SEVENTH POST

July 9, 2026 · 9:57 PM

It's getting late and I'm tired. Tonight, what do I want to talk about? I don't know what I want to talk about tonight. I keep thinking that writing will get easier, even if I do it when I don’t want to, when I’m tired, when I’m in pain, when my body refuses to cooperate. I don’t know that it will.

Either way, I wanna talk about how incredible it is that there's anything at all. It’s amazing that there’s anything in the world that does anything. I think it is beyond all imagination. Truly incredible. Everything that exists, it exists because someone made it so. Every process that happens, every bit of optimization, is that way because someone cared, and cared enough to go to bat for it, or argue with other people over it, or just decided to make it So. The world works the way it does because someone decided to focus obsessively on a small detail you will probably never even think about.

The world is just a museum of passion projects.

There are so many small corners of the universe we never think about, so many things in our day to day that we take for granted. Every single one of those things was hard-fought, hard-won. Every thing that exists -- from the tiniest little detailing on a brownstone in Brooklyn to a behemoth data center in Arizona to the stained glass of a church in Greece to the very Malbec I sip right now from Argentina (wishing I was in Argentina) — exists because someone demanded it be so. Every single thing exists because someone decided it just had to be that way, and they could not be stopped.

Tonight, faithful reader, I can be temporarily be stopped. I am tired. I ache. My bones hurt. It’s been really wet here, and the humidity seeps in between the cracks of my skin, and it drains me. My connective tissues are inflammed. My back is sore. I do not have the energy to write as much as normal.

But I want to offer up this: every single detail of every little thing that exists is precious. The human spirit is indomitable. We cannot be stopped, not really. We are such curious, such weird little creatures, and I do really have love, respect, and wonder for all of it. That’s not super apparent from the way I’ve been writing here. Admittedly, this blog reads as pretty grumpy so far. I’ve had an amazing time while writing it: I’m actually just scared to be publicly excited about anything anymore, because I feel like every time I get excited where anyone can see, I end up embarassed. Let’s not unpack that at all.

My hands hurt, and I feel (irrationally, maybe) that this blog must be done the old-fashioned way: no WhisperFlow, no Claude, I’m doing my best to do this from scratch. I tried a hack at the beginning (can you tell?) and it came out… weird.

I refuse to submit to my worst urges. I refuse to give up the fight. I refuse to lose my curiosity. I refuse to lose my insatiable hunger to know just about everything ever. I refuse to lose, kind of just in general.

My psychiatrist, the other week, was trying to give me a compliment. He told me that after working with me, over the past year, he was really proud of how much I had persevered and how determined I was to just get better. How dead-set I was on growing, cutting out the bad, focusing myself on well… myself.

What choice do I have, I said. What am I gonna do, just curl up in a ball and die? That didn’t seem like an option, no matter how bad the miscalibrated parts of my brain wanted me to.

After all, I am too stupid to stay down. I will get up, every time. I can be knocked down, I will even consider how nice it would be to simply stay down, but I’m not about to start now.

Anyway, my psychiatrist told me I should probably not see it that way, that I had a lot of options in between death and thriving. I don’t think that he’s wrong, I think I just can’t actually integrate that fact into my way of Being.

One thing this blog has taught me is that one of my nervous ticks is saying “I think”. I do this because I am used to trying to soften my opinion, and if I make it something that I “think” rather than a sentence I just say, it comes across softer. I’m a little over softening, too.

There is so much to report, but I am going to save it for my poor sweet fringe.report.