The pleasures of binge reading
Or, how to compensate for your pathetically inadequate schooling to face the upcoming challenges of Computer Times
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The last couple evenings I sat in bed for hours and read.
My bedroom is minimal, a little embarrassingly so. A mattress on the floor without a headboard. A single nightstand that’s an upside down IKEA basket that’s not sturdy enough for a glass of water, so I lay down a hardcover book as a pseudo-tray. Some pillows behind my back prop me up.
Hobbes curled up beside me, snoring little snores, and I sit here enjoying the thoughts of others from years before.
I’m supposed to plan a trip this month — can I somehow get into Japan finally? — but instead all I think is, “I want to sit here and read and never go anywhere ever again.“
This binge it’s been a lot of Pete D and rachelbythebay. Both are sort of ornery and blunt and nerdy and it’s perfect for me right now. I’ve been keeping daily notes from my readings, sort of like a commonplace book, and using Notion pages split up by month. It’s the most organized I’ve been when it comes to my daily reading habits.
A taste, from “The Six Pillars For Surviving in Computer Times” written in 2014 — almost a decade ago now:
We’ve already seen the likes of cave times, tribal times, village times, empire times […] Computer Times are just the next in a long series. The transition is underway. You can feel it. And it might seem scary and bad and mean and unfair but it’s in no way and under no circumstances optional. It’s happening. […] In this period of transition, your only recourse is to spend every single fucking evening and weekend compensating for your pathetically inadequate schooling in the following ways. It’s this or the soup kitchen:”
I find this kind of stuff oddly refreshing.
Back in my early 20’s I read voraciously. Each evening after work I’d get in my brown comfy goodwill recliner ($25, minimal stains, didn’t quite fit in my Ford Escort Wagon), pick up a book and read for a solid 3-4 hours.
2007. The beginning of a decade long pursuit of fitting Hobbes into small boxes.
An old boss told me, “Keep reading while you can, it goes away once you have a family.”
Well, maybe I got around that by not having a family.
And yet… I’ve still regressed into reading less.
I haven’t read anything of significance lately — nothing truly life changing. I fall asleep to audiobooks but if I’m honest it’s almost always the same one: The Stormlight Archive (sometimes known as The Way of Kings, and it’s so good I’m in my third re-read and it will definitely be a TV hit show someday).
Give it 50 pages and you’ll be hooked. Give it less and you’ll be bored.
But I always find a new writer who grabs my attention, and I dive in, and keep diving until my life is changed or something else distracts me and I’ll forget to read for weeks again.
It’s been a weird and intense week.
I spent hours working with lawyers to prepare pages upon pages of documents for an investment Blue Kazoo is taking on. Adding a partner who would be investing and also working in the business is something I’ve never done before… an opportunity for growth. And pain.
My parents bought a hundred acres in the middle of nowhere in Georgia. An hour from civilization. They love it. To me it sounds like a lot of sticks to pick up.
At the same time, I closed on a house in Florida that I bought as a short sale in 2008. It took 6 months to fix it up after the renters trashed it. My mom told them they should bring their church group over to see what they did to the place. The house symbolized my marriage falling apart, so… good riddance?
2009. I lived in the house for a year or so. Hobbes loved scooting around the bathtub every night… sometimes I would join him.
One of Brainjolt’s key partners changed their revenue sharing terms without notice. Just… bam, this is the new way or else. So many power games. When they’re a BigMegaCorp and you’re a koi in their pond, you do your best but there’s only so much you can do. Pivoting is in our DNA, but after a while it wears you down.
I attended an experimental theater where audience members talked about abortions they’ve had and orgasms they’ve faked. The willingness of strangers in an audience to air their private lives in such a public way was wonderfully uncomfortable… especially when an argument broke out!
Interrobang, my new venture fund, minted its first NFTs while I was standing in a security line at the LA passport office that wrapped outside around the building. Maybe it really is possible to have it all?
We made an offer to invest in a company of someone we randomly met at Art Basel in Miami last year.
Dec 2021 at Art Basel in Miami. One of my favorite nights with my favorite people. (Abraham, Emily, me in need of a post-pandemic haircut.)
And finally, I wrapped up the week by telling men older than me that I was disappointed in them, and to do better.
It made me wonder if I’ve become my father…
But I think I’m just becoming more myself.
// Josh
Weekly Meanderings
🍁 Japan's 72 Poetic Micro-Seasons. I love the idea of micro-season themes. Four seasons is so boring — why not have 72? Give me “Bush warblers start singing in the mountains (Feb 9th - 13th)” and “Silkworms start feasting on mulberry leaves (May 21st -25th)” and “Crickets chirp around the door (October 18th - 22nd)”
🏡 Fill your home with the weird stuff. “The stuff that makes people say, What is that? Buy the stuff that makes your home the best estate sale when you die.” Who will buy my portable camp recliner that I bring from room to room for Hobbes when I die??
📡 Wow! signal. “It remains the strongest candidate for an extraterrestrial radio transmission ever detected.” The chances of extraterrestrial life are either enormous or nil, and as far as I can tell we have no evidence for either positions, but it’s still cool to have Wow! moments.
🧑🚀 The Case for Quantum Change. I don’t normally recommend hedge fund letters, but this one by Eric Peters is pretty good. Two things that stuck out:
“Change is the great constant in human existence. And yet, for reasons we will perhaps never fully understand, we seek its opposite - stability - a state that does not exist. In fact, stability is the one thing we cannot have no matter how hard we strive to secure it. All we can hope to attain is the illusion, so we conjure it, and shelter within. Even still, change finds us, we cannot escape.”
“The most important thing to internalize when constructing portfolios for the coming years is that we have entered the most uncertain period of our lifetimes. It is even possible we are at the dawn of the period of greatest change for the past few centuries.”
🍎 I mortgaged my future with a Mac (rachelbythebay, 2013). Even though this is now 10 years old it still resonates with me — I moved everything to the Apple ecosystem almost two decades ago, and though I don’t (usually) regret it, it does entrench you. She says:
“Instead of staying with my wonky-but-free ways of doing things, I shifted all of my stuff over to the Mac. It gladly embraced all of it and jealously took it in, never to give it back. Now when I want to get back out, I have to do all of the work I thought I had managed to avoid by using a Mac in the first place.”
PS: This week is “Dew glistens white on grass (September 8th - 12th)”
PPS: Speaking of Art Basel, here’s a sketch Abraham drew of me while we were hanging out in the airbnb listening to the sound of air conditioners in a Florida winter:
PPPS: I wanted to buy this piece so bad but unfortunately, they told me it cost Money.
PPPPS: And this made me mad… with jealousy. So simple. UGH!
PPPPPS: But the highest art was the cat memorial I found while walking. RIP Manny.
Man, I can’t wait to go back to Art Basel this year.
If you’ll be there hit me up.
-J