Hitting The Links: 3/23/25
This one's got lots of links, + My Trouble With Doors, more travel, a new mantra, where I put my keys, and more.
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Doors of Misperception
My 4-day series of business meetings in NYC began and ended with assaults by doors in hotels. On Monday morning, I juggled a coffee and an avocado toast while trying to get into my room. I was in a balance/rhythm where if the keycard worked on the first tap, I’d have opened the door and gotten in just fine. Sadly, it did not work, the coffee tipped out of my hand and I got a nice burn on my forearm. Not an auspicious beginning to the week.
On Thursday, after my final meeting, I elected to open the automatic lobby door myself, because I’m big & strong. The door, however, was bigger and stronger, and swung back as I was exiting, smacking me on the left hip, which now has a fantastic bruise and has me thinking about Ivan Ilyich (to paraphrase a poem I wrote in the 2nd issue of Haiku for Business Travelers).
Doors notwithstanding, it was a good, if tiring, week. No new member companies signed up, but there were prospects, and lots of good business conversation, bookended by podcasts and punctuated with that Westbeth event I wrote about mid-week.
I got home at 5pm Thursday and was on the road 6am Friday for a flight to Kansas City for my niece’s wedding. She was a 6-year-old kid when Amy & I got married 19 years ago, which of course can’t be true.
On the flight out here, among other things, I listened to OK Computer and then watched 2/3rds of It’s Such A Beautiful Day. I’ve watched the latter 4 or 5 times now, and it’s never the same. I like to think it’s not that I’m misremembering it, but that the movie keeps transforming or mutating each time I play it, with new segments generating spontaneously.
On the plus (or minus) side, the one thing that stays the same is the segment near the beginning, where “Bill dropped his keys on the counter and stood there staring at them, suddenly thinking about all the times he had thrown his keys there before, and how many days of his life were wasted, repeating the same tasks and rituals in his apartment over and over again. But then he wondered if, realistically, this was his life, and the unusual part was his time spent doing other things.”
I return to OK Computer every few years and it continues to unfold. Funnily enough, it’s the only Radiohead record I’ve ever listened to.
Don’t worry; Birdy’s getting along with her pal Teddy while we’re gone.
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And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Meeting Across The River • Elon Green • Vanda Krefft • Seth Lorinczi • Martin Mittelmeier • Jonathan Ames • Witold Rybczynski • Matt Madden
RIP George Foreman . . . RIP Kitty Dukakis . . . RIP Slick Watts . . . RIP Lenny Schultz . . . RIP John A. Hemingway . . . RIP Jeffrey Bruce Klein . . . RIP Hugues Oyarzabal . . .
Anyone got an in with Graydon Carter? I bumped into him once in an Ottawa airport and we gabbed a bit, but he wasn’t gonna give out his contact info. With his memoir out, it sure would be fun to have a conversation. Here’s an excerpt, and here’s a review.
The WSJ’s tech editor has an essay about life after GLP-1s, in which he managed to craft a diet & exercise regimen that enabled him to lose another 20 lbs., in addition to the 40 that he lost with a 5-month course of Monjauro.
(YES, when he mentions wanting to break his 14-year-old self’s PR on a 10K and then says that he came in 4 minutes better than that — “about 52 minutes” — I went back to my Garmin Connect stats to see what my times were like when I was regularly running 10k+ w/The Guys 3x/week. I finished some of those under 51:30 in 2021. I tell you this not just because I’m an egotistical monster, but because ALL RUNNERS DO THIS.)
I visit malls that never existed in my dreams, so I’m down for a documentary about the Fort Thunder folks who spent years surreptitiously living in a real mall.
I push Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper on everydamnbody. Here are a couple recent items from Warren Ellis about notebooks: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. (As I was writing this, Ellis quoted Roland in a daily post.)
The week was so busy I found I had little time to check out the social media platforms I’m on, Bluesky & Instagram. I posted pix & selfies from my NYC trip, but barely looked at my feeds. And then when I did, esp. on Bluesky, It Was All Too Much. So, after posting a pic of me & Amy on the flight on Friday, I haven’t looked at anything. Which gave me more time to write emails back to friends and future pod-guests, catch up on the postcards I didn’t get to write some mornings, write this inordinately long email, and just be here now.
Saturday’s Zippy, via the genius of Bill Griffith Sometimes I forget where I am. I’ve been so frayed and ragged this week (month-year-life) that I blanked on what city I’m in a couple times this weekend. Glad this city’s got reminders aplenty.
Sometimes it’s good to just see a friendly face when you’re walking down the street.
Current/Recent Reading
How We Got Here: Melville Plus Nietzsche Divided by the Square Root of (Allan) Bloom Times Žižek Equals Bannon - David Shields
A Christian Existentialist and a Psychoanalytic Atheist Walk Into a Trump Rally - David Shields
Pink Dust - Ron Padgett
Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory - Janet Malcolm
When I ask someone a question — either in life or in work — I often don’t listen to the answer. I am not really interested.
(The use of a tape recorder during interviews permits me to counteract this obvious disqualification for my job. But, thinking about it further, I wonder whether a lot more of us, perhaps most of us, only pretend to be interested in the answers to the questions we ask, and whether the word “empathy” refers to a performance rather than to a feeling.)
The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil (tr. Wilkins/Pike)
“There’s something the matter with people. It seems they’re unable to take in their experiences or else to wholly enter into them, so they have to pass along what’s left. An excessive need to write, it seems to me, comes from the same thing. You may not be able to spot this in the written product, which tends to turn into something far removed from its origin, depending on talent and experience, but it shows up quite unambiguously in the reading of it; hardly anyone reads anymore today; everyone just uses the writer to work off his own excess on him, in some perverse fashion, whether by agreeing or disagreeing.”
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
Didn’t get to do much exercise this week, with all the travel for work and now the wedding. Just a lot of walking during the NYC trip. But I did have my yoga mat & resistance bands with me in the Weehawken hotel, so I was able to do my 15-min. routine first thing every morning, no matter how crappy a night’s sleep I got. You’d have been proud of me.
On Friday, I got in 2.7 mi. on the hotel treadmill in the afternoon. I wanted to do 5k, but I was tired, bored, had recently had late lunch + coffee, and figured that was good enough. On Saturday, just 20 minutes on the treadmill, as my head’s not in it. On the plus side, all the walking around NYC last week from meeting to meeting, combined with not snacking in the evening, has my weight heading back in a good direction. Still, no yoga or weights in nearly 2 weeks, so I’m gonna be sore this week.
I don’t have a yoga mat with me on this trip, and don’t trust hotel floors, so I meditated in a half-assed lotus on Friday atop a couple of gym towels. I had to focus on my posture, form, foot-knee-hip soreness, and my hair, none of which are an issue when I’m in corpse-pose, so that changed things. It was just after a run in the fitness center, and I felt my body become a river as sweat rolled down.
In my head I repeated the subway station vendor’s mantra from earlier this week — You cannot start a brand-new life / While participating in your own destruction — as I breathed. That helped keep the world out. When it started to creep in, these words occurred to me: I don’t want to be the expert in my own anger. Maybe that’d make a good line of merch, or maybe it’s just good personal wisdom.
I found a bigger towel in the fitness center, so I went back to corpse-posing on Saturday.
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Wednesday with a new episode, an Instax pic, & maybe some art, and on Sunday with links, books, & workout craziness, & maybe a little profundity or something.
Up above aliens hover / Making home movies for the folks back home / Of all these weird creatures who lock up their spirits / Drill holes in themselves and live for their secrets,