four things

at the end of a long day after i had put my computer to sleep so i wouldn't open it again, thought of a new variation on the slack game i built earlier in the year and opened it again and sent a DM to the two beloved coworkers who built it with me and though it was after work one of them immediately responded from slack on her phone (I don't have slack on my phone) "I love this"

 

having ideas. what i like about writing is recording and expressing the feeling of having ideas, which is my favorite feeling.

 

i think in some core way happiness for me is four things:
1) when by the grace the frequency gets high and the fallow troughs between ideas shorten

2) when i can grasp onto an idea quickly after having it and execute it in some way that creates a closure without delay (waiting as a kind of death)

3) those ideas and their expression as objects affect others positively (the idea as generator, as bond)

4) balancing my addiction to the energy of the idea cycle with the ability to turn myself off for self-preservation

the most recent issue of edith zimmerman's thread is a new favorite of her oeuvre and i mentioned its beauty to kh, who i found out also reads it recently, and she was happy because she had missed it and also found it moving. i have also really been enjoying brandon taylor's sweater weather, starting with this one about raymond carver. over the long weekend, i also treated myself while laying in a lounge chair to dirt, which is in that microgenre of "wealthy new yorker writer lives in european city for a few years and writes gently trillin situation comedies about it" but fuck it i'm not proud and sometimes i want to eat the foie gras of that.

 

when we were at the grocery store, i saw this employee wheeling around one of those big carts filled with brown paper bags being filled for pickup, which seems like a hard job but also one i might find enjoyable in its own way, but she seemed very tired when i saw her as our paths crossed through the aisles and then on the penultimate row, i saw she and a guy facing each other and she and he pulled their masks down and she stood up on her toes to kiss him and i found it very beautiful

 

the particular inertia of grocery carts, their motion across the soft asphalt of a parking lot or the hard shiny floors inside, the thing you see both children and adults doing of pushing off and riding the cart, this banal utilitarian conveyance turned into a small release. the feeling, after unpacking your cart and have wheeled it back to the cart return

 

i recorded a cover of "a new life" by jim james, which if it's about romantic love is kind of a washed schmaltzy wedding song sort of thing (if a pretty one) but in this version i am singing in platonic love, love as a celebration of a possible future

 

it's going to get colder and rain but it was warm and sunny for more than a week. one day d charged her many crystals by putting them on a dinner plate in the yard and i decided, even though i don't believe in crystals and only have them because she gave them to me and i feel a mild to moderate level of superstition in all things, to charge two of mine too and then when she brought them inside (exactly the same, but charged), she wasn't sure exactly which crystals were mine but i knew.