I was speaking with a colleague today about publishing something every day, and they said that they’d struggle because they want things to be perfect. The funny thing is, the only way I can personally get past that feeling is precisely by publishing every day.

For me, now, publishing every day is the thing I’m perfecting. The daily practice is the thing I want to get right, rather than any one individual post. I still want any essays I write to be great, but knowing that there will be hundreds of other posts takes the pressure off.

I’m also champing at the bit to write an essay now. To publish something. To write something deeper and sit in it for a while, whilst still coming back to write in this journal every day. I got a bit burned by the daily non-journal posts, but it’s coming back.

After a few weeks not writing morning pages, I also want to bring that back into my practice. It had become a negative place for me and the positive stuff overlapped with this journal too much, but there’s something missing and I want to figure out what that is.

I stopped by South Park Commons this evening to see Rasmus Andersson in conversation with Soleio. In one of my favorite answers, he talked about MeWare, ThemWare and UsWare—the idea that you could make things for yourself, for others, or for both. Rasmus has mostly worked on UsWare, and that’s the kind of stuff I like working on, too. Interesting enough that you want to use it, useful enough to others that you have enough reasons to make it. I sometimes wonder what this (public) journal is.

After a brief-ish hiatus of publishing things other than these journal entries, I’m finally going to get back to it. I think one consequence will be that this journal gets even more scrappy and temporal. I sometimes drift into article-adjacent (which is fine) but I never end up satisfied. I get caught somewhere between a quick thought and a bigger thing that I don’t actually honor with the time it would take to articulate.

I should probably create some proper space for this stuff. My one massive page with hundreds of posts is starting to strain a bit, and now that I do have hundreds of posts I sort of want them to have a better home. There’s probably a post I could write about that, to be honest. I was re-watching Wilson Miner’s great talk from Build recently, and it was a good reminder that the spaces we create on the web are important.

It’s my birthday today—4/20, which in California means that everyone seems to be celebrating me. It was a quiet birthday, just like I wanted. Aneesah, as usual, made me feel loved, and I’m feeling grateful for this life of mine. For growing old together (and growing together) with my best friend. I’ve come further than I thought I would, and have farther still to go, but the best part is all of the unknowable stuff in between. I often feel like I’m not doing enough, but reading Aneesah’s thoughtful message today reminded me of just how much has happened in the past year. It’s easy to take things for granted. It’s nice to be reminded that we should not.

We looked after a good friend’s dog today, and Cacio loves him so much. They live a couple of streets away and she’ll try to drag us down the street to see him whenever we’re passing by. He’ll do the same on our street. He’s like a dog and Cacio is like a strange half-human, half-dog by comparison. If he jumps on the couch he looks alarmed that he’s there and jumps right back down. Cacio is pretty much half couch cushion I think.

In the evening we went to help another good friend move one of their stores next door. I like doing (light) physical work. So much of my work is sat in front of a glowing rectangle, but it’s pretty great to do some lifting and wield a screwdriver from time to time. It’s especially good, of course, to spend time with friends and to support them in some small way. Drinks and food after to reward ourselves for a job well done.

We got to experience some second-hand pride when folks in the community kept popping their head in to say “oh no, you’re closing?!” and got to reveal the good news: “just next door actually, bigger space, not going anywhere.” We felt so proud, actually, just to contribute some very small thing to this part of the community, and proud of our friends for making it such a meaningful part of the neighborhood.