No internet yesterday or the day before so no newsletter. I severely over estimated the amount of connectivity I’d have on this trip, but I have arrived on the land I will be staying on for a week so we’re back to regularly scheduled programming.

Jack Kerouac

I returned from the mountains to SF last week and immediately stopped at Streetlight Booksellers, a place famous for its relationship with the Beat Poets. I didn’t stay or even go in, just dropped a new but dear friend there.

It seemed an appropriate place for a parting, on the street in front of the western end of a nomadic movements path.

When I first started this newsletter grandfather D. he immediately named Kerouac as an inspiration. He framed this project in terms of a travel journal. I hadn’t quite made that jump yet, but as he spoke it i knew it was right.

I’ve been thinking about that. I, like Grandfather, love following the footsteps of people. One of my favorite books as a kid was Stowaway, a fictional journal of a butchers son who became a naturalist by stowing away on Captain Cooks journey. It’s a day by day story. It keeps you close to the rhythm of the ship and the waves.

And besides that was the Earths Children books, a long series following a Neolithic woman’s journey across Europe. That book too writes of almost every day, only occasionally zooming out into weeks instead of days.

The kind of books that stay low to the ground, close to the moment have a magic in them. I want to be able to capture that in my own life. Hopefully I can.

This collection of pieces in a wider, perhaps unnamed, genre is jut the start of my investigation into Kerouac. Soon I’ll dig in more.

Questions for Kerouac:

• Is the travel journal a masculine lineage of journaling?

• Are there forms of journalism that are masculine lineage of journaling?

• If not what would it mean to identify such a lineage and trace it?

• How do you write so well on the move? Can you teach me?

• What does it mean to be solitary and yet connected in the way this journal connects me to people?

• How does it feel to simply launch your self off into the wild blue yonder.

Randall Munroe

I’ve been reading XKCD since I was a kid. Lots of my friends did. It’s the gold standard of nerdy kid reading. Randal Munroe, the author, has an excellent grasp of science and a sense of humor that really gets what a child learning to understand the world will find amusing.

There are comics he’s written that have become, near instantly, part of the vernacular of my friends and colleagues. I cannot say the number of times I’ve said “I’m serving as the random person from Nebraska,” in reference to the comic above.

Here’s another I’ve heard referenced a ton of times. We say to each other “You’re one of today’s lucky 10,000,” and it genuinely softens to blow of learning something which feels like it should be obvious.

Munroe has a talent for making catchy comics which can be understood in a few minutes, easily shared, but with heart and love baked in so they don’t loose their power as they travel. But even so, the real experience is reading in chronological order from the beginning.

The early comics are drawn with pen and paper. The characters have not yet gained their, well, character. Many of them are just single images with no captions at all, clearly emerging from Munroe’s subconscious fully formed but not yet perfected. You can see how he slowly sharpens his skill set and learns to get at something grand.

When you read it from back to front you catch not just the comics that travel, but also the odder gentle ones: an experiment in durational storytelling, a delicate explanation of human scale, a sudden departure into much needed political protest. You catch hidden storylines. You learn that the stick figure in a top hat might as well be Coyote or Ananzi in the flesh. You start to wonder where he might “float next”, often literally—he has a penchant for travel by balloon.

This comic teaches many things I think are necessary for life right now: a sense of scale, ways of reframing learning to be fun, empathy for non human, a healthy skepticism about any fact, a healthy skepticism about “science is blindly a good”, a heathy sense of skepticism in general.

I. and I have been saying these last couple weeks that “XKCD read chronologically is one of our favorite books”. It’s not a joke. I hope with this newsletter I can make something like that. You all are here from the beginning but hopefully you wont be the only ones who start at the beginning of the thread.

So where does that leave us?

I’ve learned some things about this projects simply by taking some time off after my start.

First of all, I don’t think I want to stop again. At least not when I have cell service. I’ll miss a day or two here or there I’m sure for other reasons. But I don’t want to take a break like I have been again. It’s harder to start again the second time than it was to start the first time. I feel a sense of embarrassment every time I pause a routine.

But more than that, my head is too full these days and my conversations not nearly deep enough. This journal née newsletter is a way to keep both at a manageable buzz. Plus I don’t want there to be places in my life I can’t take this writing. There are places in my life I wont share with you—every magician has their secrets, every priest their own confession—but I don’t want there to be places I don’t think I can write from. Emotionally or physically or as a metaphor.

Secondly, I think I want to keep everything free. I’m worried about this decision but I’ve sat with it for more than a week and the little voice saying it isn’t going away. I envisioned this as a major source of income—not right away, but in the long run. I need it to be that as well as a space I’m building.

But I don’t want to pick and choose what someone might need that day, or who might need it. I don’t want people who can’t afford it to have to ask if it can be free for them. And like XKCD I want it readable by the day or in order, and locking somethings away means people would be missing part of the story. Part of that day by day, hour by hour magic.

That means the payment feature would be more of a tip jar. To pay would be a wish that I continue to be able to move through the world with freedom instead of fear and that, like a young man returning with a deer for his grandparents, I can share what I’ve gathered. I hope people would be willing to see it that way.

More tomorrow,

Weaver