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.

The 37%

According to the 37% rule, by age 30 you’re supposed to stop exploring, pick the best option from everything you’ve encountered, and spend the rest of your life comfortably committed to it. By that logic, at 55 I should have settled on a handful of favorite records sometime during the Clinton administration and now be calmly rotating them until my last day on Earth. Instead, I’m anxiously awaiting the new Anthrax release, obsessing over Remi Wolf, going deep into Doechii, disappearing down the rabbit hole of Angine de Poitrine, and paying tariffs on an Genesis Owusu record shipped from Canberra because I heard one song on KEXP and apparently lost all executive function. If my musical life is an application of the 37% rule, then sometime around age 30 I accidentally checked “Remain Evergreen” in the operating system settings.

At this point I’ve accepted that my musical taste isn’t a carefully curated identity so much as a raccoon repeatedly breaking into different dumpsters. The algorithm has no idea who I am. Every week it confidently recommends death metal, hyperpop, Appalachian folk, Japanese hiphop, and some lo-fi basement recording by a masked man with three monthly listeners. And the embarrassing thing is that it’s right every single time. Frankly, neither the algorithm nor I have the slightest idea who I am anymore.

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.

I am in control

This crow, specifically, shits on my car daily. I clean it in silent self-affirmation.