Journal

I dropped by a friend’s studio today for an “afternoon work party”—a few folks from the internet co-working together—and it was so nice. I love working remotely, but I miss the energy of being around humans in a shared space. I forgot how much fun it can be to just… be around fun. To laugh, and to make others laugh. To listen to music together, eat together, and occasionally fall into silence as everyone gets very focused.

I was an internet stranger to this friend a few months ago, and I feel fortunate now to call them a friend. They were the first person to make me feel truly welcome in this new place that we now call home. They helped me to start building a community here, helped me to understand more about my brain, and have been unendingly open and generous. It’s such a gift to connect with kind, creative folks. I’ve been lucky over the years.

I keep reflecting on the fact that I started keeping this blog by writing about wanting to build community, and that less than a year later I really feel like I’m building one. Writing has helped, actually, just as I hoped it would. It’s helped by literally connecting me with folks through writing, but also helped by giving me space to articulate, every day, what it is that I’m actually looking for, whether right here or in morning pages.

I don’t know where the evening has gone, but it has. I’m deep into it and have little to show for it. That’s okay I guess, but I like it when evenings go by slowly. I’m sat here writing and I like writing, but I sometimes feel guilty. I feel like I should be doing something else. Anything else. The million things that I haven’t gotten around to and really need to get around to. That’s all of us maybe. I have to believe that it’s most of us.

I’m in a funny enough mood that I’ll probably stop writing, because I’ve been trying to keep this public journal pretty neutral. A side-effect of writing something journal-like here is that I’ve fallen off morning pages for a while. I sort of half-write morning pages here, but I don’t write some stuff. I keep it to myself. It’s important not to give all of yourself away, I think, lest you have nothing left for yourself. What a tragedy that would be.

So, swinging it back up: I could do whatever I wanted with the rest of my evening, really. I’ll walk the dog. I could read. I could write. I could make art. I could just sit and think, which is such a rare thing these days—for any of us, not only for me. People used to simply sit and think, as far as I know? Whatever I do, I think I’ll just try to enjoy it, and to feel grateful for it.

Aneesah’s birthday. Up early to pick up some flowers, coffee and pastries on the way back, gifts, and then both of us at work. As we get older it becomes harder to buy gifts for one another. We get the things we want when we need them, and we don’t really need gifts. Still, we get gifts. I tried to focus on time and effort this year. Finding just the right things. Making things by hand. Making things for the people you love feels good.

During lockdown in 2020, Aneesah created an at-home cinema experience for me based on our favorite movie theatre, the Everyman. She called it the Everybug after our (adorable) nicknames for one another. Snacks, tickets, even took me to my seat. I loved it, and I love her for doing it. Thousands of miles from London, I opened the Oakland location for her birthday this year. Snacks, tickets, even took her to her seat.

There’s something about being hunched over, cutting ticket after ticket—and perforating the edges until you’ve got two that feel perfect—that just feels like time well spent. I don’t think I’ve ever truly regretted making something, because making something is sort of the point. It’s the act of making. The time spent. When you’re doing it for someone else, it’s even better I think. We should all make things for one another.

I’ve been making software for over a decade, and I taught myself programming in college (I was a design major), so this current moment in the arc of technology hasn’t made something impossible possible, but it has made the “takes a while, maybe I’ll get to it” more like “will probably take minutes, why not.” I’m making things I just wouldn’t have found the time for before, and it feels great. I just like making things, period.

When I first started using large language models and tools like Claude Code or Codex to help me make things, I first did so only if I was looking at all of the code along the way, even for goofy stuff. I wanted to bring them into code-centric spaces, where they played the supporting role rather than the lead. I thought that I’d do that for a long time, but it’s shifted for me pretty quickly, at least for the goofy, transient stuff.

I was making something over the past couple of days, and I haven’t looked at the code at all really. I glanced at a couple of diffs out of curiosity, but otherwise I worked in an agent-centric tool (this time, Codex) and just expressed the thing that I wanted. It was frustrating during a couple of moments, but it was mostly great. It was a super simple project, but still, I noticed that this behavior had changed in me.

I have a sense of pride (or maybe just ego) at having taught myself some hard things over the years, and I’m still going to cling on to it for a little while longer, but it feels good to lean into this new thing a little more and take myself less seriously. I still think that writing code is fun, and that thinking in code is useful (because thinking logically is useful) but it’s also fun to just get floopy and do the thing from time to time.

I hadn’t written a memo in a while, and I’d forgotten how good it feels to write a few hundred words of impassioned nothingness. Not quite a plan, but also not a sermon. Just an opinion, written down and transmitted. It feels good to write down what you think or believe, even if you stop believing it soon thereafter. You can get a rush of adrenaline just by writing something down—isn’t that amazing? Free to anyone who takes it.

In general I think that writing is powerful in that way. You can feel something by writing, feel something by reading, feel something by speaking it out loud—even to yourself. You can write down something absolutely bonkers that you think you could never achieve, but then just write that you’re going to achieve it. You can feel giddy, drunk on the power of silly little words that didn’t exist until you wrote them down.

I’d always known this, I think, but the past year for me has been sort of mind-blowing. There comes a point I think when you realize that writing things down can make them come true, and writing them down over and over again makes it even more likely. You can just sort of… write things into existence. People do it every day of course, for the stage or the screen, but what the heck is this whole thing if not just another stage.

A rainy day in San Francisco today. We took Cacio to Golden Gate Park Dog Play Area 1 which is just such a cute name. She rolled in the mud, found stick twice as long as she is, and tried to dig holes that she is not allowed to dig. I ate a pastry that will probably keep me full for a week, picked up one of Aneesah’s birthday gifts, and ended the evening by trying to find a good rotisserie chicken for sandwiches. A good day: embraced some elements and then curled up in the warm eating sandwiches and fries.

Finally getting my taxes done today—slightly more complicated than I’d hoped because of an error in reporting. Mostly sorted now, but it made me yearn for the tax system in the U.K. where you don’t have to submit a tax return and where it just… works, for the most part. I spent most of my life not really thinking about it, and now I spend far too much time thinking about it. It’s so easy to take things for granted.

By the time I was done the day was almost over, but I didn’t want to start and end my day thinking about taxes, so we popped out to eat ramen at a neighborhood restaurant. It had been raining all day, and a bowl of hot broth was just what I needed. Noodles, a cold beer, and a malted ice cream sundae to finish. It was fucking great and I felt so much better afterwards. The place was cosy, the staff kind, the food excellent.

Back home now with my two favorite people (Cacio is people) asleep on the couch and Peep Show on the TV. I wrote about this yesterday, but I really feel like I accomplished it today: I had two days. I reset and turned a pretty annoying day into a pretty great one. I got to sit next to Aneesah as we slurped ramen, and then across from her at the wine bar afterwards as we talked about life and enjoyed a drink together.