Don’t you find it kind of funny how we know what we need to know but like to pretend we don’t know so that we don’t have to act on what we know? (mind blowing i know)
Let me explain:
Posts
127 episodes and still having fun
We’re on our 4th season with the Havana Cafe Sessions podcast and still having fun. If you’ve never tuned in and listened, you should. It’s a conversational podcast about life –
We put this little teaser video together to show you some behind the scenes clips of us doing our thing. The US being me and novelist, Sarah Beth Hunt
Morning Notes 13.03.09
I’m currently wrestling with the question: what does it mean to be my most evolved and authentic self?
This got me thinking about the human potential movement again, and whether or not it’s possible to re-engage with the movement when it was in its nascent state, back before it got mixed up with a lot of new age mumbo-jumbo.
A snippet of Episode 126: The Body-Mind Connection
So this week we discussed how you can use your body to explore your emotions and your thoughts. It’s pretty crazy, the connection between the mind and the body and how each influences the other.
You can listen to the full episode here.
I was struck
I never know how this works to say he is a great man means what exactly? What makes one great? Not wars, at least not according to Yoda.
“I was struck from the very beginning that there is a totally independent and new voice in writing.”
Werner Herzog on Harmony Korine
And yet I can’t understand his scribbles, but at least I am having a cracking good time in this crazy mixed up town. Sleep wants me, but I don’t want sleep. It’s overrated at best, so I resist.
Channelling My Inner Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac was a cool cat, at least in his prose. I adore him above all the other Beat Generation icons. His words speak directly to the soul of who I am. On the Road, a classic yes, but give me The Dharma Bums or the Book of Sketches to really get me going.
I’m calling on you now Jack. I want to feel the extraordinary in the ordinary, experience the wind howling across the fog drenched landscape as I walk mile after mile, drifting, searching (for what, for anything but certainty).
People kept asking you how you did what you did, so you laid it for them, and me, in way only you could.
Like Ginsberg did when writing Howl, I’ll post these on my wall:
Thanks for these Jack.
“Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.”
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
Where I need to be
‘I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.’
Douglas Adams, from The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Toulouse 9
Seeing how I just finished reading Harold Jaffe’s Paris 60, I thought I’d use it as inspiration for the style of this post.
16.02.2019
Socrates, one of my heroes, said the unexamined life is not worth living. But in this day and age rumor has it that people who don’t spend much time examining their lives are much happier. That doesn’t bode well for me. I spend way too much time examining my life and my place in the universe. Searching for what? Truth? Maybe. Happiness? Not really (happiness is not my bag). Then what? Damned if I know. I’m just hoping that I’ll know it when I see it.
17.02.2019
I’m going to ‘the pink city.’
Toulouse, capital of France’s southern Occitanie region, is bisected by the Garonne River and sits near the Spanish border. It’s known as La Ville Rose (‘The Pink City’) due to the terra-cotta bricks used in many of its buildings.
I’m sat on flight AF1065 on my way to CDG airport in Paris. I won’t be spending any time in Paris this time around. My onward flight is to Toulouse, which is suppose to be a lovely place. It’s not a pleasure trip though, so I won’t get to see much of the place,
I bought a GoPro Hero 7 Black from Dixons Travel. It was a bit of an impulse buy in that I didn’t decide to buy one until an hour before I headed out to the airport.
My flight in was as smooth as pie.
I’m in Toulouse at the Ibis Styles, near the airport. I checked in about 8. I had a repeat of Berlin. The check-in lady gave me a key to someone else’s room. Unlike the Berlin incident, the guest was not in bed fast asleep when I walked in.
I met the rest of the crew for dinner at the Leon de Belgium. The crew – John, Kim, Mark, and Claire. Tomorrow is the kickoff of a 3-day customer centric workshop we’re delivering for a group of up and coming leaders.
18.02.2019
Had to hunt down an ATM machine in the wee hours of the morning. Another example of me doing everything at the last minute! Forgot I needed euros. Actually, I didn’t forget, I just didn’t think about it.
How do any of us even make it through this gig called life?
There’s surviving and then there’s thriving. Just a few days ago I was thinking we should be content with surviving. But now I’m thinking, I’m here. In the game. Why not play to thrive?!
Why not maximise my experience of being human?
19.02.2019
Eye pleasant evening.
My table mates at dinner were fantastic.
One of my table mates was a former German infantry officer, he got out as a captain, same as me. We chit chatted about what we liked most about our time in the army and what we missed most. We shared the same sentiments. We both missed the camaraderie and the sense of brotherhood and knowing that your fellow soldiers had your back and that you could trust them with your life. We missed the clear sense of purpose and mission.
He has an interesting job in PR and seems to be making some good political connections with the likes of General Petraeus and other people of similar caliber. I like the story he told about one of his current work mates who has two PHDs, does combat tours with the German special forces during his reserve time, sleeps only 4 hours a night and so on. When I hear stuff like that it makes me think I could have played my cards differently and done so much more with my life. What kind of brain bucket has two PHDs?
Or like one of the other dudes on my table who has his side hustle selling baby clothes and is about to be bought be another company? Plus his coding and hacking, and volunteer work.
And here I am, a lowly blogger trying to keep the dream alive…
I’ve been here four days now and shockingly I haven’t been able to see much of the place. That’s often the case with work trips though. Essentially my time has been consumed with prepping for the day’s event. Running the day. Recapping the day, then prepping for the next day. The evening is spent networking with the delegates in the hotel where we are staying (which is outside of the city centre), so by the time the evening event is done, it’s time to get some shut-eye before starting the cycle again.
The event has gone extremely well so no complaints there. It’s been full on and intense, and pretty cool too be working with German, French, Spanish, and English folks all in one place. I don’t know about you, but whenever I’m with incredible people, it makes me want to up my game. So many people doing so many interesting things.
20.02.2019
Be curious. That how essaying gets done.
21.02.2019
I’ve got a stupid head cold, other than that
I’m not in the mood to be around people today. I don’t want to play Mr Motivator today.
I need some decompression time from people…but that ain’t happening for another couple of days, so suck it up soldier and drive on with the mission…
22.02.2019
I’m not firing on all cylinders at the moment. I need some duvet time!
23.02.2019
I’m feeling a ton better now. The sauna and steam room helped.
24.02.2019
I started reading Mythologies by Ronald Barthes (a book recommendation
Fantasyland on the A425
When stuff like Thursday happens it reminds me that we are all the same, driven by the same basic motivations, the ones Maslow shared with us in 1943 in his paper, for the Psychological Review, called “A Theory of Human Motivation”. Yes, I’m talking about the hierarchy of needs. That’s it! That’s us, 5 levels on a triangle
We like to delude ourselves into thinking that we are complex, unique individuals, when in fact we are simple, oh so very simple
So simple in fact, that all you really need to understand the true nature of the human can be described by what evolutionary biologists call the Four F’s
We’ve added our own layer of complexity by falling for the fairytale story of
This coming from
So I was driving into town when up ahead in the distance I saw a plane flying across my field of vision. I literally, and I kid you not, started looking for the crate drop I’m talking PUBG style here (which btw, we’re looking for 2 good men or women to join our team, hit reply if you’re interested).
And then not 5 minutes later I was driving across a bridge. Off to my left, I saw a field of tall dead brown grass. There was a guy moving slowly through the field. I could swear he was a zombie, straight out of this season 2 Walking Dead scene.OK. OK. I know. I need help
Once you start to self-actualise you become a threat
Sex and drugs, two pathways to altering consciousness. Making aspects of them illegal to support an institutional agenda of subjugation is in effect a war on consciousness from the State. The State sees these as threats to its institutions and programs of control.
Activist Conner Habib:
“Once you start to self-actualise by investigating your own consciousness you become a threat.”
I stumbled upon Mary Jane, a cannabis lifestyle blog edited by Mira Gonzales and owned by Snoop Dogg. Just one of those random things that happen at 5:30 in the morning. It showed up in my twitter feed (actually the podcast link showed up in my feed and in the spirit of discovery I pressed play and kept on listening to the end.)
It was
Anyway, check out the episode. You can watch it here or listen to it on iTunes.
When it comes to social media and the blogosphere, be like water
Getting meta on you for a second.
One of the things I’ve been working on of the past couple of weeks is my blogging workflow. Admittedly I’ve been focusing on the Newsletter (which, by the way, if you haven’t signed up for it, you should. I’ve renamed it Eclectically Curios to reflect where I’m going with the whole “learn something new everyday” motif). I’m 23 issues in and feel relative happy with the direction it’s taking.
Now to integrate the newsletter and the blog…
Because, despite all of the rhetoric about blogging being dead, I believe the blog is alive and well – for some. And yeah, while the good old days of personal blogging, where everyone pretty much just bled their hearts out onto the screen (they do that on social media now), may be gone, blogging is not dead, it has just evolved.
And I believe it’s about to evolve again as more and more articles and blogposts are throwing the question out there, is social media dying? Plus a number of high profile bloggers back in the day, who jumped ship for social media, are now hinting at returning back to personal blogging in attempt to recapture the blogosphere of the late 90’s early 2000’s.
Of course there is talk that people are turning to closed networks on platforms like WhatsApp, which last year broke the 1.5 billion active monthly users mark. And there are others like Messenger and Telegram, and for the more techie, security caution types, there’s Wire. Of course, being the geek I am, I have a presence on all of them.
I like the questions and conclusions that long-time blogger, Jason Kottke lays out:
Maybe we need to ask ourselves, what was it that we wanted from the blogosphere in the first place? Was it a career? Was it just a place to write and be read by somebody, anybody? Was it a community? Maybe it began as one thing and turned into another. That’s OK! But I don’t think we can treat the blogosphere as a settled thing, when it was in fact never settled at all. Just as social media remains unsettled. Its fate has not been written yet. We’re the ones who’ll have to write it.
Ok, so back to the blogging newsletter things. Knowing that I have limited time (don’t we all), I have to sort out how the blog and the personal newsletter play nicely together without either taking up too much time and the other dying of neglect.
My thinking at the moment is to have the personal newsletter take the lead role and the blog, the supporting role. I haven’t quite worked it out completely, but my initial thoughts are the newsletter is a more personal link from me to you, while the blog is my Internet interface, where, like Rome, all of my connections lead to.
Anyway, that’s the state of affairs for whatever this is that I’m doing.
By the way, I’m writing this in MarsEdit 4.0, a web editing app that allows my to create my posts on or offline. I’m trying it out as a part of nailing down my workflow. The two main features that I like is the ability to compose blogposts in something other than the browser or copying and pasting from Word. The other neat feature is the Safari extension that lets you create a post from an article i’m reading, like what I do with the Revue powered newsletter. That should save me a load of time in my seek, sense, and share mode.
Be messy
Chad Dickerson’s words bare repeating:
Maybe if we all gave each other the space to be complex people — not reduced to public perception, our professional bios, our LinkedIn profiles, others’ narratives of who we are — we might understand each other better and give ourselves the room to be messy but wondrous human beings
This is the first thing I read this morning and it has set the tone for the day. The things is, I spend a lot of time fighting with myself inside. On one side of the divide, I’m trying to limit myself online, to niche as as they say, because the logic goes: you’ll attract a larger audience, the narrower you go.
On the other side of the line is me, the renaissance man, the jack of all trades, the curious George into everything.
I hate the idea of putting myself in a narrowly defined boxed.
I like things to be messy.
I feel as human beings we have the capacity to be many things all at the same time and that we don’t need to be small, we can be big and expansive into anything and everything, exploring our curiosity.
We don’t have to be like insects and be specialists. We should indeed celebrate our infinite capacity to be many things.
Natural enemies
We have four natural enemies: fear, clarity, power, and old age. Fear, clarity, and power can be overcome, but not old age. Its
Carlos Castaneda, from The Teachings of Don Juan
effect can be postponed, but it can never be overcome.
The Science of Thinking
How the brain works, how we learn, and why we sometimes make stupid. mistakes.
Find Your Freedom
This week we explore the give and take of freedom. Are we really free and is the freedom we do have, balanced?
Some Easy Life Math For You – Lifehack #001
How good are you with math? Here’s some easy life math for you.
Sometimes a fantasy
I found myself caught up in this debate on Reddit: AITA for taking husband’s sex doll to the trash?
In this instance, I think the lady was definitely wrong. By her own admission, she knew he had the doll while they were dating and that he used it frequently. She married him knowing he had and used the doll (not as frequently after marriage). She has her own sex toys (but doesn’t like his because it has a face).
This week she snapped and while her husband was at work she took it to the town dump and threw it away. Just to add some context to this, the type of sex doll (NSFW link) in question has a starting price of $6,000.
I have to say, I side with the dude in this instance (and not because he’s a dud) but because the lady knew he had it. Married him knowing he had it (and didn’t make any conditional demands that he get rid of it). Has and uses her own sex toys. And threw away an expensive piece of equipment without her husband’s consent.
What fascinates me about this thread is the psychological strain I image the woman must be under. On some level, I image she must feel like she’s competing with a doll over her husband’s affection/attention. And the unasked question ringing in her head probably is “why is he having sex with a doll, when he could be having sex with me? Am I that inadequate?”
Aside from her throwing this thing away, I think they have some deeper issues to address between the two of them.
Anyway, read the thread and tell me what you think?
The durable stuff
I stumbled upon the “stock and flow” conversation again today. Quite timely really as I’ve been reevaluating where and on what I spend my time on when I’m on the Net (actually as I wrote that last bit, I thought, hold on, the Net is always on…am I ever really off of the Net (as my watch just dinged me to let me know I have a new notification, but that is a discussion for another, I think).
Robin Sloan, the guy who wrote the original post, defines stock and flow as:
Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist.
Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
*stock and flow btw is an economic concept that Robin adopted as a metaphor for writing in the connected world.
As Robin writes:
Flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons—but I think we neglect stock at our peril. I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: oh man. I’ve got nothing here.
That’s the situation I’m trying to avoid – having no stock – because I spend way too much time creating flow. And there’s a good reason for that. Flow is quick, as quick as a retweet or a share. Creating stock, on the other hand, takes time. Time to sit and think. Time to digest and make sense. Time to craft the sense-making into something readable to others. And, finally, time to share.
That’s a lot of time.
And who has time?
Of course, if I cut out the time I spend on flow, I’d have more time to spend on stock. But you ignore flow at your peril too:
This is no time to hole up and work in isolation, emerging after years with your work in hand. Everybody will go: huh? Who are you? And even if they don’t—even if your exquisite opus is the talk of the tumblrs for two whole days—if you don’t have flow to plug your new fans into, you’re suffering a huge (get ready for it!) opportunity cost. You’ll have to find those fans all over again next time you emerge from your cave.
Somewhere in all of this, there has to be some balance.
And that’s the trick isn’t it, balancing the two – stock and flow.
It’s time for a revolution in learning
Picked this up from Giovanna Lo Storto. I’m happy to be a part of the upcoming learning revolution. It’s definitely about time for one! 
¡Viva la revolución!
Pause for a second.
Now scan the canon of your past. Now reflect:
How has everything that has happened in your life led you to this precise moment in time?