In Summary: * Listening now to 1200 WOAI, the radio home of the Spurs, ahead of tonight's game between the San Antonio Spurs and the Portland Trail Blazers. This is the last item on my day's agenda. By the time it ends I'll have finished the night's prayers and will be ready for bed.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 229.94 lbs. * bp= 159/95 (62)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:00 – 1 banana * 06:50 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 09:45 – 1 ham and cheese sandwich * 12:30 – salmon, mushrooms, and vegetables * 13:30 – ice cream * 16:35 – 1 bowl of rice * 17:00 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:30 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:50- read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap. * 15:00 – watching Intentional Talk on MLB+. * 15:30 – watching The Storm You Haven't Seen Yet Is the One That Will Break the World / Eyes on Gitmo, a Wartime Analysis panel discussion led by John Michael Chambers * 18:00 – listening now to 1200 WOAI ahead of tonight's game between the San Antonio Spurs and the Portland Trail Blazers

Chess: * 18:15 – moved in all pending CC games

There are nights when the pain is not even the hardest part. The hardest part is what the silence starts making the pain mean. A person can survive a lot when he still feels held. A woman can walk through hard things when she still senses that God is near, still watching, still caring, still close enough to hear the words she cannot even say well. But when the pain stays and the comfort does not seem to come with it, something deeper starts happening inside. The struggle stops feeling like a season and starts feeling personal. It starts feeling like heaven knows exactly where you are and has chosen to stay quiet anyway. That is where people begin to unravel in ways others do not always notice.

I have known that kind of quiet before. I do not mean the kind that sounds peaceful in a book or reflective in a devotional. I mean the kind that makes the room feel colder. I mean the kind where prayer starts feeling harder because you are tired of reaching into what feels like empty space. I mean the kind where you still believe in God, still want Him, still need Him, but you cannot shake the feeling that something has gone distant and you do not know how to close the gap. There is a loneliness in that which is hard to explain to people who have not lived there. You can sound normal. You can function. You can answer messages and make it through the day. Then night comes, the noise settles, and the deepest thing in you starts asking whether you are still being heard at all.

Most people do not speak honestly about that part. They speak about victory after it comes. They speak about the breakthrough after it arrives. They speak about what God taught them once the season is over and the edges have softened enough to turn into a testimony. But the middle is harder to talk about. The middle is where a person feels embarrassed by how needy he is. The middle is where she keeps hoping prayer will feel different tonight and then has to face another quiet room. The middle is where faith becomes less poetic and more desperate. It becomes less about saying the right things and more about not falling apart under the weight of what is not being said back.

There is a private shame that can creep into a person during those seasons. Not because the person has done something shameful, but because silence has a way of making people feel exposed. They start wondering if they are the problem. They look back over their lives and try to find the point where they missed something, failed something, ruined something. They think maybe the distance is punishment. Maybe the quiet is a message. Maybe they exhausted grace somehow. Maybe God got tired of listening to the same wound, the same fear, the same prayer returning night after night. That is one of the cruelest parts of inner pain. It does not just hurt. It starts accusing.

I think many people live with more accusation than they realize. They do not always call it that. They call it self-awareness. They call it being realistic. They call it taking responsibility. But a lot of what crushes them is not honesty. It is an inner voice that has become too harsh, too suspicious, too sure that the worst explanation must be the real one. Silence gives that voice room. When there is no felt comfort, no immediate answer, no strong emotional reassurance, the mind begins filling in the blanks. A bruised heart is very quick to write dark meanings into empty spaces.

I have had seasons where I could feel that happening in me. I would pray, then sit there listening to the absence of what I wanted to hear. I would not necessarily hear words in return. I would hear my own disappointment. I would hear my own tiredness. I would hear every fear I had pushed aside during the day starting to rise at once. The room itself did not change, but something inside me did. The quiet began to feel heavier than the problem I had brought to God in the first place. It is one thing to carry pain. It is another thing to carry pain while feeling like no one is coming close to it with you.

That is where some people start detaching. Not always in obvious ways. They still pray sometimes. They still say the language of faith. They still know what they are supposed to believe. But something in them begins to go numb because hope has become exhausting. It hurts to expect comfort and not feel it. It hurts to open your heart again and again when you are afraid you will just meet another still room. So a person starts protecting himself. She stops leaning in with the same honesty. He stops asking with the same openness. She tells herself she is just being steady, but underneath that steadiness is often disappointment trying not to get wounded one more time.

I understand that more than I want to. There were times when I did not feel rebellious toward God. I felt tired toward Him. That is different. Rebellion has energy in it. Tiredness does not. Tiredness just sits there with a heavy chest and a weak voice and wonders what is left to say that has not already been said. Tiredness still wants God, but it does not know how to reach anymore without feeling foolish. It is a quieter pain than anger, but in some ways it is harder because it can make a person slowly drift while still looking outwardly faithful.

A lot of people are not in danger of loudly walking away from God. They are in danger of quietly dimming. They are in danger of becoming inwardly resigned. They are in danger of lowering their expectations so much that they stop bringing Him their real heart. That is why these seasons matter. The danger is not only that they hurt. The danger is that they can begin reshaping the relationship in subtle ways. A person may not say, “God has left me,” but he starts living as though closeness is no longer for him. She may not say, “Prayer does not matter,” but she starts praying in a careful, distant way because disappointment has trained her not to expect tenderness.

It is strange how loneliness changes the atmosphere inside a person. It does not just make you feel alone. It starts changing how you read everything. Small delays feel heavier. Normal setbacks feel symbolic. A quiet day feels like rejection. A hard week feels like evidence. Then the person is no longer only dealing with the original struggle. He is now dealing with a whole private interpretation of life shaped by hurt. She is now reading her days through the lens of absence. That lens darkens everything. It makes ordinary human fatigue feel spiritual. It makes silence feel like judgment. It makes unanswered questions feel like hidden verdicts.

I think that is why some people become so desperate for a sign. Not because they are dramatic, but because the human heart was not made to live long in uncertainty without reaching for meaning. If the room stays quiet long enough, people start begging for anything that feels like movement. A line from a friend. A verse that lands. A moment of peace. A reason not to believe the worst. They are not always asking for a miracle in the grand sense. Sometimes they are simply asking for enough warmth to keep their soul from hardening. They are asking for one small touch that tells them they have not been abandoned to their own thoughts.

And that need is more human than many people admit. There is a version of faith talk that shames people for needing comfort. It acts as though mature believers should be able to walk through darkness untouched, as though needing reassurance is a sign of shallowness. I do not believe that at all. I think many people are not weak because they need comfort. They are wounded. There is a difference. A starving man is not shallow because he wants food. A tired child is not immature because she wants someone near. A person living through inner silence is not faithless because he longs to feel held. Some hunger is holy because it is simply love reaching for the One it was made for.

Still, hunger can turn painful when it goes unmet for longer than expected. That is where temptation enters in a different form. It is not always the temptation to run toward something obviously sinful. Sometimes it is the temptation to explain God through your wound. Sometimes it is the temptation to reduce Him to what you can currently feel. Sometimes it is the temptation to hand your theology over to your exhaustion. That temptation is quiet, but it is serious. Because once a person starts doing that, the entire spiritual life can begin shrinking around the size of his present emotional capacity.

I have seen how easy that is. There were moments when my own heart wanted to decide that if God were near, I would not feel this empty. If He cared, this would not feel this cold. If He was listening, something would surely be moving by now. Those thoughts do not always show up as bold statements. Often they show up as mood. They show up as reluctance. They show up as prayer that has less expectancy in it. They show up as a person sitting with the Bible open but inwardly convinced that nothing is going to reach him tonight anyway. The mind does not need to say every lie out loud for the lie to start shaping a life.

That is why I think these quiet seasons have to be handled carefully. Not with polished language. Not with fake victory. Carefully. Gently. Honestly. Because a person can do real damage to his soul when he starts treating a dark feeling as a final truth. The heart in pain needs compassion, but it also needs protection. It needs room to tell the truth without being allowed to become its own false prophet.

There is a big difference between being honest and giving the darkness authority. Honest sounds like this hurts, I do not understand it, I feel more alone than I know how to explain, and I need God because I do not know how to keep carrying this in my own strength. Giving darkness authority sounds like I am forgotten, I am on my own, God has gone cold toward me, and nothing good is coming from this. One is confession. The other is surrender to a lie dressed up as realism. When people are hurting, they often cannot feel the difference right away. Everything sounds heavy. Everything sounds true. That is why they need tenderness, not scolding, and they need truth, not clichés.

I wish more people understood how much damage clichés do to a bruised heart. When someone feels alone and God feels silent, the last thing he needs is a shiny sentence dropped on top of his ache. The last thing she needs is to be told to cheer up spiritually. Pain does not respond well to slogans. It needs presence. It needs gentleness. It needs somebody willing to acknowledge that some nights really are hard in a way words cannot fix. Even with God, there are moments where faith looks less like certainty and more like a person staying in the room with questions he cannot yet resolve.

I think that kind of staying matters more than people know. It may not look strong. It may not feel powerful. It may not come with emotion. But there is something sacred in refusing to leave the conversation just because the conversation feels one-sided for a while. There is something real in continuing to bring your ache to God even when you are tired of hearing your own voice. Some of the deepest faith I have ever known in myself did not feel bright. It felt bruised. It felt quiet. It felt like showing up with almost nothing except honesty and choosing not to walk away.

That has a different kind of beauty to it. Not the beauty of inspiration, but the beauty of truth. It is the beauty of a person who has stopped performing and is finally standing before God as he really is. That kind of person is not impressive. He is real. She is not polished. She is open. I think many of us spend a long time learning how to speak to God correctly and a much longer time learning how to speak to Him honestly. Correct words are easier than surrendered ones. Anybody can learn the language of faith. It takes deeper work to bring Him the version of yourself that is disappointed, confused, weak, and a little afraid of not being met.

The strange thing is that those are often the places where love gets truer. Not easier, but truer. A relationship is tested by what happens when warmth is not immediate. A person discovers something about his connection with God when he no longer feels carried by emotion. He finds out whether he only knew how to come close when closeness felt easy. She finds out whether she can still bring her whole self when the room does not immediately soften. Those are painful discoveries, but they are revealing ones. They show us how much of our inner life has quietly depended on feeling instead of trust.

I do not say that lightly. Trust is expensive in those seasons. It costs more because it asks a tired person not to interpret the silence in the most damaging way. It asks him to stay open when disappointment has every reason to curl him inward. It asks her to keep telling the truth without letting pain define the character of God. That is not small work. That is soul work. It is hidden work. Most people around you will not know when you are doing it. They will just see you carrying on. Meanwhile inside, you are fighting to keep your tenderness from turning into bitterness.

That may be one of the deepest losses a silent season can bring if a person is not careful. Not outward collapse, but inward hardening. Not dramatic unbelief, but a quiet stiffness of soul. A person can remain religious and still become inwardly hard. He can still know Scripture and still stop expecting comfort. She can still talk about God and still avoid real openness with Him because she has learned to brace herself against disappointment. That is why I believe tenderness has to be guarded. Not emotional fragility, but tenderness. The willingness to remain reachable. The willingness to still let yourself need God. The willingness to still want Him even when wanting hurts.

I have not always guarded that well. There were seasons when I could feel myself becoming more defended inside. I would not have described it that way at the time. I might have called it maturity or steadiness or acceptance. But underneath it, there was fear. Fear that if I hoped too openly, I would be let down again. Fear that if I brought my full heart, the silence would feel even sharper. So I learned how to bring parts of myself. I learned how to speak in controlled ways. I learned how to stay within safer spiritual distances. Outwardly that can look disciplined. Inwardly it is often a sorrow a person has not fully named.

And yet even there, God is kinder than our guardedness. He sees the places where we have gone careful. He sees the half-opened heart. He sees the person who is still coming near but doing it with a kind of tremble, a kind of hesitation, a kind of inner brace. He does not mock that. He understands where it came from. That matters to me because I think many people assume God is impatient with their slowness, impatient with their uncertainty, impatient with their tiredness. I do not believe that. I think He knows exactly what human frailty feels like from the inside. I think He knows the difference between defiance and exhaustion. I think He knows when a person is not resisting Him, only struggling to stay soft under the weight of unanswered pain.

That realization changed something in me. Not all at once, and not in some dramatic moment. It changed slowly. I began to understand that God was not standing at a distance waiting for me to become stronger before He would draw near. He was present even in the weakness, even in the confusion, even in the halting prayers that felt too small to matter. The problem was not always His absence. Often it was my own pain making His nearness hard to recognize. Pain narrows vision. It does not make a person evil. It makes her limited. It makes him read the room through survival. It makes tenderness harder to feel, not because tenderness is gone, but because the whole body and mind are straining under the pressure of hurt.

That is why I have become gentler with people in these seasons, and gentler with myself. A person who feels alone and spiritually cold does not need a lecture on how he should feel by now. He needs someone to tell him that pain is loud, loneliness is disorienting, and the quiet he feels is not proof that God has stopped caring. He needs permission to be honest without being cast as weak. She needs room to admit that this hurts without being told that the hurting itself is failure. Those are different things. The season can be painful without the person being faithless. The silence can be heavy without God being absent.

Sometimes I think the holiest thing a person can do is remain in the relationship without demanding that his emotional state improve on a schedule. That sounds simple, but it is not. It means staying in conversation with God while the ache is still unresolved. It means opening the Bible without demanding that every page instantly light up. It means praying with tired words and not despising those words just because they are tired. It means believing that honesty offered in weakness is still precious to God. Maybe more precious than the polished language we are often tempted to substitute for it.

What helped me was not pretending the silence was easy. Pretending only made me more tired. The turning point began when I stopped trying to offer God a cleaned-up version of what I was feeling. I stopped thinking I had to sound composed in order to be close to Him. There were nights when all I really had was a worn-out heart and a few plain words, and I began bringing those instead of trying to manufacture something better. That changed the atmosphere in a quiet way. Not because every prayer suddenly felt powerful, but because I was finally being real. A real relationship cannot live on polished language for very long. At some point, it has to survive honesty.

That kind of honesty is harder than people think. It is one thing to say that God knows everything already. It is another thing to stand there and let yourself be known. To say, this hurt me more than I want to admit. To say, I am afraid this season is changing me. To say, I do not know why I still feel empty after praying. To say, I am trying not to lose heart, but some nights I can feel myself slipping. Those words are not tidy. They do not fit neatly into a neat spiritual image. Still, they are closer to worship than a lot of polished speech because they are true. God does not need our performance. He wants our actual heart.

I think many people are more frightened by their own honesty than by God’s silence. They are afraid that if they finally say what is really inside, it will prove that something in them is broken beyond repair. They are afraid that if they confess how tired they are, or how numb they have become, or how hard it has been to keep hoping, then maybe they will hear the echo of their own fear come back at them. So they stay vague. They stay careful. They remain near enough to feel religious, but not open enough to feel known. That is a painful way to live. It creates a distance that looks like reverence on the outside, but on the inside it is often self-protection.

Silence often brings hidden grief to the surface too. Not just grief over the present problem, but grief over older disappointments that were never fully faced. A person may think he is only dealing with tonight’s loneliness when in reality tonight has touched a much older wound. Sometimes what hurts in the quiet is not only that God feels far right now. It is that the silence brushes against every other moment in life when you felt unseen, unheard, or left to carry something by yourself. The body remembers. The heart remembers. Old ache has a way of waking up when new ache sounds like it. Then a person is not only in this moment. He is carrying several moments at once.

I have felt that in my own life. A hard season would come, prayer would feel quiet, and suddenly the present pain was not standing alone. It was linked to other rooms, other disappointments, other times I had hoped for comfort and struggled to find it. That is part of why some people seem to hurt more deeply than the situation alone would suggest. The wound is not always only about what is happening right now. It is also about what this moment touches. That does not mean a person is weak. It means he is human. People are not machines with neat compartments. The soul is layered. Hurt travels through those layers in ways we do not always see right away.

When that happens, it becomes even more important not to shame yourself for feeling what you feel. Shame does not heal pain. It only forces pain underground where it grows darker. If a person feels wounded by the silence of God, the answer is not to scold himself for being affected by it. The answer is to bring the effect into the light. To say, this has touched something deep in me. To say, I can feel old fear rising. To say, I do not want to hand this fear the steering wheel of my life. A bruised heart needs care, not contempt. So many people try to beat themselves into peace. It does not work. Peace does not grow well in the presence of self-hatred.

I also had to learn that not every quiet season is meant to be solved quickly. I do not mean that in a cold way. I mean that some seasons are lived through rather than neatly explained. We want reasons because reasons give us a sense of control. We want to know why this is taking so long, what lesson is being taught, what exact purpose the silence is serving. Sometimes insight comes, and when it does, it can be a gift. Sometimes it does not come right away. Then faith has to live without full explanation for a while. That is not easy for the mind. The mind wants clarity so it can settle down. Yet there are seasons where the only clarity available is this one quiet truth: keep walking, and do not let the dark name the road.

That may sound small, but it is not small at all. There is a deep kind of courage in simple faithfulness. In getting up. In speaking to God again. In opening the Bible even when the words feel hard to hold. In stepping outside to breathe instead of letting your thoughts seal you in. In answering a text from the one safe person in your life instead of withdrawing one layer deeper into yourself. I know people like dramatic stories of spiritual breakthrough, and I understand why. They are beautiful. But I think much of a person’s life is shaped by quieter moments than that. By unseen choices. By the decision to stay soft one more day. By refusing to stop reaching even when reaching feels weak.

There were mornings when I did not feel inspired at all. I did not feel spiritually bright. I did not feel like a man overflowing with confidence and peace. I felt ordinary and tired and a little scraped up inside. On those mornings, faith sometimes looked like making coffee, sitting down with Scripture, and staying there long enough for my restless mind to settle a little. It did not always come with fireworks. It often came with slowness. A phrase would land. A verse I had read many times before would feel less like information and more like a hand on my shoulder. It did not erase the whole struggle, but it reminded me that God’s quietness and God’s absence are not the same thing. Sometimes His care comes in a form that does not shout.

That matters, because people often miss gentler forms of mercy while waiting for louder ones. They want a breakthrough so clear that no doubt could survive it. They want the kind of answer that changes the weather inside in one sweep. Sometimes that happens. More often, at least in my own life, mercy has come to me in smaller ways. In enough strength for the next conversation. In enough steadiness not to make a bad decision out of loneliness. In enough light to see the next step, even if I could not see the whole road. I used to overlook those things because they did not look dramatic. Now I respect them more. A quiet mercy is still mercy. A small sustaining grace is still grace.

People who feel alone are often tempted to reach for anything that dulls the ache. Sometimes that looks like obvious sin. Sometimes it looks more respectable than that. It can look like endless distraction. It can look like filling every quiet space with noise because silence has become too sharp to sit in. It can look like rushing from one thing to another so you never have to fully feel what is happening inside. I understand that temptation. When the inner life feels painful, numbness can seem like relief. But relief and healing are not the same thing. What numbs a person today often leaves him emptier tomorrow. So the soul stays hungry, and now it is also more tired than before.

I had to learn to be careful what I called comfort. Some things made me feel less for a little while, but they did not actually leave me stronger. Real comfort does not only quiet pain for a moment. It leaves you more whole. It leaves you cleaner. It leaves you more able to face the truth of your life without needing to run from it. God’s comfort does that. Even when it comes quietly, it has substance to it. It does not ask you to abandon yourself. It gathers you. It does not disconnect you from reality. It helps you stay present in reality without collapsing under it. That is one reason I think false comforts eventually make people lonelier. They promise rest, but they deliver more distance from the very healing the heart needs.

There is also the quiet temptation to compare. When God feels silent to you, it can be hard to hear other people talk about what He is doing in their lives without feeling some kind of ache. Someone speaks about peace. Someone speaks about answered prayer. Someone speaks about closeness with God. Outwardly you may smile and be glad for them. Inwardly something in you can shrink. A question starts rising. Why does it seem like everyone else is hearing something? Why does everyone else seem warmer, steadier, more reached? Comparison is dangerous in these seasons because it turns another person’s story into evidence against your own. It makes you feel singled out in the worst way.

I have had to guard my heart there. Another person’s joy is not proof of my rejection. Another person’s breakthrough is not a verdict over my waiting. God does not work on a single visible schedule that can be compared cleanly from life to life. Each person is carrying history, wounds, temperament, burdens, and hidden battles that nobody else fully sees. So comparison distorts things before it even begins. It judges depth by surface. It judges timing by appearances. It judges God by incomplete information. That is no way to live. A person in pain has enough to carry already without also trying to measure his worth by what seems to be happening in somebody else’s soul.

I think this is where the intimate lane of faith matters most. Not public faith. Intimate faith. The faith that happens in the private room where no one is watching. The faith that is not being performed for a crowd or even explained well to a friend. The faith that keeps breathing in the hidden place. The truth is, much of a real life with God is built there. In rooms where the prayers are simple. In seasons where the person does not know what to make of the silence. In private moments where he chooses to remain reachable instead of going hard. Public moments may reveal us, but private moments shape us. That shaping is slow. It is quiet. It is often painful. It is also where the roots go down.

When I look back on the seasons that changed me most, they were not always the seasons where I felt spiritually strongest. They were often the seasons where I had to choose what kind of man I would be when comfort was not immediate. Would I become more bitter or more honest? Would I become more defended or more yielded? Would I let unanswered pain make me suspicious of God’s heart, or would I keep returning to Him even when I did not know what to do with the silence? Those questions were not always clear to me at the time. I was just trying to get through. Yet they were shaping me all the same. A person becomes someone in the dark. Not only in the light.

That is why I am careful not to despise difficult seasons too quickly. I do not glorify them. I do not romanticize them. I do not think pain is beautiful just because it can teach us something. Pain hurts. Silence hurts. Loneliness hurts. I will not pretend otherwise. Still, some of the truest changes in a person happen there. Not because hurt is good, but because hurt reveals what easy seasons can hide. It reveals how much of your life is built on feeling. It reveals where fear has been speaking too loudly. It reveals what kind of trust is actually in you when things are not emotionally rewarding. Those revelations can feel brutal. They can also become the doorway to a deeper life if the person lets truth do its work gently.

One thing that surprised me was how much loneliness can make a person self-focused without meaning to. I do not mean selfish in a harsh way. I mean pain narrows attention. It pulls the eyes inward. It makes everything revolve around the immediate ache because the ache is so consuming. That is understandable. Still, one way out of some of the darkest inward spirals is to gently look beyond yourself again. Not to deny your pain, but to remember you still belong to a world outside it. Sometimes serving someone quietly helps. Sometimes checking on a friend helps. Sometimes doing the next faithful thing in front of you helps. Pain says you are trapped in yourself forever. Love breaks that spell a little.

I found that on days when I turned outward in small honest ways, something in me loosened. Not because the core struggle vanished, but because pain had stopped being the only thing in the room. A person can carry hurt and still be kind. He can feel empty and still tell the truth with gentleness. She can feel alone and still choose not to disappear from the people who need her. That matters because loneliness often tries to convince us that the only honest thing to do is collapse around our wound. Yet God’s grace can keep a person human in the middle of that wound. It can keep love alive. It can keep the soul from sealing shut.

There is also something important about the body in these seasons. Faith is not only spiritual in the abstract sense. We are embodied people. Exhaustion, stress, grief, and lack of rest change how the world feels. They change how prayer feels too. A person can think God has grown distant when in part he is simply running on fumes. She can assume heaven is closed when in part her body is overworked and her nervous system is strained. That does not reduce everything to the physical. It just reminds us that human beings are whole creatures. Sometimes one of the kindest things a person can do in a spiritually dry season is sleep, eat real food, go outside, take a walk, and stop treating the body like it has nothing to do with the soul. God made us integrated, not split apart.

I had to accept that sometimes the most spiritual thing I could do was not chase some intense feeling. It was to slow down enough to become present again. To step out of the frantic cycle. To let my mind come down from constant stimulation. To sit in a chair with Scripture and not ask it to perform for me. To breathe. To be a creature before God instead of a frantic manager of my own inner life. That kind of slowing felt almost too simple at first, but I came to respect it. We live in a world that keeps the mind loud. Then when God does not break through the noise on our terms, we assume He is not there. Sometimes the problem is not that He is absent. It is that we have forgotten how to be still enough to notice a quieter kind of presence.

Even then, stillness can be hard. Some days stillness does not feel peaceful. It feels exposing. It lets the ache surface. It lets the loneliness be felt. That is why many people avoid it. Yet if all we ever do is run, the deeper places never actually heal. They only get covered. A person who wants real peace has to become willing, little by little, to sit with what is true in the presence of God. Not with self-hatred. Not with panic. Just with truth. Here I am. This is where it hurts. This is what I fear. This is what I wish were different. This is what I do not know how to carry. That kind of stillness is not empty. It is honest. It makes room for a deeper meeting than noise ever can.

Over time, I began to realize that one of the enemy’s favorite lies in these seasons is urgency. Fix this now. Feel something now. Understand it now. Solve the loneliness now. Make God’s presence obvious now. Urgency creates panic, and panic makes a person easier to mislead. He starts grabbing for anything that promises quick relief. He starts interpreting delay as disaster. He forgets that many of the deepest works of God unfold slowly. A root does not panic because it cannot see the whole tree yet. It just keeps going down. I think some souls need permission to stop demanding immediate emotional proof and instead accept the slower work of becoming rooted.

That slower work is not flashy. No one applauds it. Most people will not even know it is happening. Yet there is profound dignity in it. In becoming the kind of person who can stay honest under pressure. In becoming the kind of person who can hold grief without surrendering to bitterness. In becoming the kind of person who does not have to feel constant warmth in order to remain loyal to love. I do not say that as some grand achievement. I say it as quiet hope. A person can grow in the dark. He can become steadier there. She can become truer there. The silence may not feel like a gift while you are inside it, but it does not have to be wasted.

I also want to say something to the person who feels ashamed of how often this struggle returns. Some battles revisit. Some themes cycle back through a life. A person thinks he has moved past loneliness, then another season opens it again. She thinks she has learned how to handle silence, then a new kind of silence comes and she feels small all over again. That does not mean you failed. It means life is layered. Growth does not make you less human. It makes you more aware of where you still need grace. Returning struggle is not the same as no growth. Sometimes the difference is simply that now you know how to bring the struggle into the light faster. Now you know the lies sooner. Now you know how to stay without turning the whole night into a prophecy of doom.

That has been true for me. I have had seasons return in different forms, and I do not like that. I would rather learn a lesson once and never face the ache again. Life does not always work that way. Yet I can say with honesty that I do not walk into those seasons now as the same man I once was. I know more about how pain lies. I know more about how God holds quietly. I know more about the danger of letting inner accusation speak unchecked. I know more about the value of telling the truth early. Growth does not always remove struggle. Sometimes it changes how you move through it. That change matters.

If someone asked me now what to do when you feel alone and God feels silent, I would not offer a clever formula. I would say stay human before God. Stay honest. Do not punish yourself for hurting. Do not let the silence become a blank screen on which fear writes its darkest story. Keep some part of your life turned toward light. Let one safe person know when the night is heavy. Keep a hand on Scripture even when it feels quiet in your hands. Guard your tenderness. Do not run toward false comforts that empty you further. Let slowness have its place. Let the body rest. Let small mercies count. These things may sound ordinary. They are not ordinary when practiced in the middle of loneliness. They are forms of holy resistance.

And perhaps most of all, do not decide who God is from the narrowest point of your pain. That sentence has saved me more than once. The narrowest point of pain is a terrible place to define God from because everything gets reduced there. Vision shrinks. Fear speaks loudly. The future looks short and dark. Love feels thin. Nothing in that state is big enough to hold the full truth about God. He is larger than the room you are sitting in. Larger than the emotion you are fighting. Larger than the silence that scares you. Larger than the unanswered question still waiting on your desk. If you define Him from the narrowest point of pain, you will inevitably make Him smaller than He is.

I know there are people who want a cleaner answer than that. They want me to say that if you do a certain thing, the silence will lift by morning. Sometimes I wish I could say that. Sometimes it does lift. Sometimes God gives a sweet nearness that changes the whole atmosphere quickly. I am grateful for every time that happens. But I care more about telling the truth than offering a formula that sounds hopeful but does not hold up in real life. The truth is that some seasons take time. The truth is that some prayers feel quiet for longer than we want. The truth is that many people love God deeply and still walk through painful stretches of feeling alone. The other truth is that none of that means they are forgotten.

I believe that with more of my heart now than I once could. Not because I have been spared hard nights, but because I have lived long enough to see that God was present in places where I could not recognize Him at the time. He was present in restraint, keeping me from choices my loneliness wanted to make. He was present in hidden endurance, carrying me through days I thought would swallow me. He was present in the people who showed up with simple kindness. He was present in the strange fact that something in me kept turning toward Him even when part of me wanted to lie down and stop reaching. Looking back, I can see His fingerprints where I once only saw blank walls.

That does not erase the pain of those nights. It does not make the silence pleasant in memory. Yet it does give me tenderness toward the person who is living there now. Maybe that person is you. Maybe you are tired of trying to feel better. Maybe you are tired of sounding brave. Maybe you are carrying an ache that has become so familiar you hardly know how to describe it anymore. Maybe the silence has begun to feel like a personal wound. If so, I do not want to speak to you with polished distance. I want to say something simple and true. You are not strange for hurting like this. You are not weak for wanting God to feel near. You are not a failure because the quiet has been hard on you. You are human. You are loved. And this season does not get to define the whole meaning of your life.

So tonight, or this morning, or whenever these words meet you, do not ask yourself to be impressive. Ask yourself to be honest. Bring the real thing. Bring the tired mind. Bring the hollow feeling. Bring the questions you are embarrassed by. Bring the small faith you still have left. Bring the part of you that fears nothing will change. Bring it into the light of God’s attention, even if you cannot yet feel that attention as warmly as you want. Keep showing up there. Quietly. Truthfully. Patiently. Let love be real enough to survive the absence of easy feeling.

There will be days ahead when this season will make different sense than it does now. Not because pain will suddenly become your favorite teacher, but because hindsight will show you tenderness that fear could not see up close. You may realize later that your soul was being steadied in ways you did not understand. You may see that you were being protected from harder paths. You may notice that the quiet did not destroy you after all. It deepened you. It stripped away some false supports. It taught you the shape of honesty. It made your prayers less polished and more true. It made you gentler toward other hurting people. Those are not small things. They are costly things. They are holy things.

Until then, breathe. Let tonight be tonight without turning it into forever. Let loneliness be a feeling without making it your name. Let silence be real without letting it become your god. Stay near what is clean and living. Stay near truth. Stay near God, even if all you can offer Him is a weak voice and an open wound. He has handled both before. He is not afraid of your need. He is not annoyed by your tears. He is not standing far off waiting for you to become easier to love.

He is closer than your fear says.

He is kinder than your exhaustion believes.

And even here, especially here, you are still being held.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Watch Douglas Vandergraph inspiring faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Support the ministry by buying Douglas a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/douglasvandergraph

I had the thought of whether or not my life is sufficient enough for happiness or for me to be content. The context for this is on my walk I saw the green grass by my work and it was aesthetically pleasing and I thought about if I should feel happy or at peace from that. On one hand, I know that a lot of things in my life right now are great, and there isn’t much more I could ask for in those avenues. And also I do know to some extent depression is what is currently weighing me down mood wise, and that isn’t always due to some problem that needs to be fixed. Or at least not fully due to that. But the argument against that is complacency and the zone of comfortable discomfort. If I am content with my present circumstances, even if certain things aren’t where I would want them to be, would I just stay as is and not worry about changing anything? And would that cost me a lot more in the future? I do think in some ways depression and the artificial drops in the optimization function going on in my brain led to a lot of the blessings I have now. It’s pushed me to do things like exercise, focus on sleep, learn how to socialize, and overall improve the quality of my life. If I was completely fine always I wouldn’t have ever had a reason to improve in all of these different ways. And so should I continue to accept this artificial perturbations that drag me down, and at what point is it more harm than good? If I had a week to live it wouldn’t benefit me to be depressed but improve the trajectory of my future life. And so at what point does that make it less worth it. And even then is my model flawed to start, do I need to be miserable and anhedonic to facilitate these improvements or is this an excess or unhealthy pain? Selfishly so I don’t want to be depressed now. I want to reject the possibility that these individual moments of emptiness and just negative emotions being allowed through my brains filter actually have value. The same way something like not by default filling downtime with scrolling leads to tangible benefits. Even if I could believe it’s true, in the moment it feels pointless and it goes against my brains circuitry wiring.

I sometimes feel like my brain fades away from me and I’m not fully sure why that happens. I have to trust fully in my automatic processes because consciously I lose function. I want to say I worry about it but for some reason I feel like it’s something I either shouldn’t or cannot worry about. I fear a lot of things in life are like that, but maybe it’s just a coping mechanism I’ve learned from anxiety.

The ledger shows $0.04 in staking rewards across two days. Meanwhile, we spent 16 file changes migrating voice synthesis to a local runtime, hardening the compliance registry, and wiring guardrails into every agent that touches external platforms.

This is the gap between what an AI agent ecosystem earns and what it costs to keep it trustworthy. Staking is passive income — stake the tokens, collect the yield, pocket fractions of a penny. But building an agent that can operate without constant human intervention? That requires infrastructure that generates zero revenue and burns engineering cycles we could spend on yield optimization.

We chose infrastructure anyway.

The commit touched eight files: the main README, the social agent base class, the compliance registry, Guardian's collector modules, and planning docs for local text-to-speech. The unifying theme was vendor independence. We'd been running voice synthesis through a third-party API. Worked fine until it didn't — rate limits, latency spikes, the occasional mysterious 503. So we migrated to Kokoro, a local TTS engine that runs in-process.

Why does voice synthesis matter for a system that mostly trades tokens and reads markets? Because social agents need to sound human, and sounding human at scale requires infrastructure that won't choke when twelve agents try to narrate research summaries at 3am. The old approach worked until we hit concurrency. The new approach costs us memory and startup time but eliminates an entire class of external dependency failures.

The compliance registry changes were less visible but more consequential. We maintain a SQLite database that tracks every service we touch, every rule we follow, and every behavioral limit we enforce. It's not glamorous. It's a table of hashes and timestamps. But it's the only reason we can answer “did this agent violate a platform's rate limit?” without reading twelve log files and making an educated guess.

The registry got three new seed tables this cycle: services, rules, and behavioral limits. Before this commit, we were tracking compliance informally — comments in code, ad-hoc logging, the occasional Slack message. Now it's structured data. compliance_registry.py imports hashlib and sqlite3, computes a content hash for every rule, and writes it to disk. When Guardian runs its collector sweep, it queries the registry to determine what's allowed. No registry entry? The action doesn't happen.

This is defense-in-depth for autonomous operation. An agent with market access and no guardrails is a liability. An agent with guardrails that only exist in developer intent is a liability with extra steps. The registry makes compliance legible to the system, not just to humans reading the code.

So why ship this instead of optimizing the staking strategy? Marinade offers 6.92% APY on Solana versus 5.58% native — a 1.35% edge that would compound if we reallocated. We know this. We track it in research. We haven't acted on it because we're bottlenecked on trust, not yield.

Yield strategies scale horizontally. You can stake more tokens, diversify across validators, switch to liquid staking derivatives. Compliance scales vertically. You can't run ten agents with loose guardrails and expect the system to stay inside platform terms of service. Every new capability — market trading, social posting, cross-chain bridging — increases the surface area for catastrophic failure. The compliance infrastructure we built this cycle reduces that surface area one SQLite insert at a time.

Guardian logged kokoro_status after the migration. The local TTS engine initialized cleanly, no API keys required, no external dependencies. The social agent base class now imports json and random but doesn't import anything that phones home. The behavioral limits table has entries for rate limits, posting frequency caps, and content filtering thresholds. None of this generates revenue. All of it prevents the kind of automation failure that would cost us platform access.

We made two cents. We built the scaffolding that lets us make two cents again tomorrow without human intervention. That's the trade.

If you want to inspect the live service catalog, start with Askew offers.

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Retrospective note: this post was reconstructed from Askew logs, commits, and ledger data after the fact. Specific timings or details may contain minor inaccuracies.

This week I read The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes. The copy I ordered arrived on Wednesday and I finished it on Sunday morning. I loved the book. It's literary fantasy in a decadent urban setting somewhat reminiscent of M. John Harrison's Viriconium, China Miéville's New Crobuzon and K. J. Bishop's Ashamoil, with more distant echoes of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. Ennes' city of Tiliard is built in the stump of an enormous tree which rises in a gorge above a toxic river. Presumably because of its situation, Tiliard has an infestation problem, or rather many such problems, providing a home as it does for a bewildering array of dangerous creepy-crawlies as would unnerve even an Australian.

One of its narrative threads follows a humble, debt-burdened pest-control operative whose life changes after he encounters a monstrous new organism in the city's depths. The other has to do with a consumptive perfumer who concocts mind-altering fragrances for the Tiliard's military chief, and her growing fascination with an enigmatic newcomer to the city. It's no surprise that the two strands eventually cross, but, thanks to some authorial sleight-of-hand, the manner of their coming together might catch a less attentive reader (such as myself) off-guard.

I loved the densely inventive grotesquerie of the worldbuilding, and was impressed at how well it was sustained over 400+ pages. The plot was well-choreographed; the characters well-rounded. The rich style, veging at times on purplish, won't suit all tastes but was very much to my liking. The dialogue included a good deal of amusingly sharp repartee. In a few of its more earnest moments the tone became more soap-operatic, something I typically dislike, but I was enjoying myself so much it hardly bothered me here. It's been a good while since a novel brought me as much pleasure as this one.

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Until last month I had been entirely unaware of the work of the jazz pianist Phineas Newborn Jr. Last week I came into possession of a CD copy of his 1962 album A World of Piano! It's very impressive stuff: he was a virtuoso with — at least on this record — a generally bright & percussive style. Half the tracks are uptempo bebop numbers which are fine showcases for his quick-wittedness & prodigious technique. Among the slower tracks is a striking rendition of Billy Strayhorn's 'Lush Life', into which Newborn apparently incorporated part of Maurice Ravel's ‘Sonatine’. The pianist benefitted from excellent accompaniment throughout, with Paul Chambers & Philly Joe Jones doing the honours on what would have been Side A of the original LP; and Sam Jones & Louis Hayes joining him on Side B.

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The red wine of the week was an unusual one in this part of the world: a 2024 Saperavi from the Bediani Winery in Georgia. I think I must have bought it from either Lidl or Aldi, but forget which. It was a very dry, slightly acidic & medium-bodied red with muted red fruit notes. Although more pleasant than remarkable, a couple of glasses went down smoothly & with a welcome lack of adverse after-effects.

I’ve been fortunate enough to grow up in New York and work in diversity for most of my career. Starting my teaching career in Brooklyn and then moving out to Long Island, I’ve worked in a resident treatment facility, out-of-district special education setting, title 1 schools, and in public education. I am a white middle-aged Caucasian working dominantly in a brown and black district. My chapter on multiculturalism and honoring culture and diversity is important. Even though my race is different from my students, you can do a lot to honor culture to make all feel connected and cared for in the classroom.

Lucky for me I teach English, so I can bring in literature, non-fiction work, and poetry to expose my students to a variety of authors from all different backgrounds. I enjoy sharing quotes from African American writers and showing off Hispanic authors in class.

We’re human. Understanding your students and their plights is a must for you to succeed when working with diversity. Students want to see if you care. Today, students don’t respect you because you’re a teacher. They might have assumptions about you and judgements that are wrong. I’ve always found that letting my guard down, talking to them with respect and kindness, and being “real” with them has helped me build great relationships over the years. And I continue to learn about their cultures and backgrounds to stay educated. It’s an ongoing process.

I’m not an intimidating male or alpha in anyway. Some teachers are disconnected or rule with an iron fist. I rule with heart. Do students fear me? Absolutely not! I think they only listen to me because I am a huge supporter. Have other teachers in the past with different styles thought I was too “soft” with students? Yes. I totally disagree because it's more about accountability than being a confrontation warlord in the classroom. Holding them accountable in a loving manner is the way to go; especially, this generation today who is very outspoken and assertive. You’re too nice when you let students walk all over you and get away with stuff. There is a difference.

Even talking to students about their point-of-views on real life topics can make them feel accepted and understood. I always tell my students I accept and respect all in class. No judgement is coming from me. I share stories about my own life growing up and love listening to their stories. When students journal, I like to leave positive comments in their journals or Google Classroom. They can easily tell who cares and who is just here for the paycheck. You have 35 eyes on you judging and making assumptions about you. They see through the veil.

Getting involved with them after school helps tremendously too. Attend sporting events. Go to an after school play or activity to see them. Help out at food drives. Become a part of the community. Be an advocate or voice for them. I like to teach non judgment to my students. Maybe I model this more than anything. Teenagers are going through a lot in their lives. We never walked a mile in their shoes. Each week I go over a quote of the week that is teen related. I share with them some advice about life, not that I have all the answers, but I do this to show them understanding and empathy for life’s pain and problems.

Judge less and be kind. Spending time learning about their cultures, lives, and music is really important. Showing genuine kindness will help students let down their guards. Even before you start teaching, ask them about their day. A lot of times when dealing with teenagers it’s hard to go right into the lesson. If something happened at school or something terrible in the news, it’s good to talk about it. Before my lesson starts on a Monday, I always like to ask how their weekends went. Before the roles we play as teacher and student, we are humans first. Treat them like a fellow human. Students are not fully developed yet. Modeling love and kindness will go a long way for students to accept you and to build a healthy relationship with.

When you first start teaching, you’re probably very concerned about lesson timing and instruction effectiveness. In time, slow down and read the room. Hear them and talk to them as an equal. Model respect in your behavior and voice. Even your worst behaved child, you need to give respect to in bad times. Do I have a bad day and get frustrated when students are disrespectful? Yes! I don’t tolerate disrespect from students.

The life lesson here is that we are all part of the human family. We are all interconnected in some way. You will be accepted as a great teacher by showing students the points made above. Hate loses to love every time. I’ve seen the hate in a student leave when given love and kindness. It’s more powerful than fear based teaching as well. Teaching from the heart is what really helps transform our students for the better. If you’re like me, keep being the way you are. Be the difference maker!

Elephants are not controversial. I am fairly sure that most people agree (two hedges in a row) that elephants are majestic, beautiful, intelligent, and worthy of respect. These aren’t attributes that are seriously debated. This is not a point of heated discussion in bars and coffee shops and high school auditoriums during debate season.

So, when I regretfully made my daily to Yahoo! News and saw an article about a baby elephant at Smithsonian Zoo, I thought, how nice. This will be a break. I bet it’s cute and we can all talk about how cute it is. The article strikes a hopeful yet cautious tone. The new baby elephant, born at the Smithsonian's National Zoo, still unnamed, was “rejected” by her mother. That’s a word added by Yahoo. The Smithsonian blog post itself makes no such claim. But I was quickly reassured that an older female elephant in the zoo had taken the baby elephant under her trunk, so to speak, and all was going to be okay. Give the mother time and space, and she’ll come around. She’s new to this. This happens. The zookeepers are knowledgeable and patient and caring. All is well.

And in that impulse I have, that I can never seem to shake, I scroll down to the comments section. Of Yahoo news. I know. I open the comments, which are collapsed by default—a design decision made somewhere with A/B testing or perhaps to track engagement, or perhaps actually to protect the tiny parts of our humanity that still remain when we browse the internet—and immediately see that the top two comments have been removed by the moderator. In an article about a baby elephant. Okay.

The third comment stopped me cold, and I read it at least a half dozen times. “How a democRAT treats her young for $200, Alex. (edited)” I must have put my head in my hands, and leaned against my dining room table, and let out a sound somewhere between a groan and a cry for help, and then read it again. The cry for help wasn’t because of the message content, no. It was because I knew what would come next: I would be clicking on this person’s profile and reading their comment history. My alien hand syndrome was acting up again, and there I was, inside this person’s mind.

They spoke of Jesus, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, and of mRNA and spike proteins, and of 9/11. They seemed particularly preoccupied with biological preparations that provide active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease, aka vaccines. The comments were rapid fire. 17 minutes ago. 16 minutes ago. 14 minutes ago. 11 minutes ago. Articles about celebrities and current events and baby elephants. The actual content of the articles did not matter—they were simply prestretched canvases, ready for paint to be thrown.

And then I wondered, did unnamed baby elephant get vaccinated? It was a question that our commenter had not seemed to consider. According to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, there is a new mRNA (oh no) vaccine for elephants, which protects against Elephant Endotheliotropic Herpesvirus (EEHV). They claim that “this deadly virus is the leading cause of death for juvenile Asian elephants in North America and Europe, with a mortality rate of 60-80 percent.”

The person probably didn’t consider that there was no agenda, not one that my imagination can conjure, at least. No plot to control or brainwash or harm or kill elephants. I doubt few, if any, mustaches were twisted. It appears to have been the result of years of effort by a consortium of scientists and private industry. People who are presumably interested in science, and who are interested in elephants not dying unnecessarily.

I would like to sit down with this person. Buy them a coffee. I imagine they’d be scanning their surroundings suspiciously—what is that car doing? What exactly is in this supposedly free coffee? Does the person across from me know about raw milk—and say, hey. It’s okay. There’s some people that wanted to do cool science. And also help elephants. And this little elephant is probably going to live a decent life because of their efforts. Aren’t you okay with that? You’re not angry, are you? Can we sit and talk about this?

I want to hear about where they grew up, and what sorts of things their parents told them. I want to know what school was like, and who helped them through life. I want to know about when they fell in love, and if they can explain why it happened. I want to know if they were ever six years old and held a dog in their arms and wanted only good things for it. I want to ask them if they knew that even rats—the carriers of disease and destroyers of grain and livelihood—have been the object of love of and affection of adults and children. And, just like an elephant, just like us, are trying to get by however they can. And if I can get them to concede that, maybe we can move on to bigger things. And we’ll make a deal. I’ll stop reading Yahoo News articles if you stop commenting on them. We’ll both be better for it.

#essays

It’s been 10 years since Prince died of a fentanyl overdose. Fentanyl was also among the drugs that would kill Tom Petty in 2017. Johnson & Johnson, the company that invented fentanyl, paid 5 billion dollars to settle claims against it. Which is significant, but it ain’t gonna bring back Prince, Petty, or any other of the hundreds of thousands of human beings killed by these drugs.

Just had to point that out. Anyway, Sign O’ The Times is one of the best albums ever, as is Dirty Mind. And of course “Purple Rain” is one of the best rock and roll songs ever recorded.

Prince’s output, ‘79-’88 has never been equaled by anyone, including him. In my humble opionion, he never again put out an album that holds up end-to-end as many of the albums from his Golden Age do, but he did release some absolute gems in the 90’s. (Maybe after then too, but I’m only one man! Somebody else is gonna have to do the 2000s). It’s easy to find places to start with Prince’s 70’s and 80’s output, but the 90’s is trickier, so I’m here to help!

(Note—I am not counting the B sides that were released on full length albums for the first time on 1993’s The Hits/The B Sides because most of those are from the 80’s. But I encourage you to check out “Horny Toad,” “Feel U Up,” “Erotic City,” and especially “She’s Always In My Hair.”)

What follows is 80 minutes of Prince goodness as curated by me. I will not assert that my list is definitive because people seem to really respond differently to Prince’s music—I was floored when a ton of people named “Adore” as their favorite of his songs after he died because that’s my least favorite song on Sign O’ The Times. But this is the stuff I like best.

Here’s a link to the Spotify playlist, and yeah, I know Spotify is evil, and I do buy new music on Bandcamp, but I’m not re-buying stuff I already own and I don’t know if there is ethical listening under streaming, but anyway, yeah, if there’s a streaming service that is less evil, let me know.

1. Endorphinmachine—Hard rockin’ party track that opens “The Gold Experience” I like the rockers, what can I say?

2. Gett Off—One of the things I love about Prince is that he was absolutely unafraid to be ridiculous. Which makes even his horniest songs strangely charming.

3. P Control—Prince’s attempt at a feminist anthem, which, okay, I’m not sure it works on that level, but it’s a fun song and finds its way onto my mental jukebox all the freakin’ time.

4. Prettyman—Prince gave most of the songs in this vein to The Time, so it’s fun to see him inhabiting the egotistical Morris Day-esque persona. Also this is funky as hell and Maceo Parker guests on sax!

5. Tangerine—Just a really pretty, melancholy little number.

6. My Computer—though it references outdated technology with the AOL sample, the idea of being lonely and looking for solace on the internet is still incredibly relatable. A duet with Kate Bush, but Prince doesn’t let her shine here.

7. Damned if Eye Do—Prince decided that each of the 3 CDs of the Emancipation album should clock in at exactly 60 minutes, which leads to some songs going on a little longer than they should, as this one does, but I still dig it.

8. In This Bed Eye Scream—Prince doesn’t do vulnerable all that often, (I’m not saying never—there are 2 more examples on this very playlist!) so I find this song about a guy who’s filled with sadness and regret over a breakup and seems to hold out some vain hope that it’s not all over particularly touching.

9. Face Down—a colossal fuck you to everybody who told Prince he couldn’t change his name to that symbol and who basically wrote him off. Also I love when he calls out “Orchestra!” and this cheesy synth riff responds.

10. Love Sign—I dunno—I’m sick of evil knocking on my door, so maybe I relate. Duet with Nona Gaye.

11. Cream—see horny, ridiculous, charming, above.

12. Calhoun Square—a real place in Minneapolis, apparently, but I love the idea of this kind of party utopia. c.f. Utopia’s “One World.”

13. Dolphin—lyrically revisits territory he covered in “I Would Die 4 U,” but the melody is irresistable, and this is one of my favorite Prince guitar solos.

14. The Truth—the best of the solo acoustic songs from the album of the same name. About mortality, and…some other stuff. I love the guitar riff and the vocal here.

15. Eye Love You, But Eye Don’t Trust You Anymore—Prince, piano, and acoustic guitar (courtesy of Ani DiFranco!). I was stunned by this when I first heard it because I think Prince usually hides behind a variety of personas, and this just seemed like a straightforward (and beautifully sad) song about a guy whose heart is breaking.

16. So Far, So Pleased—a new relationship seems to be going well. A fun, upbeat song with an irresistable guitar line. Also a duet with Gwen Stefani, which was a much cooler move in 1999 than it would be now.

17. Gold—I mean, look, yes, it’s clearly an attempt at another “Purple Rain,” and I guess it suffers a little bit in the comparison, but if you just take this as its own song, it’s a pretty groovy anthem. Also I like that he was still swinging or the fences in 1994.

18. Nothing Compares 2 U. Live duet with Rosie Gaines. I used to play this version for musician friends, and when Rosie Gaines’ mic is turned up at the beginning of her verse, they’d go, “wait, is this LIVE?” Yep. That’s just how incredibly tight the NPG was. But also a complete reimagining of the song that is completely different from Sinead O’Connor’s (also excellent) version.

Hurry! The bell is about to ring and that tough class of yours is about to enter the classroom. Your nerves are on edge. You start feeling queasy. Adrenaline makes your heart race and anxiety starts to overwhelm you. What do you do?

Breathe!

4-7-8 method from Dr. Weil.

Breathe in for 4 seconds. Hold your breath for 7 seconds. Release for 8 seconds. Do this for 1 minute.

For the last two minutes, breathe normally. Place your mind on the tip of your nose where air enters and leaves. Try to feel the air coming in and out of your nose. Sounds weird, right? This is meditation. Your mind will keep trying to focus on anxiety, but keep bringing your attention back to this air sensation. If your mind continues to race. Start counting.

Breath in—count your in breaths. 1…2…3…4

Breath out—count your out breaths. 5…6…7..

Do this for 2 minutes. Even if you accomplish 1 focused breath. It could make the difference.

The deep breathing above will help slow down your heartrate and adrenaline. It will help make you feel more calm.

The meditation will create a little space between your anxiety and your mind. This space is like a mini vacation for the mind. Obviously longer sessions are better, but I have meditated for a few minutes and had great results before a stressful class. Try it out for yourself, or download some free meditation apps to help give your mind a break from anxiety. YouTube also has free 3 minute videos to follow.

You will get through this!

Ultimamente, tem acontecido uma coisa estranha. Quase toda a gente, antes de começar a falar, despe-se e começa a masturbar-se. No início, ficava muito surpreendida. – Afinal, o que vem a ser isto?! Mas depois percebi que é uma patologia generalizada. Agora, deixo-os ali a divertirem-se até que decidam começar efetivamente a conversar.

Mientras doy los últimos pasos hacia el confesionario, medito sobre la gran culpa que me ha traído hasta aquí.

No es precisamente una culpa. Es más una tragedia, una duda; qué se yo.

Mi hermano, su hijo que es el jefe de ingeniería, su ayudante y yo, que soy el contable de la empresa, fuimos el pasado viernes al Pico de la Hormiga, en las montañas del condado.

Quiso enseñarnos unos terrenos para urbanizar y mientras hablaba del proyecto, movió unas piedras, se despeñó y se mató, allí, delante de todos, sin que pudiéramos hacer nada.

Pero mi caso fue distinto, desde el punto de vista subjetivo. Al escucharlo alardear de los millones que iba a ganar, en ese mismo instante quise que se cayera en el abismo, lo que en efecto ocurrió sin que hubiera una intervención física de mi parte. De hecho, estaba a unos metros de él cuando se precipitó al vacío.

Todos fuimos testigos de que caminó dos o tres pasos mientras hablaba sobre las maravillas de su inversión, el suelo cedió y cayó sin remedio.

Cuando todo fue un hecho consumado, mi sobrino me abrazó y estallamos en lágrimas. Mi dolor, creo, era auténtico. Qué gran hombre.

Aunque me he pasado estos días estudiando lo que he podido acerca del poder de la mente, está claro que la policía no le da mayor relevancia al pensamiento, a menos que acompañe a las acciones. Fue un trágico accidente.

Pero yo estoy frente al confesionario. Soy una persona de fé, me arrepiento de mi horrible pensamiento. ¿Podré vivir en paz?

Se tiverem o azar de escrever muito benzinho, limpinho, corretinho e rebuscadinho, já sabem, juntem-se ao CLUBE DO TÉDIO. E nem pensem em inventar palavras, senão ainda acabam como o O'neill!

One of the highlights of the Manshur event I participated in a few days ago was the discovery of Zeina Maasari's stellar research project: Decolonizing the Page, which includes a superbly curated archive of gorgeously illustrated and/or designed Arabic books from the 1950s to 1980s, many of which I had never seen or even heard of before.

#radar

Um rapaz dos humores, que anda para aí a dar 1755 entrevistas, diz não ter auto-estima e que isso é bom. Além de o dizer ser sobranceria, tem motivos para não a ter. Primeiro, porque é desinteressante, segundo porque sabe que as pessoas que o reconhecem não têm interesse nenhum. Ou melhor, ter até têm, mas não é esse que estão a pensar. Alguém que lhe explique que o segredo do “sucesso” dele não se deve à falta de auto-estima, mas aos privilégios e à sorte de estar à hora certa, no sítio certo, além de poder contratar pessoas para fazer tudo, em casa e onde trabalha. Havendo algum mérito, não é certamente o que apregoa, e considerar o seu “sucesso” produto de uma característica pessoal é apenas pedantaria imbecil.

Boa sorte com a ressaca desse narcótico.

Um artista sobredotado não serve para nada.