working notes from the textual underground
a space for collecting imperfect notes, essays, posts, poems, microlearning experiments, and
following my curiosity down infinite rabbit holes
Four suspects. One victim. No witnesses. Breakfast served as normal. I came downstairs this morning to a “murder scene”. Feathers everywhere. A dead starling in the middle of the hall. Four cats in the household, none at the scene, and nobody in the kitchen demanding breakfast. Something was wrong. Obviously,
Or how I discovered that I might be a fictional character in someone else’s metaphysical experiment. It began, as these things often do, with a perfectly innocent question. I’ve been reading Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, a novel that has the peculiar effect of making you suspicious of just about everything,
Clay’s daily note this morning contains a small observation from a hotel room near King’s Cross. Underground trains pass close by every few minutes. He hears them, except that after a while he doesn’t. The sound remains in the room; attention has stopped reporting it. I keep returning to that
I’m writing this from a narrow hotel room near King’s Cross. There’s a single bed, a television on the wall and, most importantly, a decent space to write. The room I had last week was a tiny square that was mostly bed. This one has enough room for a desk
Some stories save us by making the world smaller. They take a bewildering field of possibilities and cut a path through it. Be the reliable one. Keep moving. Make yourself useful. Don’t let them see you struggle. Find the lesson. Turn the wound into something meaningful. For a while the
A red button sits within reach. The machine begins doing something unexpected, dangerous or simply wrong. A human hand comes down. The process stops. This is one of our favourite images of control: obvious danger, decisive intervention, a clean separation between the person who judges and the system that acts.
A barebones vectorial version of me stares back from the screen. The skin has dissolved into planes. Texture has gone. Pores, lines, scars, fatigue – all the small evidence that a face has passed through time – have been cleared away. And yet I remain recognisable. Apparently identity survives a
I returned to Sönke Ahrens’s How to Take Smart Notes with a different question from the one I brought to it the first time. The Textual Underground already existed: an Obsidian vault containing years of notes, journal entries, reading highlights, unfinished essays, old obsessions, and ideas whose energy I could
1. I have called the blog a place where I think in public. The phrase once felt like permission. I didn’t need to arrive with conclusions. I could show the workings: the question under examination, the half-built bridge, the sentence doubling back because it had discovered something behind it. A
The Soulcruzer podcast is an audioblog from the edge of the inner life.
Part personal essay, part field recording, part narrative alchemy, it follows the strange places where story, psyche, myth, technology, and everyday experience begin to speak to each other.
One episode might wander through tarot as reflective technology. Another might take Nietzsche’s eternal return for a walk, explore games as containers for transformation, or ask what happens when ancient wisdom meets the AI age. Depth psychology brushes against the esoteric. Philosophy comes down from the shelf. Theory gets tested against life.
This is not polished guru-talk or productivity theatre. It is a mind in movement: raw notes, live experiments, confessional mysticism, and working fragments from the textual underground.
At the heart of it all is a simple premise:
Stories are code. Reality is programmable. And the life you are living might be more editable than you were taught to believe.
If you are drawn to the deep work, the strange edges, and the art of becoming more fully alive, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
In this episode, I take the Soulcruzer podcast out of the studio and into the fields.
What starts as an experiment in mobile podcasting/vlogging turns into a wandering meditation on labels, blogging, AI, morning rituals, and the strange abundance of media tools we now carry in our pockets.
– Why I still think of myself as a blogger first
– Podcasting, vodcasting, and the pressure to become “multimodal”
– The problem with labels: “When you label me, you negate me”
– soulcruzer.com as the central hub/home on the internet
– Wisdom Walks as thinking time
– Walking, motion, and changing perspective
– The “barefoot philosopher” approach to everyday philosophy
– AI as an extension of cognition rather than just a productivity tool
– The “soft cyborg” and the library of Alexandria in your pocket
– Morning reality tunnels and the sacred space before breakfast
– Coffee, barefoot grounding, and choosing what enters your mind first
– Indie blogging, platforms, Substack, distribution, and the open web
– Why these episodes may stay loose, minimally edited, and stream-of-consciousness