Reading someone else's diary

tldr: I got down on one knee and she said yes

Excerpts, 2024

1/1

There was a time I was like wait it’s only nine how are we going to make it to midnight but of course we made it to three thirty. J got drunk and was so funny, just talking shit and making hilarious comments and dancing around. K also had so much fun. Before he left D said it was the best party ever. We woke up early because S had to go to work. I was in the loft with C. We woke up and ate some lasagna and went back to sleep for a couple hours. Cleaned. Which took forever. The place was absolutely destroyed. A was still asleep. She woke up and we had coffee and my brain was pretty empty but happy. Listened to How Long Gone on the drive to Oakland. We ate at Saul’s. It was very good. I just watched almost the entire season of a Nearly Normal Family. Now going to bed at eight god bless hny.

1/4

It’s not that I’m looking for a perfect person, I just thought to myself, on the couch, reading Stella Maris, raptly, but that I’m too reticent to get close to someone for long enough to know if I want to actually get close to them. Okay I can hear the water is done boiling.

1/10

Absolutely insane rain and wind outside, I’m at Sightglass, it’s before nine. My hands are dry and I have a sweater on. Some dude to my right is talking to himself I put headphones on and the other guy across from me is eating a croissant with a fork for some reason. I watched Turn Every Page last night. It was magnificent. What a great story what an incredible look at culture and journalism and friendship and belief and the power of digging deep. There are people walking in soaking wet, the rain is slanted, loud. I’m high on coffee. Want to read all Robert Caro’s books now.

1/14

Separate the trust in receiving from the impulse for control. Look ahead not in search but in enjoyment. You can’t search and receive at the same time. Standing up on Mt Tam, looking at how absolutely beautiful and perfect it all was and at the same time really knowing that it need not be forever. It’s possible to enjoy something and know it need not forever be close by.

1/20

Will be good to get it out yesterday was super fun. Was at A’s all day and then had dinner in Larkspur with M and D and H and R. Good vibes. Drove home and putzed around for a bit and then went to a gallery for a fog party. Took a bit of time to warm up, the lights were too bright and the vibe was a bit whatever or I was just feeling a bit whatever. Two of C’s friends showed up. Drank wine and talked to a bunch of people. That girl J was there too with her boyfriend and it was really funny our exchange because they are moving in together now—I told them how the night J and I met was right after she’d met him and we were commiserating about how depressing dating is then and anyway I told them I was so happy for them etc etc and then made a joke along the lines of well I’m still single and miserable and we had a good chuckle and then went on with our nights. I wanted to go home at a point but the girls wanted to go to the afters so we drove to chinatown. It was a fun drive and we talked a bunch of shit and wit and later, much later, L told me that during that conversation she was worried I was a monster for a minute, and then she realized no but still maybe. I laughed. At the bar everyone was dancing but I was absolutely transfixed by the game of Jenga that I ended up playing for like two hours. L kept coming up to tell me where on the dance floor she was and that’s when I realized that she wanted to take advantage of me.

1/24

I listened to the new The Smile record last night on the couch, headphones, eyes closed. Had a thought like maybe I’m addicted to the state of keeping things at bay, or just out of reach, both—they’re opposites, or the same, I guess, maybe, huh. Anyway I deleted Hinge and Raya lol. Felt like closing a leaky hole.

1/29

It’s the worst thing ever to get the thing you want when you’re sulking for not having it.

1/30

Stella Maris:

“I think your experience of the world is largely a shoring up against the unpleasant truth that the world doesn’t know you’re here. And no I’m not sure what that means. I think the more spiritual view seeks grace in anonymity. To be celebrated is to set the table for grief and despair.”

“A platonic theory of music just muddies the water. Music is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules. Yet it’s true that no one made them up. The rules. The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension. Music is not a language. It has no reference to anything other than itself. You can name the notes with the letter of the alphabet if you like but it doesn’t change anything. Oddly, they are not abstractions…. Schopenhauer says somewhere that if the entire universe should vanish the only thing left would be music.”

“But I sat in the floor and I read A New Theory of Vision. And it changed my life. I understood for the first time that the visual world was inside your head. All the world, in fact.”

“Wittgenstein was fond of saying that nothing can be its own explanation. I’m not sure how far that is from saying that things ultimately contain no information concerning themselves.”

“I think it’s magic if you don’t understand it. As you learn more about it it becomes less magical. Then as you realize that there is a clear sense in which you will never understand it it becomes magical again.”

1/31

What to say really, it’s the afternoon and it’s raining quite hard. Blue just got from her bed onto the couch. I suppose I will remember this apartment someday from somewhere else. I once said I’d look back on last year as life changing and I’d said before that my life would be different in six month or one year or or and yet here I am, having done literally nothing all day. I rode bikes with M and he said why not use Substack and said dear god I can’t. I want to do something with my life but the more I think about it the more I realize I can bring love to my community. God listen to me I hope no one ever reads this lol. Maybe giving up on ambition is the actual practice. Like actually stop chasing the sunny hill of the horizon for once. Give up on the idea that I will become something I’m not yet. That actually feels right in the moment. In three minutes my timer will go off and that means I will fold my laundry.

2/5

M doesn’t really lift her arms over her head in urdhva hastasana. I thought about this just now, rolling around on the floor stretching etc, that the difference between the way we want to show up in the world and the way we do is in how we lift arms in urdhva hastasana.

2/11

I woke up and sat for an hour and then felt like going to the coffee shop which I actually haven’t done for a few weeks probably. Sat next to a nice young woman who I definitely matched with on Hinge before and made a joke to her about guarding my laptop with her life while I went to the bathroom and she laughed and then I went to poop but I hurried because I was aware that she was aware of how long I was away.

2/14

The sun doesn’t search.

3/7

It would be funny to go read back the last week probably for the rollercoaster. Now it’s Thursday morning I woke up early because Blue was vomiting and then didn’t get back to sleep. Four thirty to five thirty I lay in bed and then I sat from five thirty to six thirty—I’m glad I bought the new alarm, maybe it’s the best thing I’ve gotten in this insane shopping spree. After that I took Blue to the beach. It was very cold and windy and super high tide. She was is always so amazing at the beach it turned around my attitude any attitude every time. She jumped especially high to get over a wave and for the ball and a woman walking by looked at me and pointed and smiled and I smiled. I went to Andytown after for coffee was good but they didn’t have a ceramic cup which should be illegal. Came home and hosed down Blue with the new hose downstairs and she really hated it so much. Good girl.

3/8

I think I need to have more things to do, in general. I’m thinking about Substack lol.

3/12

Every time lately that the whole thing comes to mind I feel a trust that I will make it work. That if I leave things where they are and take life day by day that things will work out. Haven’t been feeling this way for a while obviously. Wrecked about finding an agent it’s been almost six months looking I think. I don’t know. Trying hard hasn’t been working. But how much can I rely on passivity. Yoga always came to me. Has always come to me. How do I cultivate that circumstance and environment for other things to come naturally. Huh. I never really wanted anything from yoga. To be a teacher or whatever. I did it to do it. I never wanted anything more than that. I mean maybe not never but the want was always for integrity and natural expression. I didn’t have ambition. Still don’t. How do I reach for an agent without the ambition to do so. Starting this teacher training is a lot and also great and will be a good use of time and also force some actual writing that’s not this stupid document lol and change my brain a little bit back into the practice which is always a good thing etc. Writing a whole manual is scary but here we are.

3/13

I would like to live a life that’s wide and timeless. When the structures are there for a thing to happen it happens and when there aren’t it doesn’t. Totally.

3/19

I listened to Scott Galloway talk this morning about how his goal is to give back more love than he’s received and that sounded like something. When I was younger and a hippie I had this fanciful notion or maybe it wasn’t fanciful at all that small things mattered, that I could change things by changing things or whatever but now I feel the preponderance of what I can only call daunted energy. To build something anything feels so intense so much to overcome so many logistical details to strangle the hold on magic. But maybe the dedication to logistical details is what makes the things that want to be made. I don’t even know what that means and I could think about something like emergence but I’ve already thought it so many times and the things I’ve thought so many times are not bringing me anywhere closer to truth or what’s ultimately desired.

3/23

Pretty much every time I type the word becuase I get it wrong. Even then. The u always comes first when I type it really fast. Slower now. Because. There we go. Listening to the new Waxahatchee. I spelled that right. Spelt. I think I should stop eating ice cream I’m so fat right now.