301 post. flowers. everything returns except what doesn’t and even that does too

 

300th post

 300 posts. We made it. 

A good time to reflect on the word of the year. The word of the year for 2025 was STRETCH and I think I was mostly successful in meeting the expectations of that word. Namely, I stretched a lot. My hamstrings got a lot more flexible. I also think I grew professionally and personally so I'm proud of myself for that.

The word I chose for 2026 is Breakthrough. I think I have a good chance of experiencing a lot of breakthroughs this year. Both physically and personally. We'll see.

The other thought I had looking ahead to the new year is choosing my attitude and how I want to feel before doing something. It's definitely not new but I think it could make a big difference before I go to coach or workout or anything else to take the time to think about the attitude I want to bring and the emotions I want to feel. The biggest part is remembering to do it and making that habit. We'll see how it goes.

my mom had a great run of three sentences

while watching the TV 

"-and a partridge in a pear tree..."

"-that's some figgy pudding..."

"I don't know--British food is just *yeugh*" 

helped fix maw maw's toilet

the man at Randy's Hardware in Timberville was really helpful

a mean woman in a ridiculous fur hat was rude to the cashier at Food Lion

Paw Paw's tool shed is really cool.

Spaghetti and meatballs tonight.

Would love to hear from you

Little guy was eating a bread sandwich

 

They Replaced the Engine Oil with Eggnog

Watched a video where two Australian men replaced the engine oil of a Volkswagen Golf with eggnog and ran it until the engine destroyed itself. 

Took a barefoot walk on wet road on a warm Christmas day. The air is calm. The grass is dormant.

The eggnog curdled and evaporated and congealed causing the engine to sing its “death song”.

I took two navel oranges from the bird tote bag in the garage fridge and sat out here on the porch to write and listen to sounds of birds and distant planes and traffic.

The video is 30 minutes long and at first I was confused and unnerved why the Australian men insisted on continuing to find ways to make the car run again until the engine had absolutely irredeemably thrashed itself to death. It seemed somehow cruel to marvel and cackle at a piece of machinery hovering between life and death. 

A hawk cries. Yesterday I was walking around and saw that my sister had accidentally run over a mouse as she was parking in front of my parent’s house. I took the body over to the woods at the end of the street and wished it a peaceful return to the earth.

The more the Australians talked though, the more I realized that they were mechanics who spend their time carefully exercising patience and judgment to make a car run seemingly against its convoluted and frustrating design. A dance of elaborate steps and checks to appease a system that flies in the face of common sense. It’s easy to imagine those grievances piling and piling. 

Like the mystery in the dark. Oh, it’s just another kind of light.

A cricket downstairs in the bathroom, victim of a curious cat, with one leg missing hopping in a circle.

It must be therapeutic to watch a car fail all the way. 

We can only impose order on nonsense for so long until we must systematically impose nonsense on nonsense and urge entropy to take its place.

They also, two months prior, had replaced the coolant with a combination of Pepsi and Milk, otherwise known as Pilk.

you spiral. I spiral. he/she/me spiral

 eating candy-canes, fixing the toilet, making tofu, watching welding, walking to walgreen's, eating cookies, drinking water, scrolling too much, trying to fix my shoulder, looking at the cat, going shopping, stretching, driving over the mountain. winter is a time for rest.

looking forward to the new year. it could be the year.

going to invent something called 'strong lunch'

 I'll use it at camp. Tell everyone in the morning, 'okay everybody. get ready for strong lunch today.'

generate a lot of hype. a lot of buzz. what's strong lunch? oh what could strong lunch be?

 I think people who use logical thinking in a deeper way than I'm comfortable with are unfeeling machines who need to explore their creativity and intuition. Like, sure you can plot it all out and make it make sense but would you turn the whole world into a grid at the cost of sudden inspiration and wonder and exploration?

but also

People who use less logic than me need to keep their mouth shut. Just think through something for like two seconds instead of spouting whatever thought pops into your head. All this pattern recognition and frontal lobe development and processing power like the animal kingdom has never seen and you squander it away on free association and noise that is essentially the same as barking.

Me? I use the perfect amount of logic. 

Oh! Did I make an error in judgment? Well let me ask you this, are we human or are we dancer?

Am I taking something too seriously? Is it not actually that deep? I'm sorry. Sorry that my brain thirsts for problem-solving and analysis. Y'know, Prometheus didn't get chained to a rock to have his innards devoured by an eagle for all eternity for me to just go, duh I dunno. whatever, man. He stole fire from the gods so we could light the way with our intelligence. And I, for one, honor that sacrifice. I've done a Sudoku.

And you're probably reading this, sitting in your tower, thinking 

Hohoho. Andy. You're so foolish. Fool boy. Don't you know that when you have a problem with literally everyone else then YOU are the problem?

What if I said that I lived on Earth and that any planet farther from the Sun is too cold and has no atmosphere and any planet closer to the Sun is covered in greenhouse gas? Just because I've rejected the two options that aren't me doesn't mean I'm wrong. I could be the Earth of options. 

Thank you for watching me argue with myself and everyone else at the same time. You could probably liken it to watching some animal in an enclosure pick up its food dish and thrash it around for a bit.

A relic. An artifact even.

 Last night I was playing a card game called Anomia and the cards have categories on them like 'recyclable material' or 'bird sound' or 'south american country' and you have to try to say something in that category as fast as you can. There's other rules too but that's the gist of it. 

And one of the cards said 'blog' and someone said, 'who has a blog????' and I said, 'I have a blog.' And then there was kind of a reaction of like 'you have a blog?' 

And then I did what I usually do when this happens which is trying to remember how old the blog is and I said twenty years but I think it's only 18 or so. 

This morning I was trying to scroll my comments page to see how old my oldest comment is and I got distracted because I could still see the profiles of people in high school who also had blogs and some of them are still up! Frozen in time.

I started reading one and I remembered there was this kind of post or format floating around of like dozens of questions. Like they were just questions and you would answer them and post it.

Here's an excerpt:

What are you doing right now? Listening to music and waiting for my laundry to be done.

What time did you wake up this morning? Like 10 something.

When was the last time you cried really hard? Last night.

Have you held hands with somebody in the past three days? Yea.

If the year consisted of only one season, which would you choose? Probably summer.

What was the last thing you drank? Water and lots of it.

Do you believe that there's good in everybody? Yes.

Is confidence cute? Umm I wouldn't say so.

Where is your father? Probably at home.

------------------------

I did a count and there were about a hundred questions. But these were common. I have clear memories of encountering these. 

And so I ask my only active commenter, Crab, do YOU remember these? Are they still a thing? What happened to these? Do they signify anything?

Robert Oxygen

 I was driving home from Staples and out of the corner of my eye I saw a sign for Roberts Oxygen but I thought it was just the name Robert Oxygen and I thought, 'what a cool name.' 

He's Robert Oxygen. He's 8 feet tall and weighs 18 times as many pounds. He's a smooth operator. He's indignant in the face of danger. He always keeps on his person a briefcase containing a relevant dossier. He never parks his car--ever. He once spent half a year seeking out the world's best highwire act and upon seeing it he was underwhelmed. He's Robert Oxygen. Son of Merlin Oxygen. His blood pressure is 110 over 12. His innards are a regular length. His eyelids contain no special properties beyond the normal special properties of eyelids. His job is nondescript. He's been known to dabble in freelance valet parking. He once went to two weddings in the same day and at both events described the tuxedo he was wearing as a 'monkey suit'. 

Robert Oxygen once had a big day coming up. "I've got a big day coming up," he said. "I've got to be ready for my big day. It's coming up." When it was time for the big day--the day of the big day, he said, "Well, it's finally here. The big day has arrived. Good thing I prepared. I knew this big day was coming up." 

You idiots thought a man named Robert Oxygen wasn't going to be ready for his big day??! 

must mean something

I made up this climbing game for the team I coach where I write out most of the climbs in the gym and if a kid does a climb they go to the board and they get their initials placed by that climb. The initials stay there until another kid does that climb and then their initials are replaced. You keep going for some amount of time and whoever has the most initials on the board at the end is the winner. 

Inevitably, some amount of kids are not motivated by this game. My guess is they feel like it's overwhelming and they can't make any progress no matter how hard they try. Which is an interesting psychological thing because eventually someone has to win and often the winner of the game is not the strongest climber but the person who is most comfortable with doing nonstop climbs regardless of how many times that climb gets taken away from them. It's not surprising that I would invent a climbing game that is similar to distance running in that no one step seems to get you any closer to your goal but if you persist at a seemingly hopeless task for an hour or 90 minutes or 2 hours or however long, you will eventually get there. 

But the interesting twist to the game that was played today was that I was trying to motivate these girls who weren't into the game at all and I said, "well if you want you can just play the spoiler and figure out who is currently winning and make them not be winning anymore." And they really liked this idea. And the added their own twist to it where when they did a climb they would erase the previous initials but then they wouldn't add their own initials to it. It would just be blank. And then this really caught on and about four kids were really motivated, the most motivated of anyone playing, to just erase other kids initials (while still otherwise staying within the rules of the game). And so at the end the board was mostly empty and the winner had done like 2 climbs. 

It's an interesting way of creating agency. It's like saying, my own efforts can't amount to anything lasting and substantial but they can tear down whatever the most powerful thing is and in doing that there is a feeling of powerful. David Foster Wallace describes post-modernism that way. That irony and sarcasm and satire can challenge power and the entrenched ways of doing and looking at things. The kids yearn for post-modernism. The problem Wallace has with it that is also reflected in the game is that it can't create anything. It's empty but at the same time it does feel like something has been accomplished. 

It's for sure banned in all future games but it was a fun experiment. 

The girl who initially got really excited about it liked that she could take away a climb but nothing could be taken away from her because she didn't stake a claim in a climb. She disliked the feeling of losing a climb more than she liked the feeling of gaining one. But her reaction to that was just to embody loss and destruction. Villain origin story.

all the magic words I can think of

presto! change-o!

alakazam!

abracadabra!

shoofini!

walabamalama!

sudafed!

please!

kississippi

ramalamadingdong!

And of course, the real magic words which are hearing someone say they care for you when you care for them and you don't know how they might feel about you and your care for them isn't dependent on their care for you but you do get that confirmation--they show it some way and your sliding on electric butter all afternoon.

let's go! they brought back blue Jyoti!!

 my favorite canned Indian food!

now I'd write 'it ain't over til it's over' about blue Jyoti!!!

 lenny kravitz wrote 'it ain't over til it's over' about his failing marriage to Lisa Bonet. the song was an attempt to rekindle the relationship which would go on to end in an 'amicable divorce'. 

I think the celebrity culture on the whole is pretty stupid but I love the song and think the story is really cool. 

me personally I'd write a song about the time I beat Crabby in sock wrestling. I would recreate 'it ain't over til it's over' in every way but it would be about the time I beat Crabby in sock wrestling.

… Here we are still together

We are one

So much time wasted

Playing games with socks

… So many tears I've cried

So much pain inside

But baby, it ain't over 'til it's over

So many years we've tried

To keep our sock wrestling dreams alive

But baby, it ain't over 'til it's over

let me tell you

 let me tell you.

I cleaned out my humidifier/oil diffuser today. I mean I really cleaned it out. And I've owned it for maybe 3 or 4 years now. I gave it a good cleaning. Hours spent with a flashlight and a water pick and I was blasting gunk that you've never seen before in your life. It was an experience. I don't have words for it yet. 

The thing pretty much looks like this and it has a lid that has a tube and an inner cavity that the mist comes out of and that's where all the gunk was lurking. And so whatever's in there is kind of hidden from rinsing and direct cleaning so you have to get creative with how you flush it out. 

It felt like purging a kind of evil. The closest I'll ever get to an exorcism maybe. Or the closest so far. I still contend that I could perform an exorcism if I really had to. 

But anyway I fired it up a little bit ago and the mist is flowing so freely now. 

I'm a little ashamed of myself for letting things get that bad but I'm proud that I got there eventually.

how's that for a slogan of modern triumph?

things that make me anxious: finite resources

oh man do I get anxious when I find out the resources are finite. 

I like to imagine my resources are infinite. Or at least replenishable. I can't deal with something only existing one time and if it's gone then it's gone for good.

And I understand that this is a great philosophical error. Of course things are finite. That's how it is. But I do think with a little imagination most things are renewable in a way. 

Or maybe a better way to say would be: most of the time, whatever gave value to a thing or was valuable about a thing, can still be found in a different but similar thing. And that actually your ability to give and find meaning and value in something is what's important. Not the thing itself. 

One time I made a cool painting of a robot and I gave it to someone and shortly after making that robot painting I stopped talking to that person and I still missed the robot painting. But I consoled myself by saying that I'm the one who made that painting and I have the ability to make another one if I really wanted to. And I did make another robot painting and I foolishly foolishly oh so foolishly gave it to someone that I also ended up not speaking to again and you think the lesson is about the ability to create versus the creations themselves but really--clearly--the lesson is: don't give robot paintings to people you think you want to date. they're cursed artifacts. don't do it.

But I'll also say this: I probably care more about that painting because I can't have it than if I had held on to it. If I had held onto it it would sit in a stack with other paintings or be on my wall and I wouldn't be telling you about it now.  

And so maybe the lesson is that that process of making something and giving it to someone and not having it anymore and it's tied up in those people that I knew and paths I opted not to take and a fragment of myself I cast into the wider world--y'know that's something.

 I bet you thought. I bet you thought I wasn't still moonboarding. 

Oh Andy. He gave up on moonboarding long long ago. A forgotten dream. Andy he's the type of guy to just throw away his dreams.

WRONG!

I'm like a dog with a dream in its mouth and when you get to close I just growl because I'm never letting that dream go. No way. 

I sent TBA Warm Up 1 today!

This qualifies me for TBA Warm Up 2 I believe.

But I don't have to do TBA Warm Up 2 because it's not a 2016 Moonboard Benchmark.

Of which I only have THREE left. Warm Up No. 10, Gravity's Rainbow, and two Chinese characters that I've been told by Google translate mean 'Challenge' or 'Problem'.

Gravity's Rainbow might go within a couple weeks. It might go next session. Who knows.

Anyway I did a new climb and I was happy about it!

the gloom by cat clyde is one of the most beautiful perfect songs ever made

my platform

 I've decided to clarify my platform and stances:

pro

I am pro vulture. Big birds that eat dead stuff and generally don't bother people. They don't get enough love. I also don't like that when the term 'vulture' is tied to a person or a thing it's a negative connotation. I think that's unfair.

I am pro clown. I think clowning is somewhat of a lost art and some bad actors really messed the whole thing up for everybody. Go watch Big Top Burger. 

Pro canned soup and beans. 

Pro quiet reflection. 

anti

I am anti AI. It's not trying to help us. It's trying to replace us. But even the doomsday scenarios are a con anyway so it all just needs to go away.

anti car and anti car infrastructure. bad for the planet in every possible way. I'll say this: I think people should be open to the idea that their life would be categorically better in nearly every way if we significantly reduced the number of cars and car-based infrastructure. 

anti killing bugs. 

Anyway these are my issues. I'm going to start a media company and talk about nothing but these things.

today I stretched so good that I remembered what it's all about

 that's a good stretch

what if nationally we have a moratorium on talking

mandated stop and think time.

no more takes. no more opinions. everybody take a moment to stop and think. heck shoot dang I won't even tell ya what to stop and think about. whatever you want.

Or 

or or or

you should be able to look at someone and say, "you look like you never make time for quiet reflection." and that should carry some weight to it.

I don't know I gotta think about it. this one was half-baked. how hypocritical of me.

let it be known

 I had a good day today

leaf spot

leaf spot. pull all the leaves in one spot. 

take all the leaves on the ground and put them in one spot.

gather all the leaves into a single spot.

leaf spot.

new plan. I've got a new plan called leaf spot.

I'll be releasing the map for leaf spot soon.

make sure to put all the leaves in this spot. the leaf spot.

we're going to gather all the leaves into a single spot.

then all the leaves will be together. one. one spot.

it won't go anywhere. it will remain a monument to leaves.

don't collect leaves and bag them up. that's stupid and depletes the soil and makes no sense.

if you're going to do all that why not just put the leaves in my leaf spot.

I've hoarded something. That creates value.

If you hoard something it creates value.

I've hoarded leaves. I've created value.

leaf spot.

 I hope one day I don't have to own anything and everywhere I go people will just know that I'm me and that will be enough for me to get along in the world.

Albert Camus on charm

“You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.”

That's good. I'd also call that buy-in. When someone is ready to say yes before they hear what is asked of them. 

Today I had the kids in climbing club start lying on the mats on their stomachs and then they had to run down this hallway of mats and drop down all the way on the last mat and stand up and run back to the start and lay down as fast as they could. The most important thing is that the kids like it and it's fun. But I like to think about how much coordination goes into sprinting, lying down flat, standing up and sprinting again. It seems like it would do a good job of getting your body comfortable with moving quickly in space and applying force quickly. 

I think fun stuff like that creates buy-in. Moving your body in a new and different way that is fun and competitive. 

last day of november

 25 more posts to reach 300 in 2025.

We'll be analyzing a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre, he allegedly said once

“That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.”

What's ol JP up to here? Draining one's own self dry? So like applying yourself, right? Giving all your time and energy and attention to something. Putting your all into an endeavor until there's nothing left. Everyone's felt that, right? Or a time you tried harder than you thought you could? Maybe you had a liminal experience and things you used to think didn't matter as much. Your priorities changed in a moment of clarity. 

But then what's he saying in the second half "without the sense of thirst." So to exist is not just to give your all but to be so caught up in it that you wouldn't bother with a biological need. Normally, in a survival mindset or going about your regular life, you have all these checks and regulators on the machine of your body. But to really exist, to really do the thing, you have to have a purpose greater than that. It's like a test to be overcome. You can't just give yourself over to anything willy-nilly. It's got to move you in a way that is greater than survival. You're not just a chain in a biological process you're a thing that exists and is doing something. 

That's all I got. 

If you want to exist I suggest you write a letter to your past self and cut out the individual letters and wait for it to rain and stomp around in the slush until you make a big mud puddle and scatter the letters in the mud and watch them swirl and wilt and disappear into the slushed earth and think I am the mashing maker of muck much mud mostly a morass of mottled missives. And then take off heading NORTH as fast as you can

did you know moths have evolved to use ultrasonic clicks to disrupt the echolocation of bats hunting them?

does anyone want to get into an evolutionary arms race with me where we both push each other to the extreme?

I hit 230lbs for back squat!

And then I loaded up 235 and failed it! But was somewhat close!

The road to 300 rolls on! There's a decent chance I get it in 2026. 

I hate the game Simon Says

 what is Simon Says trying to prove?

That if you speak really quickly and in a way that is intended to confuse you will confuse people? The winner is the person who is best able to overcome the actions of a person with ill intent? A moral travesty of a game.

social media doesn't make any sense because why would you want to seem better than you are?

that's not right. there's no upside to that.

in as many things as possible be better than you seem.

be stronger than you look. be smarter than you look. have more money than you look. I feel like nature figured this out a long time ago. 

but then you'd say, "well what about animals that look like predators and what about looking scarier than you are?"

well you got me there but that's not going to make you any friends is it?! yeah. making friends is important. and a good way to make friends is to utilize surprise competence. so there. 

I was scrolling around on wplace and I found the Mississippi River and it was yellow and I thought

 'No. No surely they haven't. They couldn't have."

Sure enough. They did. They made the whole Mississippi river pee-pee colored. Except one part near Quincy and Hannibal where they made it poo poo.

 today I was coaching at the climbing gym and my sister was there and the guy I coached with said, yeah I knew you guys were siblings because earlier I saw her do the same little goofy run on the mats that you do

my impression of a guy who has recently been promoted and now has people working under him AND has never been absolutely sure what people are saying when they say the phrase "nip this in the bud"

 

"Well we're gonna have to, uh, ʟɪᴄᴋ ᴛʜɪs ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ʙᴜᴛᴛ"

if you go to the Galapagos Islands in wplace it's nothing but Snoopy.

 and I think that's great.

on the eve of getting sick

a lot of sickness has been going around the gym and I held it off longer than most but a few hours ago I could tell from some scratchiness in my throat that it has finally taken hold of me.

I'd like to take this time to reflect on the time I spent healthy. It was a time I will remember fondly. Before I slip into the bowels of unwellness it would be appropriate to recount some of the great things I could do with my fit and able body. No longer though. Now that I have been ravaged by communicable disease.

I could throw planes into the sky. When airplanes wouldn't start right they would just have me throw them up into the clowns. It was easy for me. What with me not being sick at all.

I could smell blood in water from over 200 miles away. Back when my nose was congested it could smell every smell smell-able and I would compete with sharks in a Who Can Smell a Wounded Whale the Fastest Competition.

I could print in color. Just upload a jpg or a PNG or pdf into my consciousness and I could recreate it with near perfect accuracy. Not anymore though. My white blood cells have sequestered my brain to fight the scourge that seeks to destroy me from the inside out.

I once picked up everything. Very briefly. And a lot of things were just strapped to my back. But I did it.

Teeth like iron. And bones like iron. And hair like iron. And lungs like iron. And fingernails like iron. And freckles like iron. People used to say that iron was made of me. 

But not anymore. Now I am a frail human. A shadow of what I once was.

And I now I am truly in the animal soup of time.

 sometimes in coaching you see someone unlock potential that neither of you ever imagined. and then sometimes in coaching you're sitting on the mats with someone who is biting at the singular fake nail left on their hand until they accidentally inhale some of the nail glue and start coughing and spitting and then they get up, go over to the wall, pick a wedgie in front of everyone, give one of the worst goes on a climb you've ever seen and say, "no way that's not possible."

how I thought about running 10 years ago and now

 10 years ago (but really more like 11 years ago) I was in school to become an English teacher and I wrote this post on here about how English in classrooms was being taught in this very abstract, atomized, fundamental sort of way that I thought took all the joy and interest out of it. There was little to no attention given to words and phrases and ideas that really move people and inspire them and make them think and feel. Instead it was all zoomed in to the point where it was hard to imagine that any of it would add up to anything beautiful or worthwhile. The point of speech and language isn't to follow the rules. The point is to communicate. To share the human experience. And in my opinion at no point do you really need to know what a predicate is to do that. There are lots of things that anyone that speaks intuitively understands and by trying to catalog and dissect we've created confusion and frustration out of understanding. 

Anyway, at the time I likened it to trying to teach someone how to run with the idea of "perfect form". If all you cared about was perfect form it's hard to imagine that you'd ever fall in love with the feeling of movement and actually doing the thing. Running has always meant a lot to me and it's partially because it's a thing I did on my own that I explored and grew with.

All that to say that it's funny to me now that I'm currently taking video of myself and doing jumps and bounds and drills in a parking lot and lifting and not actually doing much running at all to try to improve my form and learn how to sprint "properly". Or to get faster. Is a better way to say it. 

But I'd argue that's the right order to do it in. Maybe not for absolute performance but at least for my enjoyment of it. For it to feel meaningful to me. I've gone out and done adventures and had the highs and the lows and run miles year round and at all hours of the day and night and gone on that physical and spiritual journey and now I want to step back and really focus on all the minutiae of it. To learn how to position my hips and knees and ankles to be springy and powerful. That stuff is boring, or at least a different kind of boring, and I'm ready to be boring. 

My opinion about teaching English hasn't changed at all though. Grammar is stupid. Pedantic. 

clean things critter mode

 sometimes when I cook beans the bean guts get stuck to the pan and I soak the pan but then I get bored and want to clean the pan anyway so I take my fingernails and just dig into the bean guts while the water runs and I call it 'cleaning critter mode' cuz I feel like a lil squirrel or critter getting in there

all-time great day of climbing: keep showing up!

 this weekend I went on a really good walk and was partially lamenting the fact that I felt like I hadn't made much progress lately. And then outta nowhere had a great day today!

A mini-goal of mine for the past few months has been trying to pull as hard with 3 fingers as I can with 4 fingers. Some people can pull harder with 3 fingers than they can with 4 but when I started I was about half as strong. For the past few months or so I've been stuck at around 70 to 75 lbs and today it moved easy. I ended up pulling 105 lbs with each hand. About a 50% increase in one day. CRAZY! And then I set an all-time best with my left hand. And then I sent my moonboard project. And then I got a weighted pull-up PR.

One must imagine that occasionally Sisyphus reaches a plateau and gets to turn around and admire how far he's come before resuming the pushing.

the word 'petty' comes from the French 'petit' meaning small

the word 'pet' comes from the Gaelic 'peata' meaning tame animal

so just know that when you say

give my little petty pet a petty pet on its petty pet head

that's two different etymologies. 

when I started this blog I was really into writing words that turned up zero Google results. I have also since archived a lot of those posts so they probably still don't turn up any results. I have also forgotten the words. 

If you want to experience what this is like for yourself, the next time you're at the beach pick up a handful of sand and say, "I bet no one has thrown this exact handful of sand before!" and throw it into the ocean and think to yourself, "yeah. I did something today."

a lot of people have been wondering

 Andy. We are about one week into November and your blog will sit at 260 posts for this year. You are on pace to break the 272 posts from 2017. Will you make a push for 300 posts?

I have not posted more than 300 times since 2016, the only year it's ever been done. And this is what I had to say on this day, November 9th in 2016:

These are sections of comics from November 10th, 2016. I didn't actually post anything on November 9th.

Dang. I really don't make em like that no more.

Anyway, the other day I saw this lady on Instagram and she was talking to this guy and she was like

Never say hi how are you doing to someone or say what's new with you because that bores people and causes them to engage in social scripts and that limits the interactions you can have with people and the reason why extroverts live so much longer is they have engaging meaningful conversations and that releases dopamine and dopamine is involved with so many things but it's mainly an energy molecule because it gives you motivation and so that's why you should never ask someone "how are you"

And then I stopped and went to the account and blocked it. 

Being hopped up on stimulants and saying a lot of words doesn't make you an interesting person or good at talking to people.

thoughts on YouTube commercials

 I'm sure this has already been said but this happened to me just now and I thought about it.

You know how with the TV they cut to commercial at a moment of anticipation? But they set you up for it. They create a moment of tension and kind of linger on it. Maybe also had in a musical cue or sting or something. There's care and work and attention that goes into raising your interest and then gracefully leaving for ads. 

YouTube don't do none of that. But it still knows when you've gotten to the point you really care about. It's not just random. It knows, somehow, 'hey this is the good part' and then it just rips you away from it to launch into an annoying ad. It shocks you. The immediacy of the cut. In a way, a very minor way and not to undermine the use of the word, that is cruel, I think. At the very least cold and uncaring. 

AH WE'VE GOT YOUR ATTENTION OK GREAT WATCH THIS AD IDIOT!!!

I think you owe the audience a certain amount of respect if they're giving you their attention.

Anyway check the comments to see what crab thinks.

He'll probably be sitting on a pile of money bags with a top hat and a monocle and a cigar and say, "Pay for premium, peasant hahaha" and then stick the cigar out in my eye.

Ha. classic crab antics.

today I voted and outside the polls these nice people stopped me and asked if I would be willing to fill out a survey

 And I was in a good mood that I had done my civic duty so I said yes and one of the questions in the survey was,

"How qualified do you think you would be to hold public office?"

And then it gave like Very Qualified, Somewhat Qualified, Not all qualified, stuff like that.

And, you know, I thought about it, and put Somewhat Qualified.

Do I have the know-how to be a politician? No. But I have principles. And Nietzsche said "He who has a why to live for can bear any how."

I went in wplace and put HOME in a heart near where I grew up and a heart and Maw Maw by Maw Maw's house.

going on and on about who knows what

 I think a big issue people have, and this is nothing groundbreaking or new, is that there's a disconnect between how they perceive themselves as the self behind their own eyeballs and how they are perceived by others. Well, duh, Andy wow so astute. But I'll give you this example because last week there was a piece of paper in the gym that said someone had the record for the longest time kneeling on a yoga ball and I wondered if I could beat it and I did and now maybe I'm the yoga ball guy. The kneeling yoga ball guy. Oh at character creation he must have put in all his points for balancing kneeling on a yoga ball, that's where it all must have went. 

And no. I didn't do that. I never set out to be the yoga ball guy. If you can believe it. You probably can't. Surely, you think, he's lying to try and make his accomplishment seem even more impressive. Surely he trained and trained to reach the mountain top and when he got there he realized it was the top of Mt. Stupid and he cursed the fact that from the bottom it seemed so beautiful and from the top it seemed so needless and empty. 

A man goes to a doctor and says, "Doctor! I am so depressed! Nothing brings me joy. I haven't laughed or smiled in weeks. I can't go on. You must help me." Doctor says, "Solution is simple. Kneeling on yoga ball record is easy to break. Go to gym and break the record." Man says, "But Doc! I am the man kneeling on the yoga ball!" Everyone laugh.

The second worst thing you can be is the guy with the kneeling yoga ball record. The worst thing you can be is the guy without the kneeling yoga ball record.

I like to imagine that if I was an ant that when I was in ant heaven before I was born and given my deployment instructions

side note: in Ant Heaven there's kind of a reverse pearly gates situation going on where the last thing you do as you're leaving is talking with Ant St. Peter and he's telling you what you're going to do when you get to the colony

I was given my ant instructions and they were like 'worker ant. collect food. bite enemies. don't balance on anything.' but then I got to Earth and knelt on the ant equivalent of a yoga ball and was the best at it and back in Ant Heaven they were like "noooooooooo!" and it's that age-old paradox of how can ants have free will if the ant god is all-knowing and all-powerful

Here's what I think. Here's what I really think. A lot of life, most of it, is being handed a metaphysical egg and the question is: how do you hold it? And the answer is: hold it gently. 

you think ghosts and skeletons get along?

 or are they always trying to scare each other?

But I think for ghosts, skeletons, ghouls, goblins, frankensteins, draculas, wolfmans, witches, and such, scaring is like their version of being funny

No because then, they would be trying to scare humans. You wouldn't try to scare other scary things. Unless you were the comedian's comedian of spooky frightening things.

So they're like professional acquaintances. They're all in the same line of work. They meet up and talk shop. 

A zombie scaring a mothman but instead of screaming the mothman calmly says, "that's scary" the way comedians say "that's funny" without laughing but it's actually a huge compliment. But both parties are so analytically minded that they forgo the emotional reaction.

The creatures of Halloween are entertainers. Is what we've learned here. They exist to elicit an emotional reaction. I guess that's what Nightmare Before Christmas is about.

This is all the modern versions of course.

Look at this woodcut from 1493

Just some bones having a good ol time. That's really fun.

The thing about Christmas is that at the darkest coldest time of the year when Death feels all around we come together to show the best parts of love and charity and giving. But the thing about Halloween is that the darkness has just come around and so we have wicked fun and dance and evil party hehehe. 

 

moonboard update

 I know you need moonboard updates. I need to give them to you.

So so so close on Hugo Eliminate Clean. My unofficial moonboard coach Max stopped by and helped me figure out a move that I was jumping to that I didn't need to be jumping to. Felt like it was a very helpful adjustment but it was a little late in the session and had burned all my fresh goes. The last two moves of the climb are bigger moves and the first big move affects how you set up for the last move and I never feel like I get it quite right but I'm confident it will go soon. Hopefully Tuesday.

After an hour of trying and failing to send Hugo I messed around on these two climbs that are basically the same, Forsok 17 and Gravity's Rainbow and they both feature this big move to the left that I figured I just wouldn't be able to do but after a couple attempts I stuck the easier version of the move on Forsok and then a couple goes later stuck it on Gravity's Rainbow so that was a great consolation prize at the end of the session. I have two more climbs that I've now done all the moves on. 

The Six Remaining

Hugo Eliminate- so close to sending

TBA Warm Up 1- have done all the moves individually but it still feels hard.

Forsok 17- done all the moves. feels very doable now

Gravity's Rainbow- have done the hardest moves. is definitely doable with work

Problem 2- seems gross. don't want to try it.

Warm Up No. 10- it's got this big move off an undercling that I just plain don't like. tried it a few times today and made a little bit of progress. Definitely the next goal after sending the other 4.

Fingers felt strong today. Ready to be done with this Hugo climb but have learned a lot from it.

happy Halloween!

what I've been working on

 

this is Charlottesville. I started by putting up the climbing gym logo. And then I figured the next logical step would be to make these creepy eyes surrounded by black sludge and ichor and they'd be blasting lasers at the stuff around the Rocky Top logo. And then the laser reached across town and went over to the rival climbing gym that opened and blasted whatever was there and put up our logo. And now that the mission is over the formerly evil eyes will turn into plants and flowers and bugs and spread life and peace instead of death and destruction.

This picture is after the lasers have been fired and mid-transformation into the Tree of Not Making Things Blow Up But Rather Make Them Better

things I've found in wplace

 

very small town of Wallace North Carolina filled entirely with strawberry festival art

this is an island off the coast of Maine that someone has turned into a flower memorial for a lost loved one. we miss you Margaret.

this is a lake in the Upper Peninsula and the art is just a fish someone added but it's crazy how much it looks like a guy in a hat and a big jacket and two Italy boots.

this is on an island in the Northernmost reaches of Canada and there's that beige line that runs from Colombia all the way to as far north as the map goes and so I was scrolling these vast expanses of nothing and I fine this line and start following it and at this point someone has set up an Empanada stand and as people find it they leave a little person to wait in line for empanadas :)

if you follow that line I was talking about this is the end point. most of the line is completely empty alongside it and then at the end there's this little party for everyone who found it.

introduction to climbing league part two of which I am the czar and commissioner

 Gather round ye heathens, ne'er-do-wells and sordid lots. It is time again to compete in the ritual known as climbing league. Where you will meet your betters and your worsers. Where you will come to know that the climb is not your enemy. The climb is the occasion for the dance and the enemy is yourself--your weaknesses and inadequacies and shortcomings. The goal is to, in some small incremental way, banish these parts of yourself by completing the climb and overcoming a past, lesser version of you. Constant evolution. The winnowing of one's own soul and being into a sharp jabby pointy stick that can pierce through all set before it, even the heavens perchance. The transmutation of the will into movement.

WE ARE WHAT WE WALK BETWEEN! WE ARE WHAT WE WALK BETWEEN!

What does that mean?! Does it mean that climbing is the motion between two holds? Does it mean that our being is the conduit between what is and what is not? Does it mean that our existence is the tension between two irreconcilable truths? Does it refer to the self we just were and the self we are about to become? Does it refer to the canyon style walls in the Main Room?

No one knows what it means but it's provocative. It gets the people going! 

We have wiped the slate clean and now it is time for new trios to step forth and make their mark in the history of Rocky Top Climbing League. (name some teams)

And remember, the next time you fall off a climb, sit down on the mats and stare into the middle space between you and the wall or a person next to you and think, What am I doing? Why am I doing this? Why am I here right now? What does this mean? And then think about this quote from a book I read once,

"These questions had been considered a long time ago, decisions were made, answers recorded, and the book closed. If it had to be re-opened every time the going got rough, he would spend more time rationalizing than training."

Best of luck, climbers. May the chalk dry your hands and rest easy in your lungs.

the alliance of little critters

 I think all the little critters and creatures have a mutual unspoken respect for each other. Sure they have their disagreements and disputes. Maybe the don't always outwardly display signs of cooperation that we humans might recognize. 

If the little creatures and critters of the forests and the woods and the alleys and the neighborhoods could only have a little radio station where they could pay for ad space and give little public service announcements about how much the appreciate one another. Then things would be different. 

"Little rat thing. I'm some other little screaming rat thing of the night. And I love you. I love the way you run around with your big eyes, heart racing at a thousand beats per minute, eating crunchy things. Join in the chorus of screams that fill the night air."

The footage of the badger and the coyote going down the tunnel together is everything to me right now. I can dare to dream big because a coyote and a badger are friends.

we must never forget the lessons of The Music Man

why's there so much technology and innovation and so much wealth is being generated but things feel bad?

Harold Hill taught us that a good businessman doesn't sell something to fix a need. He invents a problem that only he has the answer to. They're creating problems. That's all they're doing.

my call to adventure is wplace.live

 there's this website that is Google maps but you can put pixels over it and so you can draw whatever you want and I put the climbing gym logo over the climbing gym and that is the plot that I will tend to.

that's the thing about me. I'm not an adventurer. I'm a tender. I tend to things. That is my natural state.

But I'll say this. I love a website. I love a place where you do one thing. A page for a thing. Not an infinite scroll mine. I hate the infinite scroll mine.

EDIT: CRAB ARE YOU MAKING A CRAB????!!!! LET'S GOOOOOO

 "oh dang dude I gotta get started. A few weeks ago I applied to be a fireman because why not and I just found out I got accepted and I have a three hour test tomorrow that I have to start studying for."

Heard someone say this tonight and that's called answering the call to adventure. 

here's some life advice

there are some things where you are probably too critical of yourself. 

there are other things where you should be more critical of yourself.

And now, I have presented to you two threads and by an act of critical thinking I should weave them together in some way to reveal a piece of wisdom and expound upon it. That's how this works. 

I don't know.

No wait I've got it.

So there's you. Existing.

And then there's the critical you that's watching the first you and being like, "ah that was awful." or whatever. "Go eat ham." "Stop eating so much ham." "Nah go back to eating ham actually."

And then, to address the first two statements, you have to observe the critical observer. You gotta watch the you that's watching you and think about why they think what they think. Why do they care so much about xyz but they don't care at all about lmnop? 

If you've never questioned or thought about your critical observer, that's like going through life and not realizing you had a settings menu the whole time. You could've changed the graphics. You could've changed the difficulty mode. You could've changed all sorts of things.

There you go. Check your settings mode. Turn on aim assist. Turn off friendly fire. Invert the y-axis. You gotta invert the y-axis.

 what you gotta do is think about what part of the story you are in in the story of your life. let me get out the chart.

Where are you here?

I don't know probably the Ordinary World.

I'll be on the lookout for the Call to Adventure soon.

training update

 had a little bit of fatigue today but still good efforts

-did all the moves on Easy Does It on the moonboard. got to the second to last move from the start. 7 problems left. 2 that I've done all the moves on 

-105lb weighted pull-up moved pretty well

-did a bunch of inverted rows on the rings and on a bar instead of pull-ups today

-I need to start doing pigeon stretch because I'm really tight there

-I also added in some one arm hangs from the bar because sometimes they feel really uncomfortable and nearly impossible to hold and that can't be right. they shouldn't feel that hard.

I got a mole (I think) forming on my chest. It doesn't look weird or anything but something about new spots forming on my skin makes me spiral a little. But at least the heart of rock n roll is still beating.

I briefly catch a glimpse of the interconnectedness of things and can't handle it

 Last night Youtube recommended the Ralph Bakshi animated movie Fire and Ice (free with commercials!). So I figured I'd watch it and do another recap like I did a little while ago but the movie is simply not good. I'd sum it up as directionless. BUT!

There's a line at exactly 55:41 where one of the bad guys Nekron says, "I'll squash you like a bug!" 

And I immediately IMMEDIATELY knew that I'd heard that line sampled in a song before and I tried googling it and nothing came up and then the band Pain kind of bubbled up into my brain and in the song 'Fight' at 54 seconds the sample plays.

I'm not saying I have a superhuman memory. I regularly forget important parts of important conversations and people's names that I should really know among other things. I'd say I have a better-than-average long term memory. But I think this particular pull borders on useless superpower. 

But also why? Why instant recognition for a song I haven't heard in at least 15 years and don't even like that much. It's not even one of my favorites. Why is that neural pathway or whatever so optimized and primed? Why can I not help but feel at the mercy of some web and force beyond my comprehension.

No one cares about the 1983 animated movie Fire and Ice which has a 67% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. No one cares about the band Pain from Alabama whose most notable song Jabberjaw was used in a Cartoon Network music video that aired during commercials in 1999- a song about the underwhelming Hanna-Barbara Scooby-Doo clone cartoon that ran for only 16 episodes in the Fall of 1976.

Why must I be the conduit and keeper of this total animal soup of time!?

tonight I had a double soup dinner

 that's right I had a double soup dinner.

you're thinking to yourself, wait Andy that's crazy it's Wednesday why would you pull out a double soup dinner is everything okay

thank you for concern let me assure that I've never been better especially now that I've had double soup dinner

the first soup of course was the progresso chickpea and noodle vegetarian soup with 17g of protein and I hate that without heating it because I've reached a point where I genuinely like canned soup at room temperature

and the reason it was unheated was because I was using the pan in that moment to boil water for the ramen soup that I was making which was of course the second soup in the double soup dinner

and now I feel laser focused and alert and full of energy and I need to tell you about what a powerful experience this has been for me and I recommend every try this as soon as dinnerly possible 

and now you're really in the total animal soup of time

 Allen Ginsberg said that about Carl Solomon. 

And he also said,

"with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years"

There are different ways to know something and a lot of them are better than ratty little sentences that grub apart a line and grease it into greebles between tiny verminous clutches. 

 I've already told this story on here but one time when I was in college this girl came up to me in the courtyard outside the library and she had a visual impairment and walked with a cane and she asked me to point her towards the trash can because she wanted to throw something away and instead of pointing her to the trash can liked she asked I said, "that's okay I can throw that away." and she very politely said "no I'll do it can you point to where they are." 

And I remember immediately having this moment of like, because she asked for help I assumed she was less capable than she was and tried to do too much and undermined her ability which was probably super annoying. 

It's interesting how being offered help in a way that's unwanted has this double bind of assuming incompetence and also outwardly appearing like a kind gesture and putting the person who then has to refuse help in a position of seeming rude. 

Complicated all the more by the fact that a lot of people don't ask for help and often silently want someone to proactively help them. And so how does anyone help anyone ever?

I guess accepting that social situations are inherently messy and people will hurt/annoy one another inevitably but that in a lot of cases the positives outweigh the negatives.

That's not a very exciting conclusion. 

Meaningful existence beyond survival is play and everything else is ego.

 from a very young age I've always tended to become overly sentimentally attached to things--like a random toy or stick or anything. I think it was because I tended to lose items a lot and then I'd get overly upset about losing them. But it's funny that I would grow up to live in time when things are becoming seemingly more and more sentient and I hate that. I don't want things to think. I don't want things to do anything. I want them to be something that I can act upon. I always want agency. More than anything else really. But I will never stop hating AI.

 A picture of the light of the setting sun bouncing off a mirror on the opposite wall and illuminating an orange print of a raccoon’s head with the words “LIVE FAST EAT TRASH” as if to suggest some sort of divine inspiration or call

I like to imagine that the last name 'Norman' was an on-the-spot lie combining the words 'normal' and 'man'

 My name?--oh, of course, it's Rodger...Normalman--uh Norman. Yeah. Rodger Norman. That's my name.

moonboard update: 9 2016 v4 benchmarks remaining

 sent Standing Rock today on the 2nd go.

of the 9 climbs I have left: I've done all the moves on Hugo Eliminate Clean. I've done all the moves on La Presa Di Constantinopol. I've done all the moves on Dispensory. I'm close on the starting moves of TBA Warm Up 1 that I tried at the end of the session.

That's 4 climbs that I should get in the next week or two. 

Of the 5 remaining after that--I dunno I'll probly do em.

you got sauce

 I'm gonna invent a restaurant called 'you got sauce' and what it is is we slowly collect sauces from other places, just like extra sauces. We start a campaign where people go through their junk drawers full of unused sauces and clean out their cars of sauce and we'll take 'em. We'll take all the sauces. And then if get food from a food place and come to our restaurant we'll give you sauce. And you're like 'why can't I just get sauce from the place I got the food from?' Well, we will pay you to take our sauce. That we got for free. That you gave us. What we'll do is we'll find all the prices from stuff from the 90s and we'll pay you enough to make what you ordered cost the 90s prices. And throw in sauce too. No if you give us the sauce. If you give us the sauce we'll pay you enough to make it a 90s price. Because 'you got sauce.' And then you can hang out in the lounge and watch ads and create conversational content for other patrons and just hang out there and watch ads. 

One thing I think that doesn't get talked enough about with collecting data is that's stupid and my data is worthless. I don't care about my data. I don't care about what I do on the internet. No meaningful information can be extracted from that that will make you money. It just won't. Look at my credit card bills. I buy gas every 2 months and groceries once a week. That's all I spend money on. What does 'sell my data' mean? My data about what? To whom? For what? That doesn't mean anything.

And maybe this makes me sound misinformed and bitter for no reason but I really think we should just all consider this information useless and stop propping up this awful idea of a business model. Some dumb little robot following me around all day and then going back to some weird guy in a tower, 'oh guess what your wickedness today he watched a video of a guying singing a song about talking on the phone and it made him sad'

'MWAhaHAHA EXCELLENT! I HAVE A BAGILLION DOLLARS NOW AND PULL THE STRINGS OF SOCIETY!'

what are we doing?

I'm gonna make up the plot to a movie really fast. in one thought. ready go

 ok so the movie is called Team Match.

At the start we meet a guy and everyone hates him and he's not good at anything and he has one friend but that friend doesn't even like him that much. Then we find out the the--there is a team and they need one more member to compete in the team match against the other team--the bad team--the bad team that always wins. There's going to be a match and the teams face each other. And so the small team they have a tryout and everyone is bad but the start guy gets lucky somehow and he's the best and so he gets put on the team but the team doesn't like him still and his one friend doesn't get put on the team and is resentful about it so their friendship is ruined. But then! So, later the team is having team practice and one of the bad team guys comes to the practice and he's mean to the good team and the guy like stands up for his teammate and gets magic lucky again and does a cool move that makes the bad guy leave and that makes the good team like the guy a little more. And the guy learns that he is lucky and that people like him when he's lucky so he has to do more of that. And so in the lead up to the big team match the good team uses the power of the start guy being lucky to beat other teams that we don't even care about and it comes down to the big team match against the bad team and the good team and OH look out! the friend from before has now made his way onto the bad team because he used the hate in his heart to grow knives for hands basically and he's knife hands now which is a huge threat. And so the guy before the game is like 'we can't face this team they have a guy who is my ex-friend and now he has knives for hands this is a serious concern. we could really get hurt. this isn't an ordinary team match like we were promised and on top of all that he really doesn't like me so he's gonna want to knife me first.' 

And the ref is like 'man I don't dang know just play the ding dang match or something.' And so they do but everybody just gives knife hands a super wide berth and knife hands at first he likes that he's winning but then even his own team is scared of him and it's ridiculous and he's like 'guys this is ridiculous you think I'm actually going to cut people open in a team match with my knives for hands? you really think I would do that?! these aren't even real knives!' And then he takes off the little covers he had and they were just fake knives he had over his real hands. And the ref is like 'that guy just had fake knives over his real hands! They were just lies he was wearing!' And the other team is like 'Oh man we get fooled and now we're way behind in the score!' So they have to rally and try really hard to win the match and the start guy gets lucky but not quite enough and they lose but then the guy is like 'Hey man! you gotta take some of their scores away because we all thought he really had knives for hands.' And the ref says, 'yeah you're right. minus points for their team because you can't pretend to have knives for hands so that nobody will get near you but then get frustrated that you're unlovable and take off the knives to go back to having hands. that's not allowed.' And so they win by technicality.

the end

did you know that brandy (you're a fine girl) and king harvest's dancing in the moonlight were both released in 1972?

 you know what else was released in 1972?

American Pie. banger.

Lean On Me. banger.

Rocket Man. banger.

I Gotcha by Joe Tex (featured in a Dr. Pepper commercial during my childhood.) banger

Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress. banger.

Garden Party. banger.

Bang a Gong  (Get it On). banger.

Use Me. banger.

Roundabout. banger.

I Can See Clearly Now. banger.

No but the reason Brandy is a good song is because the guy says

brandy

you're a fine girl (you're a fine girl)

what a good wife you would be (such a fine girl)

but my wife my love and my lady is the sea

doo-doo doo doo dodod doodood doooddo 

Not enough songs out there about meeting the love of your life but then giving yourself to the SEA. The sailing life. Tons of songs, and endless parade of songs about how romantic love is the be-all end-all of life. Only Brandy by the Looking Glass was brave enough to say that the life of a sailor is even greater than that. 

me explaining anime movies that YouTube recommends to me

 first up we got Fight! Iczer-1

So let me tell you what this is all about. There's these aliens, right? And they all look like women but the really bad one sounds like a man and they refer to him as a 'he'. And they're trying to conquer Earth for some reason. They think it will be easy because the earthlings are weak but then they realize that a rogue member of their kind named Iczer-1 is on Earth and she's stopping their invading forces. Iczer-1 looks like a futuristic David Bowie-esque intergalactic pop idol. She's got a light saber type thing and she can shoot bolts of yellow energy out of herself. She can also teleport and is generally a one-woman-army.

Then we go to Earth and meet this girl named Nagisa and she's a normal girl that goes to school and stuff but then strange things start happening where these horrible grotesque alien monsters start bursting out of her classmates and eventually her parents. What we learn is that the aliens want to get Nagisa because she is the only person who can 'synchronize' with Iczer-1 and what that means is they pilot a giant robot together called Iczer-Robo. But none of that has happened yet. Nagisa's parents get taken over by the horrible alien monsters and Iczer-1 appears and kills them but then Nagisa freaks out because Iczer-1 has just killed her parents essentially. Nagisa hates Iczer-1. This is horrible news because Iczer-1 loves Nagisa and that's the only reason they can pilot the giant robot together. 

It's unclear if Iczer-1 loves Nagisa because they can synchronize or if it's the other way around. Anyway Nagisa wants nothing to do with any of this but then a full-blown invasion happens in the city and this lady alien we met at the beginning named Cobalt is leading the charge in her own giant robot. And so things are going very poorly for our fair Earth dwellers. Iczer-1 has no time to woo and court Nagisa so she summons the Iczer-Robo and forces Nagisa inside. But then they're getting pulverized and everything is coming up doo-doo when Iczer-1 reminds Nagisa that her parents are dead and that these alien types want to make everyone as dead as her parents. Somehow this clicks for Nagisa even though it just happened this afternoon, this has all taken place in a day so I don't know why she needs to be reminded what the stakes are but in her defense she's been through a lot so maybe I'm being overly critical but Nagisa snaps out of it and her hate combined with Iczer-1's love creates a powerful force that obliterates Cobalt's robot. The Earth is saved for now.

This is the end of part one of a three part series. But for now I think it's enough to consider why the writers thought it would be a good idea to make Nagisa so resistant and angry towards Iczer-1. When everything starts going down she just starts throwing a tantrum but not even in like a, I'm in shock, I'm losing my mind kind of way. She just gets really irritable and grouchy. Iczer-1 has to drag her into the robot and again she's just angry the way a 5 year old would be angry they have to get in the car to go to the cry store that makes you cry. There are lots of reasons a hero could be reluctant in this situation and that would make us sympathetic to the character. Alternatively, it could be fun if Nagisa was like, 'this is awesome'. Shoot, if an alien girl said she loved me and we had to pilot a giant robot together--shooooot. Also, unless I missed it, we don't know why Iczer-1 has defected from her people and wants to save Earth. She just fights stuff. Which is kinda cool. I don't hate that choice to not tell us.

The story has parallels to 2 of my favorite shows, FLCL and Neon Genesis Evangelion. FLCL also features a strange alien girl who falls in love with a human and uses them to further their alien schemes. NGE's main character is a boy who absolutely does not want to pilot a giant robot to fight aliens that threaten to destroy the Earth. Those series came out in 2000 and 1995 respectively while Iczer-1 came out in 1985 so maybe Iczer-1 provided some inspiration and those later shows fleshed-out the characters more and added their own style and humanity to it.

I don't know if that was anything but I wrote it and maybe you read it.

Mr. Bear

Imagine the silliness of addressing a bear, the forest's very own resident mayor, as a Mister. Absurd. Hard to fathom.

But did you know that mister is derived from master which used to be the term applied to boys who were not old enough to be considered mister. Imagine what our bear friend would think of this. He would roar and roar with rage until the water left the river and the trees shook themselves to their bones.

The word master comes from the magister which is latin for teacher or master.

Within magister is the root magis which has TWO etymologies. A fine day for the bear indeed. One hive and double the honey.

The Latin meaning of magis means 'more' or 'greater' while the Greek comes from magos which means 'magician' or 'wise man'.

And now we see our Mr. Bear bumbling his way through the woods. Looking for trash cans to overturn and trampolines to ruin. We know that he carries on a rich tradition of words--words that exist entirely outside of his realm of awareness. Godspeed Mr. Bear.

I was in the same dorm as car seat headrest

 recently I discovered that 13 years ago I was in the same dorm building as the guy known as the band Car Seat Headrest and this is a wonderful thing and I will tell you why. 

People say 'if you think you won't achieve something, you're right. If you think you will achieve something, you're right."

And this demonstrates the power of setting intentions and belief. But in the example of Car Seat Headrest, if I believed I would never meet Car Seat Headrest in real life I would be profoundly mistaken for I had already met him. In fact, I believe I once talked to him about the overflowing toilet and the ground floor near his room. And so I am free from the prison of my own beliefs. The world is far more vast and complex than we can possibly account for and Car Seat Headrest could be lurking behind any corner, even the ones of our past. 

And so I present to you a kind of agnostic optimism, the inverse of Thomas Hardy's poem Hap. 

update on sending all the moonboard benchmark v4s

did we send all the v4's in September?

NO!

But there are only TEN left. Which is less than the starting total of *checks notes* 28 or so.

The plan is to keep on keeping on. This week I sent 3 climbs that I was really happy to check off. There are at least two more that I feel close on that I can probably finish next week.

I think unless I hit a wall where I'm truly stuck and can't make even the slightest bit of progress then I will continue.

Today I did some good self-talk and practiced trying really hard. As I kid I probably did more self-talk than a lot of kids and maybe that's why I've never stopped trying at athletic pursuits. It's just self-talk.

it's October and that means it's spooky time

 My contribution to the field of spookiness for this year is this:

The first thing that people think of when they think of spooky is of course skeletons. But what if other systems of the human body were also animated.

Take the nervous system out of a body and call that a Nerveton.

Take the lymphatic system out of the body and call that a Lympheton.

Blood? Hemeton.

What else? Muscles. Call that a Buffeton.

Skin? Skineton.

I think there's potential and I think that would be really spooky.

today I got a really heartfelt thank you and appreciation on my way into coaching and it was when I really needed one and helped me a lot

thanks craig

 Sometimes as someone who works with children I recognize that certain children like to play the game of 'I'm a little monster and I will be bad and you are authority and you will stop me.' Which, unless the kid is incredibly charming, is a real drag and no fun to play. It's tiring and not very rewarding to regulate someone else's behaviors. I prefer to be around people who take responsibility for their own actions and regulate themselves. Or so I thought. For so very long.

But maybe those annoying kids are on to something. Maybe they're aware that on some level it's really lame to regulate yourself and internalize authority. Become your own jailor, so to speak. Or maybe they intuitively understand the old Christian idea that to try create your own reality is to create Hell for yourself and that's why you need to give yourself over to God. 

I don't know. I think a deep part of me actually loves being the authority of myself and being self-contained. 

The idea of 'being bad' as something that is punished externally I think honors or recognizes in some way that whatever was bad is a real part of the self. And that being 'well-adjusted' and educated and civilized forces you in a physically non-violent way to reject parts of yourself. To kill parts of yourself. And I think it's worth being skeptical of. At the very least.

life is largely about narrative building

 humans basically process everything through narrative. we aren't logic based creatures. we're story based creatures.

and in my case,

when I think about squats

the story I tell myself is that I'm a medieval peasant who was caught stealing from the king's pantry to feed my family and I've been thrown in a dungeon and my punishment is that every week I have to squat a weight 5 times in a row and do that 5 times and every week the weight goes up by 5lbs until I am crushed. And I imagine me as a peasant, clinging to life. forcing myself to get stronger so that I can live another week but knowing that the week just prolongs the dread of knowing that I will eventually be crushed. But maybe I can squat so heavy that the king's men and the king's horses won't be able to find an apparatus heavy enough to crush me and I'll be able to go free and see my wife, Honda, and my two children, Civic and Accord once more.

some comics I made 10 years ago

these hold up

 

pop punk

 here's what I'll say. 

Say what you want about the year I was born in, but it was a great time to grow up experiencing pop punk. That's something I was there first hand for that people older than me and people younger than me just don't get. 

Did it tend towards being soulless and commercial and exploitative? Of course it did. It's the music industry. 

But I was there.

I was there for sum 41, blink 182, fall out boy, green day, paramore, panic! at the disco, my chemical romance. 

Did they stand for anything? No not really. Just some lowest common denominator angst and romance and government approved rebellious nature. 

If the main form of participating in society is tasteful and conscious consumption, if your record of existence is judged by the media you consume and assimilate into your being--then that's a bad setup. You can't be doing that. You have to unironically  have bad taste to show that you are self that exists independent of what you consume

No but what I actually think is good art grows like a mushroom.

the best things in life are free but are the worst things in life also free?

 Even a little bit of poop in any meal completely ruins it. Therefore, if things that are free contain the extremes of experience, we should avoid them at all cost. Pun intended. Everything should be free. Including bones. With my new bones premium plan, we will make sure that you are never without your bones. We have a customer service hotline that you can call at any time to speak to a robot.

There should be one food that's always free and it's illegal for anyone to charge money for it and it should be asparagus. And it should be a great honor to grow it and distribute it but you can never ever charge money for it. Asparagus should always be free.

 Growing up on Saturday mornings Maw Maw would come pick me and my sister up in her little red car and on the way to Timberville we would stop at the Hardee's. Or sometimes we would go all the way to New Market for the Burger King. 

Today I was feeling pretty tired. More tired than normal. It took me a long time to wake up. But the thing that really woke me up was I driving to this park where I do my workout on Wednesday and I caught a left at the light that I never catch. Bare minimum I have to wait one long cycle and it's not too uncommon to have to wait two cycles. And that's after waiting two cycles at the light before it.

But I caught that green today and I felt the endorphins immediately flooding my brain. 

I think if I was trying to come up with an idea for a company I would try to find a way to make people have to pay a subscription fee for their own bones. Probably what it will be as that as a parent you sign up for a plan for your child to have bones and then when they turn 18 they have to make the bone payments themselves or the bone collectors come.

Your bones aren't free. They aren't even yours.

I don't think I'll ever have a meaningful experience in my life that involves a pelican. 

It's my responsibility to make peace with that. 

I've also set up my life in a way where I don't interact with large vats of things. Nothing that I could fall into and undergo a fantastic transformation. That's not the hand I've drawn. 

I think vats are full of potential. 

You got bats, cats, fats, hats, lats, mats, gnats, pats, rats, tats, and vats. And then eats and oats. 

I want the kind of friendship that eats and oats must have.

I think a mistake millenials made as a generation was hating on clowns. 

"Oh clowns are scary! I'm so scared of clowns!"

"I hate clowns."

They were wrong. Clowns are back. We need clowns more than ever. Expand your knowledge of clowns and clowning! Ignore my advice at your own peril!

as I was leaving Wegman's last night this guy was sitting outside playing little blues riffs on his harmonica and the air was warm and still and I thought I should just sit in my car with my groceries in the back seat and the windows down and listen to this guy mess around on his harmonica

and I didn't because I had frozen food and because I am sleeping my way through my life and if I was really awake I would've sat and listened and basked in the beauty that life so generously offers every day and my only solace is to write it down and imagine a world where I did that.

I think I'm good at coaching because I've learned enough tricks from doing it long enough to know how to structure a practice and keep things moving but mostly because I try to see people for who they are and celebrate that and show support in ways both direct and indirect and I think when I've been a positive part of people's lives it's because of that.

Real attention and genuine support are like gold.