It’s Sunday evening in Las Vegas, and although I’m a bit sleepy returning from a late Saturday night flight from Chicago, I decided I shouldn’t accept the many excuses that I can easily form to be lazy about posting as usual.
I was thinking about the causes that have stopped me from writing with any regularity. The biggest one is inertia/momentum/consistency, but I realized my book reading time has been reduced dramatically, which has dried up my creativity. It would be like talking to me about pro sports: my last real interest was during childhood, and although I can keep up with small talk from reading ESPN during my downtime, I don’t have many interesting things to add to those conversations. I’ve been spending lots of time with my mind deep into my current work projects (which I have some exciting new developments recently, but still getting those fully realized) for an extended period with my recharge being playing hours of pickleball daily. My reading though is what energized this blog, and I believe most writers. It’s the fuel and sustenance that gets me excited to talk about something outside of my standard life and routines which can be repetitive.
Also a huge thanks to a colleague at work who mentioned that he reads this blog. It was a little wake up call to publish something after another extended hiatus. I found several drafts over the past few months that I was around 80% finished with, got distracted, didn’t publish that day, and then over time they fade in relevance as well as don’t reflect my current thoughts.
Otherwise big picture things in my life this year are good. I’ve had plenty of ups and downs going on in my own head, but externally most things are progressing well. Work has been going in the right direction, I’ve gotten pretty decent at Pickleball, I feel appreciative and more present in many of my relationships, and I’m able to feel more contentment in regular life. The weather is warming up and I can sit in the grass outside with my cat listening to the wind just being present with him, watching good television series at night with my girlfriend, long rambling talks with friends in Chicago, and making a fresh coffee each morning brings me some daily joy.
Something that got me in a good mood to write this was re-reading a great short modern Philosophy book called “The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence” by Robert Pantano. It’s not nihilistic like the title sounds, but it does explore meaning and life through various historical philosophy ideas, and not all of them are sugar-coated. Things like that speak to me. As he notes in the book we don’t understand why we dream, how the brain works, if there’s other dimensions/multiverses, and many other basics of how humans and fundamental reality truly work. I can’t personally just put my head in the sand and pick an answer to any of these questions, but I do like to explore them and get a feeling of awe and beauty at the universe and our small part in it.
At night it’s not the best thing to go to bed to, but if you liked the ultra-violent action film “The Raid”, that director has a series with 2 seasons (and a new season coming out now apparently on whatever service owns the original rights) called “Gangs of London”. It’s a crime series, and it is over the top sometimes, but it has some pretty incredible action sequences, as well as great noir where there’s always someone behind the scenes bigger and more powerful pulling the strings.
On a lighter note, a surprisingly really funny, weird, and occasionally heart warming comedy I found is “Shoresy” on Hulu. I found it randomly, but kept ignoring it because it takes place in Canada, it’s about hockey, and it just didn’t sound appealing. I tried a 20 minute episode, and then another, and asked a friend from work who had apparently watched it: “is that show really dumb or is it really good?” He told me he thought it was hilarious, and my girlfriend and I were happy to have found it now that we watched the few short seasons.
With that I’m going to post this, and leave you with a picture of the river died green in Chicago yesterday in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.
Andrew Manser 