Approach

Saturday 3/16/24

More on this later. More on everything later. I didn't do a lot today. I'll make up for it. I have sat here for the past two hours and worked on the first page of "Friendship Bracelet." That first page is 224 words long, and is comprised of nine paragraphs, nineteen lines, and 953 characters.

Every word matters so much. One could live a billion lifetimes and wouldn't achieve what these 224 words of this first page achieve. The way this is engineered, how deeply the design goes into each of those words and every bit of white, negative space. There is no engineering project like these 224 words. No architectural undertaking. To make something like this perfect takes so much focus and recall and discipline, to go along with the bigger things.

This is such an important story, even though I have no idea when people will be able to see it. Was talking to someone today about how "Fitty" is now five-years-old. You have an entire industry keeping the world from seeing it. Five years and counting. The amount of good these two stories would do in the world. I don't mean in, "Oh, it's always nice to have some art" kind of bullshit way. I mean active, widespread, widely felt, civic good. It's beautiful, too. The story is about this thing that has impacted so many lives. This huge, life-shaping thing. But no one has ever approached it this way.

Downloaded Roy Brooks' Understanding and Coltrane's Om, have been trying to determine the most energized Grateful Dead show from 1969 (I'll keep you posted), listened to the Tallis Scholars album of Cipriano de Rore compositions.

Need to do better. Work myself past exhaustion, but in a healthy way. As Thoreau said, "Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary." He means something other than just snows in the fields and woods. Those things were literal for Thoreau, but they're also symbolic. He's talking about how you feel when you've done the best that you can. When you've pushed. When you have summoned prodigious amounts of energy and burnt it all off, but you are still strong because you know what you've just done, what progress you're making, that repeating what you've just done will make a difference. You don't feel that way when that's not what you're doing. Or certainly not as completely.