I’m not looking for revenge. I’m looking for privacy.

It’s a trap

I lost an estimated 4,000 jumps today to an inexplicable phone/watch glitch, so naturally I rage-repeated the workout.

If there’s no data, did it even happen?

Not that long ago, when I did something dumb like run 10 miles through the city, ride the White Rim Trail, or nearly die kayaking in Alaska, I had a watch, a fuzzy memory, and maybe a rough route if I’d planned ahead. Knowing I’d done it was enough.

Somewhere along the way, accomplishment became documentation. Now my watch crashes, and I’m out there doing another 4,000 jumps just so the numbers exist somewhere.

There’s probably a profound lesson here about external validation, quantification, and the gap between experience and data. I’m self-aware enough to recognize it, but unfortunately, I’m currently too tired from doing 8,000 jumps to fully absorb it.

It’s puzzling

At some point I made a conscious decision to start puzzling as a way to stay focused and keep my anxiety occupied. Which is funny, because on more than one occasion I've ended up one piece short of a thousand.

You never know until you get there, of course. Except sometimes I do. Sometimes I've figured it out before placing that 999th piece, and for a completist there's no worse feeling than an unfinished puzzle. So now I carry a strange form of experiential anxiety: the moment I spot a space I can't logically fill, I start bracing for disappointment.

Still, I persevere to the end. Because you never know until you know, and somewhere in that uncertainty is probably the lesson.

But see that missing piece in the foreground? I'm almost certain it will never be found.

Maybe that's part of the lesson too.

Out On The Tiles

Would that we could all move through the world assuming everyone is a friend, with the kind of optimism born from not knowing that our reputation has already walked into the room ahead of us.