and morning nursed by its picture

a heart reason prepared me a shipyard calendar

to type “red” or red raven as comb to commemorate the golden prayers 

as “no eyes in the balcony extraction cord buddha to intellect ridgeback 

with no me in the cord that connects buddhacore to ridgeback intellect

with sacred receipts, the wireless weft up unheavenly glare claw 

nail department watercress,

glare claw watercress nail department unheavenly 

wireless nail department egg easter and morning

and morning nursed by its picture the dice dice dice man 

and wordsworth is pops, so say

“okay, oak camera 

eggplants repeat single heron eye standing with floor pot richter

repeat single richter heron eye

single richter pot heron eye in the chakra cave 

chakra caves ogre pain chipmunk igloos, and bolt to moon coral

moral pain, paved chakra 

ochre caves paved in chakra igloo pain

igloo pain & wine scissors 

in the solstice embryo divination field of mignonettes swallowing balconies

marmoset zaris sagoin and i'm in the cryomembranous divination field 

swallowing saffron veils of balconies

 in the saffron snake place strewn with medals he gazed 

in graves inbox ajax the moth with grey heart

into ajax inbox, he read the innocence of duplicity 

or the fragility of the heroic code

and watched her dip her light 

in wounded balloons, watched the elder cat 

dip her light of stethoscopes in sewer magic

to see microscopic swimsuits that hear saxophones frowning

where the world reeled in roaring tides 

in ravines of poo pressed teacups clinking

where clock throat brain bargain typewriter teachings

effloresce aplenty

for popsicle apple code limelight 

the bellman cried out a symbol of prey to rent body prey

salt and crossbone and chimes of poo 

he flushed phone and crescent triple  nipple and the rose sunglasses

trident eyes dna receipts

saying kettles, sound tracks, and you should enjoy this

with me in my two-humped motor home, with what better tympans 

will you a line record?

of woe, a game pad emotion wry 

i will you live in line with what lines will record

here in fearful face desktop, in sweat orb millet is dharma

with madness as divine punishment

with madness as the uttermost collies in archery 

see friend, barracudas in barrels of snow

an eight-spoked traffic light chandelier asterisk 

swinging storms of cellular expulsion

foreign backhoe foreign leafless tree 

the chocolately chocolate prey as teacup breast

teacup milked breast button tent under leafless tree

relieved to know her tram links to cauliflower caveat 

where ungulates undulate fleur-de-lis 

lightning, touch leafy green circle! booth to allah eggplant

and as rain play commences: elephants elephant

in joy, and in field of prey, I face doberman pinchers as the road cherries 

now cornflower, i raise pinchers

as the road cherries, the phonograph of penelope comes back half-complete

with popsicle-scarce efflorescences

the scroll dart musk button with interior rain play 

as goddess, for in speech common crap falls to lemon 

to lemon the sunflower, no

to dragon inside without a radioactive conjunction  

to nest without toothbrush as earth letter beneath

for the giraffe two beavers down

and crown the head as it crosses each symbol

i blue book, i sit scarecrow

my monstrous hound shovels feathers shovels on the floor 

shovels on the floor into the laughing bag of before

she spins intertwined from green, she telescope sin into coronets quinoa

on dagger-gloomed walkways  the verb poor scrapbook alchemy

she teeter totters green-grey on the antennae of the grey moth rottweiler

through sieve-mouthed grooves  and kiss space collision.

a sallow pug now, a rider grinning in old savagery

a bachelor in treespirits whispers me mouse maids 

see friend, amphitheaters whisper baby fingers 

for dryers ripe and the knife that cheeseburger limelights

it's passionate and feverish for unamused rucksacks 

to cover out with advantage! a trilby parting red lip skillets

to grieve for a laugh just two liters down

railroad railroad railroad 

i miss the robe robe racing

with its disautomated brain all feverish

the bereaved giraffe felt too bereaved to leave town 

My acquaintance refuses to buy coffee from a coffee-house because he says his money will sponsor wasteful behaviour.

An aspect of the coffee-house is latte art, and baristas do take pride in latte art, however extremely large amounts of milk and coffee must be expended to gain mastery in latte art.

One wonders what happens to the “practice lattes”. Well, the answer from an industry insider is that the coffee gets poured down the sink.

[did I hear a gasp of shock? ]

Yes, it brings a heartache to the layperson-observer, (and to me, too), but it appears that baristas worldwide have grown desensitised to this phenomenon. “It's all part of training.”

My acquaintance – who is a freegan – reasons that coffee-houses can do this with impunity because customers are, in fact, paying for the discarded cups of coffee. Sponsoring wasteful behaviour, in effect. The profit the coffeehouse makes from your payment is enough to offset the loss. Hence the boycott.

(this article features an example of a freegan's lifestyle. In brief, the freegan wants to reduce his participation in money-based transactions and rescue “waste”, such as edible fruits that would otherwise be discarded by a shopkeeper due to aesthetic “flaws”. )

At this point in the argument, a spokesperson of the coffeehouse would hasten to add that company protocols include diluting the milk with equal parts of water, for beginner baristas to practise with higher frequency at lower expense. (For the purpose of practice, of course, and certainly not for customer service.)

That certainly sounds reasonable.

However, the on-the-ground reality is that the coffee industry – or, rather, the latte art industry – does attract many young teenagers, who, more likely than not, act with emotional immaturity; enforcement might be an issue. Imagine a 25-year-old Outlet Manager trying to rein in giggling 19-year-old part-timers.

And unless the customer has become best friends with the barista-in-charge, it is unlikely the former can ask for one of the “practice lattes”, whether he offers to pay for it or not. Quite likely, the Head Barista will say: “I can't serve this to you as the latte art does not meet company standards.”

Why am I talking about this now? Newspapers have been reporting that coffee prices are increasing worldwide due to damage to coffee crops, in light of extreme weather. For example, unusually rainy weather at coffee farms might lead to unsanitary mould forming on coffee beans which have been left outdoors to (hopefully) dry. This means that entire batches of coffee beans (named “green beans” in industry parlance) are being condemned and regarded as not-suitable-for-sale, at the farm level. Such scarcity in green beans drives up coffee prices at the wholesale level.

This means that coffee-houses may, very likely, pass on the cost to customers. This certainly sounds unavoidable, and to their credit, at least one barista has expressed reluctance to increase prices.

However one wonders if all areas of inefficiencies have been addressed – or optimised – before the price increase. Ahem, ahem, I saw your employee pour ten lattes down the sink, in one hour.

An intelligent friend of mine has proposed a way forward: analogous to a hair salon that lets you pay different prices for your haircut based on each hairstylist's seniority and expertise, perhaps you could have different options at a coffee-house: pay a higher price for exquisite latte art from a Latte Art Competition Champion, or pay a lower price for a brown-coloured mix of milk and coffee, by a beginner barista.

This could resolve pain points from both the barista and the customer: some customers actually don't care about the 5-millimetre difference in the “swan's neck” in your latte art, while others do.

And I have heard baristas express irritation at oblivious customers who swirl the entire painstakingly-crafted latte art with a blunt spoon upon receiving their cup.

Let the couldn't-care-less customers pay less – and spare the over-worked baristas the effort of making latte art that would go unappreciated anyway – and let the I-want-quality customers pay more. Sounds good?

But, sadly I don't envision existing coffee-houses taking up this idea.

As well-explained by Niccolò Machiavelli in “The Prince”:

“It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.”

another solution I have come across – to reduce waste – is to employ the discarded milk-and-coffee mixture as materials for a cocktail named White Russian. However this seems to be the exception rather than the norm in present-day coffeehouses. A rarity, in fact. (And of course cocktail purists might scoff at the idea).

So, go ahead, then, sip your troubles away. Let your cappuccino comfort you as the planet burns and melts. As long as you are happy to hand over the money, of course. The customer happily pays, and the barista happily practises.

Am I happy? No, I am running away to the seashore, to listen to the ocean weep – far, far away from laughing humans.

This is a fantastic, accurate description of how I feel about me and all human relationships.

> Watch this video by @joseffinspiration on TikTok

#shares

Whatever our souls are made of, these two are the same.

She sat cross-legged in the dim hush of the room, a lamp casting long purple shadows across the pages of her journal.

The house was quiet asleep— only the german cuckoo clock broke the silence, the ticking like distant footsteps.

But she was wide awake, pulse quietly chanting a name.

There were moments— when she could feel him before the words even came. As if thoughts crossed chasms of time and distance to find her.

Tonight was one of those nights.

Earlier, she, full of brightness and grace, greeted her friends in big circle of love. Smiling the way they loved, delivering kindness like communion wafers.

But inside, behind the soft armor of charm, she was somewhere else entirely. A secret garden, locked from the world, with a name carved into every tree.

No one noticed. They never did.

She felt something unique in the pantheon of her life.

Seen. Truly seen.

As if her soul had a shape that someone could finally trace. Wanted—yes, but not just a carnal lust that felled so many through history.

A desire for her thoughts, her cleverness, her edges, her ruin.

A kissed mind when others looked away.

Ache in that beautiful, dangerous way. The ache that poetry understands.

As though each rib was a string, and he a bow taut and sinewy. Every letter from him a sonata. Every glance imagined—a chorus.

She dreamed of possibilities that couldn’t be. Not in this world. Maybe not in the next—

in dreams, in whispered hours, in glances exchanged across crowded rooms. A liminal dwelling of existence.

She closed her journal slowly, placed it on the bedside table like a secret relic.

Then, stretching out across the covers, she imagined the weight of a head on her chest, and fingers tracing poetry.

He had asked how her day went. He always asked. No one else did, not like that.

Not with reverence. And that made all the difference.

So she closed her eyes and let sleep take her gently— drifting into firelight and lilac air, barefoot in the studio, the scent of oil paint and summer.

Still whispering poems as pierced realities.

As if this time she wouldn’t wake up alone.

---

#poetry #confession #osxs

Prayers, etc.: * 04:30 – Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel * 06:00 – praying The Angelus. * 06:10 – praying the Glorious Mysteries of the Traditional Holy Rosary in English, followed by the Memorare * 07:00 – Readings from today's Mass include – Epistle: Eccli 24:23-31 and Gospel: Luke 11:27-28. Followed by making an Act of Contrition then making an Act of Spiritual Communion, followed by praying Archbishop Vigano’s prayer for USA & President Trump. Followed by today's Morning Devotion Psalm 64 as found in Benedictus Magazine * 12:00 – praying The Angelus * 16:40 – prayerfully reading the Athanasian Creed in English. * 18:00 – praying The Angelus, followed by today's Evening Devotion, (Psalm 127), as found in Benedictus Magazine, followed by the Magnificat: Luke 1:46-55. * 19:00 – praying the hour of Compline for tonight according to the Traditional Pre-Vatican II Divine Office, followed by Fr. Chad Ripperger's Prayer of Command to protect my family, my sons, my daughter and her family, my granddaughters and their families, my great grandchildren, and everyone for whom I have responsibility from any demonic activity. – And that followed by the Tuesday Prayers of the Association of the Auxilium Christianorum

Health Metrics: * bw= 216.94 lbs. * bp= 154/94 (64)

Diet: * 06:35 – 1 bowl of oatmeal, ½ pb&j sandwich * 08:20 – pizza * 12:20 – meat loaf and white bread * 17:10 – snacking on saltine crackers

Chores, etc.: * 04:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:50 – monitored bank accounts activity * 06:30 – follow news reports from various sources, and nap * 10:00 – yard work, trim big bushes at either end of flower bed * 10:45 – follow news reports from various sources * 11:45 – go to bank * 12:20 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 13:30 – most of the rest of the afternoon found relaxing music playing in the background as I lightly followed news reports or quietly read through my prayers and devotions while waiting for tonight's Indiana Fever WNBA Game

Chess: * 09:30 – moved in all pending CC games

A Response at Thirty-One

“I want to write again”, I think to myself, as I open up write.as for the first time since February. I scroll through the most recent posts, stopping to click and read any that grab my attention. Finally, I read through one in particular that links me to a blank write.as page...

Write about it.

There is too much. Where do I even begin? Maybe that's the point, maybe that's the process and I need to embrace it. One day at a time, one meaningful or completely random entry at a time... one thought, one memory at a time.

Why now? Does this come with aging? Is this even the appropriate space to attempt unpacking my life?

Thank you for the push.

Side note, I still haven't figured out how to add a proper bold title on this website.

Another quiet day in the Roscoe-verse winds down.

I was able to get a little yard work done this morning. We have a flower bed that runs across the full front of our house. At either end of that flower bed are two big bushes that can transform into hideous monsters if left unattended for too long. This morning I attended to both of them, pruning quite a bit of foliage. They look much more civilized now. And I was able escape into the house, under the a/c before the worst heat of the day came upon us.

The afternoon and evening found relaxing music playing in the background as I lightly followed news reports or quietly read through my prayers and devotions, etc., while waiting for tonight's Indiana Fever WNBA Game. And that game is now underway as I sit here at the keyboard. Midway through the 1st Quarter the score finds the New York Liberty leading my Indiana Fever 23 to 16.

And the adventure continues.

The original web promised structured knowledge—but what we got was a mess of HTML, JavaScript hacks, and data silos. Schema.org tried to clean it up with shared vocabularies for Person, Event, Place, and more. But we rarely treat those vocabularies as more than a sprinkle of SEO dust.

What if we took them seriously? What if we modeled them compositionally?

Schema.org as a Category

Category theory gives us the tools. Think of schema.org like this:

• Each @type is an object in a category.
• Each property (location, memberOf, startDate) is a morphism.
• Subclass relationships (MusicEvent → Event) are inclusion morphisms.
• You can compose properties like functions:

  nginxCopyEditPerson → Organization → Place
  

Now your schema becomes a diagram, not just a dictionary. Your data becomes an instance of a presheaf over this category—structured, queryable, and introspectable.

Functors, Not Formats

This reframes structured data:

• It’s not just JSON-LD or RDF.
• It’s not about serialization.
• It’s about mappings of meaning—functors from schema to sets.

You can validate with commutative diagrams. You can infer with composition. You can transform safely with categorical structure.

From Markup to Meaning

Once you go categorical:

• Your templates become morphisms.
• Your API responses are natural transformations.
• Your app is a functor from semantic space to interaction space.

This isn’t hand-waving—it’s how we start modeling a semantic web that can compose.

Why Now?

Because we’re building decentralized systems. Because LLMs want structured prompts. Because web3 needs shared semantics. Because we finally care again about meaning.

And because we have the math.

Nearly every morning, I don a black “sarum” cassock—a long robe with ancient ties that distinguishes a member of the clergy and one that makes me look a bit like either Neo from The Matrix, or Snape from the Harry Potter series, or Kylo Ren from Star Wars. And many of those mornings I think of something Eddy once said: “I still don’t understand Chuck becoming an Episcopalian. He was so counter-cultural…”

Eddy was my youth pastor growing up, a mentor and friend. He taught me to skateboard and surf and also served to incubate my Christian spirituality, often through talks on the long drive to and from the beach from our hometown of Pine Hills, just outside Orlando, Florida. I first met Eddy when I was like seven years old and he was a seminary student hanging out in the church library where I liked to play whenever I had to come to work with my mom (she was the financial secretary for our Baptist church). In my later teenage years, Eddy served to help direct my rebellious tendencies into something good and godly.

I’ve written about this recently, but I discovered skateboarding the summer before my eighth grade year and punk rock alongside that. This awakened a fairly dormant rebellious streak that had me challenging authority and cultural norms and, much later, the “sacred cows” of my Baptist church. As a child of the nineties, I disdained hypocrisy and sought authenticity. I embraced Jesus’ words directed at the Pharisees:

You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy about you, by saying: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me. And in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ (Matthew 15:7-9 NASB)

Eventually, a sexual abuse scandal rocked our church and then ramped all this way up. The scandal came on the heels of two significant antecedent events: the firing of my high school English teacher and the ongoing attempts to suppress our church youth group—both things instigated by key members of the church community. My English teacher was very much into art and opening people’s minds and her assigning of the book Flowers for Algernon to middle school students royally pissed off some people (especially the home-school sect that saw this as evidence that even “Christian” education was going to “corrupt” their kids). She refused to apologize and so was fired. My church youth group was deeply scrutinized from the get-go because we had a more rock-oriented praise band, and this in the midst of the notorious “Worship Wars” of late-90s evangelicalism.

And so, I was exposed to the use of reason and critical thinking. I battled the more cult-like elements of my deeply conservative church. All of this resulting in me becoming a bit like a Silicon Valley type, embracing disruption and reinvention under the guise of my own arrogance and still-budding intelligence.

I created and led a Bible study (called Splinter) at a skate park. I had a whole entourage of misfit kids that loaded into my truck to skate and surf and play loud music. We all debated and argued about what was “essential” to being Christian all in service of exposing the shaky foundations of our parents’ ideas about the Church that wound up leading to lies, hypocrisy, and the active covering up of multiple sexual abuse scandals in order to maintain a certain status quo.

So, yeah, Eddy was right. I was “counter-cultural.”

Eddy had said this to my friend Maria and her counter was: “if you know Chuck so well then you’d see that this is exactly like him and is itself counter-cultural.”

See, here’s the thing I learned: embracing a tradition is itself counter-cultural. But I also learned that, almost without fail, the sorts of folks who refuse to submit to a tradition—those disruptive types—all wind up being exposed as abusers or sex-pests; exploitative and borderline narcissistic people. Because they feel that if “the rules” are “made-up” then those rules don’t apply, resulting in people who become a sort of rule to themselves and wind up living indulgent lives that hurt many people.

***

A lot changed for me when I walked into the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach, Florida as worshiper for the first time.

I had been struggling for many years with church. I read from the Bible nearly daily and still considered myself Christian. But after watching back-to-back pastors at my childhood church leave because they couldn’t stop exploiting vulnerable women in the congregation for sexual purposes, I had a hard time trusting pastors and even church communities.

Too many churches are built on the personalities of their pastors. In fact, this is often reinforced architecturally. The more Calvinist/Zwinglian-informed churches of the Protestant Reformation placed nigh sacramental importance on preaching and so altars were moved to being in front of and below soaring pulpits that served as the focal point of church buildings, so placed in order to maximize the acoustics for preaching in a world before microphones. Traditional churches placed pulpits (if they had them at all) off to the side, because sermons (if they were even delivered) were seen as being in service of the celebration of the Mass (Holy Eucharist/Communion).

Even when I was a regular church-goer, I saw the whole thing as a kind of facade. “Church” was a production and excuse to see my friends. Real worship happened in small Bible study and prayer groups. Because of this, the worship space of the church didn’t really matter. It was to be practical, above all else. Adorning a church with things like art seemed like a waste of time and money. I wasn’t opposed to art (I spent a summer worshiping at a small up-start church called “Journey” that had little community-theater-like skits right before the sermon that I thought was really cool at the time), but I felt that ornate church buildings were opulent and indulgent. I mean, my church was my high school gymnasium. The floor under my feet was a very nice basketball court, covered in rubber mats. I had PE and lunch in that same space on Monday through Friday.

Don’t get me wrong. I saw the beauty of ornate church buildings. My first serious girlfriend was Roman Catholic and even though I had qualms about worshiping at her parish, I couldn’t deny the beauty of stained glass windows and gothic arches. But, to my mind, these were off-limits or akin to museums. Serious houses of worship were industrial buildings with exposed ceilings painted black.

I’d visited Bethesda-by-the-Sea a few times during my freshman year of university. It is a stand-out beautiful building that many people think dates to the 1500s. During the day, the doors of the church were open. The grounds consist of cloistered walkways and English-style gardens. At the time, the church offered the only free parking near one of the beaches where I surfed, and so I’d park to surf and then sit in the quiet of the gothic space or the gardens after drying off.

It was a different girlfriend that had suggested we try worshiping at Bethesda. The idea was an absolute epiphany and immediately engaged my rebellious streak. What could be more counter to the sort of evangelicalism I had grown up in than to worship in an ornate gothic church with stained glass windows, clergy in robes, singing dusty old hymns with an organ-backed choir, and populated by some of the wealthiest people in the world?

Those old money, country-club folks wound up absolutely embracing me, a bicycle-riding, torn jeans and thrift-store-blazer-wearing kid with a faux-hawk and a lip piercing. I actually became excited about going to church, and was confirmed as an Episcopalian only three months after my first ever service.

What did it was the tradition.

I came to find that there was freedom in submitting to a tradition, to embracing the fact that others had long-ago asked many of the same questions about the church and had fought the same battles I had. There was no need to reinvent something that had already been reinvented many times before. Further, I found that submitting to a tradition was good for my soul.

When I was drifting aimlessly among the flotsam of an imploded evangelicalism, I was disruptively trying to construct a Christianity free from the hypocritical bullshit rules—those “commandments of men” that Isaiah and Jesus spoke of. But, as I said a moment ago, I began to find that as the “bullshit” rules didn’t apply to me, other rules didn’t either. And I began to start down the path of so many before me.

I honestly believe that, had I not discovered the apostolic traditions as enshrined in the Episcopal Church, I very well might be one of those guys you read about online. Another evangelical caught in a scandal of his own making.

Sara Miles, in her book Take This Bread (about her sudden conversion to Christianity through the Episcopal Church), writes of wearing vestments as a Eucharistic server. She says that putting on those funny robes reminded her of her days as a chef and that there was a sort of suppressing of the ego that comes with that: “the uniform changed me from an individual, with my own tedious history, to a ritual figure, one of millions of restaurant workers, with a time-honored and predictable role.”

People often ask me why I insist on wearing what I wear. Aren’t you hot in that? is the most common form of this. I once had a parishioner passive-aggressively comment on my preference for full vestments at holy communion with “when we’d do this service with the previous rector, he’d often just wear a stole over his plain clothes. So don’t feel obligated to fully vest for our small mid-week service.”

My reply to her: “One wears white tie to dine with the Queen. Therefore, I believe I should wear the chasuble when dining with God.”

I wear a cassock for two reasons: one, I can have a t-shirt and shorts on underneath while still looking like a priest. Two, it corrects for my ego. I am stepping into a role, a life, into which I have been ordained. It reminds me that, as a Christian, “it is no longer I that lives, but Christ who lives in me.”

The cassock is meant to be uncomfortable. This is because the ordained life, like the Christian life at large, is not comfortable. I am marked as someone who lives a particular kind of Christian life, one that is bigger than my ego and individuality. The ego and the over-emphasis on “individuality” has not done us a service as a people. Our world has become subject to a cacophonous noise of colliding egos, almost like a kind of static. As a sinner, left to my own devices, my ego would lead me to places that both leave me empty and cause lots of pain to others. This is true of all of us.

Submitting to a tradition, the Tradition, frees us from that chaos. It provides the right amount of boundary in order for our individuality to bloom, but not take over. Tradition prunes us and allows us to thrive. Our culture is one of narcissistic noise where many individuals are disruptively reinventing the world. When everyone sees themselves as “counter-cultural” then no one is counter-cultural—what they are is, simply, the culture. If rejecting tradition is the norm then embracing it is something radical.

A Christianity that understands itself as traditional goes against the flow of the dominant culture. Therefore, it is rebellious. It is counter to the culture.

Eddy was right. He just didn’t know it at the time.

---

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

greetings!

I had started writing a long post about the lawn mowing but like who cares whether it’s too warm to mow lawns and whether I run out of gasoline or not?, leaving just a shaved thin stripe out there.

Speaking of which, Do you ever worry when going to the dentist or something, having like a root canal filling or something that the dentist suddenly dies or otherwise disappears mid surgery and then what? You sitting there with the excavated hole in that tooth and full of sedation and then what?

I used to go to fitness dance class, would have my step board in the front most row to the right just below the speakers and I would go every Tuesday and I would learn the choreography by heart and I would fantasise about the instructor suddenly had to take an emergency call or something and then I would step up and lead the class in her absence.

Ok so I’ll write some more soon, as you can see, I’ve got my mojo back

My eyelids are doing their best to stay open. I turn on my computer to write every day, hoping to get my thoughts into something even I can understand. But when I do, every sentence I type, every key I press, feels like I am adding pressure on them to close.

I got some sleep last night, with the help of my little friend Advil PM, but not the night before. Maybe I have just been overthinking, or maybe not doing enough. I want to eat and just waste the day away. I usually gravitate toward video games because at least they give me a sense of accomplishment, even if it is false.

The pressure to keep my eyes open is strong. The world around me feels like it is crumbling. I am falling behind at work and need to keep up, since it feels like I will be obsolete soon thanks to AI. You would think this would drive me to be my best at work, but I am only beginning to care.

I try to remember my life before this job, when I was really struggling. But it is hard to remember that feeling, since I was not present on this earth. I was stuck inside my head, screaming to be let out.

This job has given me so much, but that is all it is to me: a job. It is not life. Life is what I want to make it, but that does not even make sense to me, since I spend so much of it waiting for the next day. Waiting for something to happen that will give me meaning and purpose.

That does not make sense to me either. I always say life has no meaning, but that means you can make it whatever you want. So if that is how I see things, why do I just wait for something to happen to me?

I know nothing will. I am alone in this world. Even if I were not, no one can motivate me or change me or give me meaning besides myself, so

WHAT THE FUCK AM I LOOKING FOR?? WHAT IS THE POINT?

To rebel, like Camus said? But he also does not believe in hope. Hoping for a better life traps me in an eternal loop of nothingness. Without hope, without knowing something out there will bring me joy (outside of Hot Cheetos), is the rebel worth it?

I want to hope. I want to believe. Maybe there is someone out there I can connect to on an emotional and physical level. But everyone feels unconscious most of the time. It is like the first lesson they ever learned was one foot in front of the other, and they took it to heart. Never questioning, only doing.

Of course, this is not new. I have always felt disconnected from others, and they from me. Always saying I am weird, too much, too deep. Blah blah blah. I usually cannot even muster the energy to listen, because I have heard it all before.

This disconnect from myself, though, is new. I am sure it has always been there, but I have never been present enough to notice.

So how do I get out of here? I want to live for myself. But I live for others, and others give me the chance to live. I keep hoping to make enough to end this loop of thought. But who is me? What do I want?

I thought I knew, but now the world is so big and mysterious to me. I sit here wondering, what have I not felt? How could you know, though?

Whenever I am asked, “What do you see in your future?” All I see is me staring at the sky in the woods, or sometimes a park. Nothing more. I do not know why. Maybe peace. Maybe solitude. Those are both one and the same to me.

I do know that it gives me nothing to work with in my search. After all, what am I even looking for up there?

And there it is. The Slack ping. The one thing that always brings my attention back to earth.

I would have sent an email to this blogger, but there's no contact information available on their blog (what's up with that?), so I'll respond to their post with my own.

Daily notes are useless. The value of a note is directly proportional to the number of times it is visited. That value is exponentiated each time a note is shared. Daily notes aren't revisited and they aren't shared.

First, daily notes are only useless if you don't have a system or workflow that makes use of them.

Second, they don't have to be shared to be useful. Depending on the system/workflow you have, they still have value. But the key is, you need to have system/workflow in the first place. Besides, unless the blog/website is setup like a daily journal, nobody is sharing their daily notes to the public. Typically what people would do is, write a bigger piece by expanding on ideas they wrote down in their daily notes.

Third, having dates attached to specific thoughts, ideas, events, etc... can be helpful when 6 months into the future, you're trying to understand why something is broken again. The dates give you context and clues as to what could have been happening back then. Sure, you can include all these notes into a single note, but then that means you already have a system/workflow that works for you.

I have one note that I visit all the time when I am working. It's a single Markdown file that I constantly update. It's essentially a to-do list that just helps me juggle all the things that I need to track. I call it focus.md

This is the system/workflow that works for you. This is why you don't feel the need to write daily notes.

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Sidenote: I understand wanting to blog anonymously, I do it in this blog too. But not having contact information seems a bit odd. It's like you don't want your ideas challenged or even discussed.

#NoteTaking #Blogging

Daddy Issues: A Letter to the Wounded and a Lament for Our Country

Disponible en español al final

🕊 Psalm 27:10 (ESV)

“For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me in.”

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They call him Daddy.

Mockingly. Bitterly. Half-joking, half-despairing.

Not because he nurtures. Not because he protects. But because he fits the shape of the absence—a strong, punishing shadow that looks like authority when you’ve been raised in chaos.

He promises to build walls. To put people in their place. To restore order. And for the abandoned—the ones who only knew father as discipline without love, as presence without warmth, as distance without explanation—that sounds almost like care.

Even when it isn’t.

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This is a letter to the wounded.

To the children who were never chosen. To the sons who never measured up. To the daughters cast out for being too much or not enough. To the queer kids who lost everything when they spoke the truth out loud.

You are not imagining the pain. You are not wrong to feel that fatherhood in this country has failed. Because it has.

Our nation mirrors the dysfunction of its homes: power without tenderness, punishment without restoration, control without connection. We made gods of men who never learned to weep. We gave guns to boys who never heard “I love you” without a condition attached.

And when the fathers fled—or stayed and shattered us—we turned to the state. We asked the law to be our parent. We asked politicians to play protector. We mistaked cruelty for leadership and called it strength.

And somewhere in the surreal theater of it all, the abandoned began to mock the strongman. Not because he was their healer. But because he was their mirror.

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So when they call Trump “Daddy,” it isn't flattery. It's prophecy wrapped in pain. A nation haunted by its father wound is bound to keep choosing men who know how to dominate, but not how to love.

And the transgender child, exiled from their own family, learns to laugh through the ache. Learns to twist the image of the absent father into satire. Learns that if you can't be protected, you can at least name the threat for what it is— and dare to survive anyway.

This is what “Daddy” means in the mouths of the forsaken: You can beat us, but we see you. You can cast us out, but we are still here. You can pretend to be the father— but we know what a real one is supposed to look like.

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This is a lament for our country.

For every child who prayed for someone to come home, and no one did. For every altar built to the image of dominance. For every boy taught that emotion is weakness, every girl told her body was dangerous, every queer soul made to believe they were unlovable.

We have mistaken fear for order. We have mistaken silence for peace. We have mistaken strong arms for safe ones.

And now we are led by men who father nothing but fear. Who call themselves patriots while orphaning a nation.

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But the story does not end here. Because some of us remember. Some of us are learning again what fatherhood can be.

It looks like protection without possession. Presence without pressure. Truth without terror.

It looks like the kind of Father who runs to meet you on the road. The kind who calls you beloved before you perform. The kind who heals, and holds, and stays.

And until that name is made holy again, we will not stop telling the truth:

We have been wounded. We have been abandoned. And we are still worthy of love.

Even now. Especially now.

Amen.

Luke 15:20, the Prodigal Father:

“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran to his son…”

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Problemas con Papá: Carta a los Heridos y Lamento por Nuestro País

🕊 Salmo 27:10 (RVR1960) “Aunque mi padre y mi madre me dejaran, con todo, Jehová me recogerá.”

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Lo llaman Papá. Con burla. Con amargura. A medio camino entre la broma y la desesperación.

No porque nutra. No porque proteja. Sino porque encaja en la forma de la ausencia—una sombra fuerte y castigadora que parece autoridad cuando has crecido en el caos.

Promete construir muros. Poner a la gente en su lugar. Restaurar el orden. Y para los abandonados—los que solo conocieron al padre como disciplina sin amor, como presencia sin calidez, como distancia sin explicación—eso suena casi como cuidado.

Aunque no lo sea.

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Esta es una carta para los heridos.

Para los hijos que nunca fueron elegidos. Para los hijos que nunca fueron suficientes. Para las hijas rechazadas por ser demasiado o por no ser lo suficiente. Para los jóvenes queer que lo perdieron todo al decir la verdad en voz alta.

No estás imaginando el dolor. No estás equivocado al sentir que la paternidad en este país ha fallado. Porque sí ha fallado.

Nuestra nación refleja la disfunción de sus hogares: poder sin ternura, castigo sin restauración, control sin conexión. Hicimos dioses de hombres que nunca aprendieron a llorar. Entregamos armas a niños que nunca oyeron un “te amo” sin una condición adjunta.

Y cuando los padres huyeron—o se quedaron y nos rompieron—nos volvimos al estado. Le pedimos a la ley que fuera nuestro padre. Le pedimos a los políticos que jugaran a ser protectores. Coronamos la crueldad como liderazgo y la llamamos fuerza.

Y en algún lugar del teatro surrealista de todo esto, los abandonados comenzaron a burlarse del hombre fuerte. No porque fuera su sanador. Sino porque era su espejo.

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Así que cuando llaman a Trump “Papá”, no es halago. Es profecía envuelta en dolor. Una nación perseguida por su herida paterna está destinada a seguir eligiendo hombres que saben dominar, pero no amar.

Y el niño transgénero, exiliado de su propia familia, aprende a reír a través del dolor. Aprende a retorcer la imagen del padre ausente en sátira. Aprende que si no puedes ser protegido, al menos puedes nombrar la amenaza como es—y atreverte a sobrevivir de todos modos.

Esto es lo que significa “Papá” en boca de los desamparados: Puedes golpearnos, pero te vemos. Puedes echarnos fuera, pero aún estamos aquí. Puedes pretender ser el padre—pero nosotros sabemos cómo debe ser uno de verdad.

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Este es un lamento por nuestro país.

Por cada niño que oró para que alguien volviera a casa, y nadie lo hizo. Por cada altar construido a la imagen del dominio. Por cada niño al que se le enseñó que sentir es debilidad, cada niña a la que se le dijo que su cuerpo era peligroso, cada alma queer hecha para creer que era imposible de amar.

Hemos confundido el miedo con el orden. Hemos confundido el silencio con la paz. Hemos confundido los brazos fuertes con los seguros.

Y ahora somos dirigidos por hombres que no engendran nada más que miedo. Que se llaman patriotas mientras dejan huérfana a una nación.

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Pero la historia no termina aquí. Porque algunos de nosotros recordamos. Algunos estamos aprendiendo de nuevo cómo puede ser la paternidad.

Se parece a la protección sin posesión. A la presencia sin presión. A la verdad sin terror.

Se parece al tipo de Padre que corre a encontrarte en el camino. Al que te llama amado antes de que actúes. Al que sana, abraza y permanece.

Y hasta que ese nombre sea santificado de nuevo, no dejaremos de decir la verdad:

Hemos sido heridos. Hemos sido abandonados. Y aún somos dignos de amor.

Ahora. Más que nunca.

Amén.

🕊 Lucas 15:20 “Y levantándose, vino a su padre. Y cuando aún estaba lejos, lo vio su padre, y fue movido a misericordia, y corrió, y se echó sobre su cuello, y le besó.”