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.