Category: Longform
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Why Blogs Matter
This blog had its tenth birthday last July, and I forgot to celebrate.
I had no idea what I was doing when I shared that first essay in 2014. Since then, I’ve written about a hundred more posts. Each is now swirling around the ether, a faint signal in the noise for those who share an interest in keeping a journal, or reading great books, or managing finances on a Mac, or taking better notes. Or being a better father, or living aboard a boat, or suffering an unimaginable loss.
An odd assortment, I know.
My Year of Reading in 2024
I read 53 books last year, split about evenly between physical and e-books, and listened to just one audiobook. I usually listen to 10 -15 audiobooks a year, but in 2024, I decided to leave the AirPods behind on long walks to be more present. This felt like a fair exchange.
Favorites
The best non-fiction book I read last year was An Immense World by Ed Yong. The book shares how other animals sense the world in ways humans cannot. The book covers dozens of species, from an elephant’s incredible sense of smell to how spiders sense and surf on electric charges in the Earth's atmosphere. You can’t read these amazing stories without shifting uncomfortably in your chair. We think we understand reality but are too limited by our senses. We are not seeing the whole picture. This is a mind-expanding book.
Celebrating Three Years of Sobriety
I passed my third anniversary of giving up alcohol today. I thought I would share some background on this milestone and why I decided to stop drinking.
I have a long history with alcohol. Maybe it’s the genetics mapped deep in my Irish blood or an inheritance from longstanding tradition, but alcoholism runs in the family, near and far. I can’t think of a time in my life that wasn’t steeped in the rituals of drinking.
I met the love of my life in a dive bar. Most of my proudest accomplishments and favorite moments were punctuated with a celebration beer or glass of wine. An early love of Hemingway surely contributed to an interweaving of my very identity with alcohol. If I closed my eyes and pictured my true self in my natural element, it was cozied up to a dimly lit bar with a whiskey on the rocks in a brown, brown study.
Thank Your Teachers
I came across a journal entry I wrote on this day ten years ago. I was reflecting on the people in my life that made a difference on how things have turned out for me. I realized that many of these people couldn’t possibly know the impact they had on me and the countless others they helped.
I kept thinking about this one community college professor who did more than anyone to inspire me to pursue a college degree. I thought how sad it would be if he never knew the difference he made. So after a quick search on the internet, I found him. I wrote him an email. I introduced myself and told him a few stories about how he had challenged and inspired me, how he had helped me forge a path to the person I am today.
And he wrote back:
How A Hidden Feature in Bear Changed the Way I Review Notes
This is the second of what might become a series of posts about how I use the Bear app to improve how I leverage notes in my reading and thinking. This is not a topic that will interest many, but writing a blog offers its indulgences. Unless your interests lie in the nerdier aspects of note-taking systems, you can safely skip this one.
If you told me a year ago that I’d write a blog post about the power of Apple widgets, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here I am—writing a blog post about Apple widgets.
You might be asking, what are you even talking about? What are widgets? Apple introduced these quirky appendages in 2020 as a way to present information from apps on the home screen of your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. The most popular widgets provide information about weather, stocks, and news. My reaction back then was decidedly ho-hum. Why would I want to clutter the precious real estate of my iPhone screen when I could just open the app?
A particular kind of widget in Bear 2 finally convinced me of their value.
In January, I switched from Craft to Bear 2 for my reading and knowledge notes. I shared why I chose Bear in this post. The switch went so well that I soon brought over my journal from Day One and my writing from Ulysses. For the past four months, almost everything I’ve written has started and ended in Bear.
The End of Private Libraries
There seem to be two kinds of people on this earth—those who love books and everyone else. The bookish have always been far outnumbered, and the gap must be widening in this age of endless digital entertainment. I count myself among the proud minority, but a book, of all things, has brought into question my lifelong practice of keeping a private library.
A recent acquisition illustrates the issue.
“Didn’t you just read this on your Kindle,” Lisa asks me as she flips through the book I’ve brought home.
I dislike direct questioning about my book-buying habits. It feels like the pointed inquiries on medical questionnaires about alcohol consumption.
“Yeah, but I liked it so much I wanted the hard copy,” I tell her.
The fact is, I will likely never read this book, even though I did enjoy it. I bought the book because I like having a visual, tangible record of the time this book and I spent together. I like scanning my shelves and seeing proof of a rich reading life. I like the way a roomful of books makes me feel about myself. Besides, I tell myself, there are worse ways to spend money.
Bear 2 for Writing and Thinking
For the past six weeks, I’ve been evaluating an app to replace Craft for my reading notes. This post shares the reasons I’m moving away from Craft and why Bear 2 might be the best app around for writing and thinking on the Mac and iPad.
Craft and the Value of Connected Notes
I use Craft to capture the notes, quotes, and wisdom I’ve gleaned from reading and studying. Before Craft, these notes languished in the margins of books or notecards stuffed in a file box. In three years with Craft, I have written almost four hundred reading notes linked to several hundred dedicated theme notes, creating what is unfortunately called in personal knowledge management circles a “second brain.”
The lofty promises of automatic insights from smart note-taking tools are mostly overblown. I still resort to notecards or a paper notebook when I’m forced to really concentrate. A digital tool does solve the issue of near-instant retrieval, though, and there is goodness in gathering notes together in a trusted system.
Mac-only Apps
I’ve been evaluating Bear 2 to replace Craft for my reading notes and quasi-Zettelkasten for the past few weeks. I’ve used Craft for over three years, but that tool has morphed into a team note-taking and document-sharing platform that doesn’t mesh well with my needs anymore.
My initial impressions of Bear have been quite positive. Here is an app with a calming, minimalist design, yet in many ways, has more power and capabilities than Craft. And best of all, it intuitively works like you’d expect. Like a Mac app.
Reading The Story of Civilization
In the spring of last year, I started reading The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. This is no quick undertaking. Spanning eleven volumes and 10,000 pages, it will take me the rest of this year to finish.
The first volume was published in 1935 when Durant had just turned 50. He published the final volume forty years later. Midway through these decades of writing, Will's wife Ariel became a co-author and active collaborator in this epic undertaking. Together, they read an average of five hundred books as research for each published volume.
The Story of Civilization is regarded as one of the most compelling narratives of world history ever written. The tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1968. Goodreads currently gives these books a 4.4 out of 5. Such a high rating is rare, which indicates how readers truly admire the series. Essayist Jamie Todd Rubin chose these as the sole books to take along to his proverbial desert island, which was all the prompting I needed to start this adventure.
My Two Journals
I surprised myself a little over a year ago by writing in a paper journal every morning. The surprise wasn’t that I was keeping a journal but that I was doing it by hand. I had been using the Day One journaling app to record my private thoughts for over a decade. But this was no ordinary year. After suffering an immeasurable loss, I yearned for the comfort that sometimes only flows from pen and paper.
Yet what’s even more surprising is that this was no momentary whim. I’ve kept up this daily habit of scribbling in a notebook in the morning and typing in Day One at night for over a year now. And I think I’ve pieced together why, for me, the combination of analog and digital writing has developed into the best possible journaling experience.
Quicken Classic for Mac - A Long-time User Review
I’ve used some version of Quicken for 35 years. That puts me in a stodgy demographic that manages money in a certain “this is how I’ve always done it” way. For the uninitiated, Quicken is a personal finance software program that helps manage your checkbook and credit cards, pay your bills, keep to a budget, and track investments. It’s available on Windows and Mac, though there are differences in capabilities between the two. There are companion apps for iPhone and iPad, but they feel like afterthoughts, lacking key functionality of the desktop software. Quicken Classic is sold as an annual subscription across three offerings: Deluxe, Premier, and the recently released Business and Personal edition.
The Curiosity of Micro.blog
How I fell into a trance with the Indy blog service, Micro.blog, is a curious story.
I received a renewal invoice from HostGator notifying me that the cost of my bi-annual web hosting service was going up 58%. Quick math informed me that I was paying too much for a personal blog. Surely there must be a less expensive alternative? That question led me down many paths, most leading me in circles.
Moving to Wordpress.com seemed like a good idea until I realized its plug-in-enabled service made even HostGator’s renewal price seem like a steal. I considered Medium and Substack, but their continual pestering readers to subscribe to their respective services didn't mesh with my belief in the value of an open internet. Many other competing web hosting services offered attractive short-term teaser rates but would require constant leapfrogging from service to service to remain affordable.
A Slow Read of the Story of Civilization 📚
I’ve had this old set of Will and Ariel Durant’s Pulitzer-prize-winning Story of Civilization on my bookshelves, collecting dust for almost a quarter of a century. These books belonged to my grandmother, who willed them to me after passing. I inherited her love of reading, so I’ve treasured these books as heirlooms of my memory of her and our shared connection.
The Wastelands
Grieving the loss of a child is a journey through wastelands you never expected to cross. Unlike every other challenge you’ve ever faced, there is no easy way through a loss like this. You stumble and fall. You curse. You are hobbled and bloody. You are not sure of the way. You might be going in circles.
The truth is everyone suffers in this life. It’s our lot to take the awful with the beautiful. We all must face it. In a perfect world, your mom wouldn’t forget you in the fog of Alzheimer’s Disease. You wouldn’t lose a dear friend to cancer in the prime of her life. Your son wouldn’t die in a motorcycle accident before his twenty-first birthday.
All Good Things
After five years of amazing adventures aboard our Nordhavn trawler MV Indiscretion, we’ve decided it’s time for a change. We are coming off the water.
We didn’t plan on this. We dreamed for decades to be at this very spot in our lives — casting off the bowlines to explore the world under our own keel at the unhurried pace of seven knots. But life doesn’t always work out like you hoped.
On September 27th, 2022, our son Connor was killed in a motorcycle accident in Colorado Springs. A car pulled out in front of him on a busy street a half mile from his apartment. He was just twenty years old.
A Father’s Grief
This is the most difficult thing I've ever written. I’m sharing this partly because I hope that releasing these words will provide some catharsis from the excruciating pain I have carried around these last months. Perhaps the sentiments I’ve conveyed here can be a small comfort to someone who has experienced a similar tragedy. I also know that people are worried about us, about me. Consider this an abbreviated journal of our past one hundred days. Unlike anything else I’ve written, this one contains no epiphany, enlightenment, or happy ending. This one is mired in the messy middle of heartbreak and loss.
On the night of September 27th, our son Connor died in a motorcycle accident in Colorado Springs. A car pulled out in front of him on a busy street a half mile from his apartment. He was killed instantly in the crash. He was riding a motorcycle he had owned for just one day. He was twenty years old.
I mentally replay the call we received from the coroner’s office in the wee hours of September 28th over and over and over again, my mind trying to push this all away, to wake up from the darkest, longest nightmare of my life.
Shilshole Marina — The Voyage Home
Kicking back in the cockpit of Indiscretion on this fine May evening, I've been thinking about how life has a way of circling back on itself in strange, unexpected ways.
We've been settled in our new slip at Shilshole Marina in Seattle for a month now as we finalize the sale of our Vashon Island home. After all the frenetic activity involved in readying a house to sell, it feels good just to be still and observe the hustle and bustle that surrounds us here, in what surely must be the very center of the trawler universe.
The Art of Letting Go
If the first half of life is about growing and accumulating, then the second half must see us disbursing, letting go. Life is full of cycles — like the seasons, or perhaps more dear to me, the flooding and ebbing of tides.
In the past few years, I’ve let go of my aging parents, my career and a lifetime of associates and colleagues, a dear friend, and this past year I watched my two kids leave home to start their own lives of growth and accumulation.
At its best, letting go brings an emotional release, a lightness, a feeling of immense relief, like putting down a heavy weight you’ve been carrying around for too long. At its worst, it brings a paralyzing sense of irretrievable loss. I’ve been thinking about these two very different outcomes as we navigate our next phase of letting go.
A Writer’s Journal: Day One or Craft?
I’ve kept a journal for most of my adult life. I got started in my early twenties filling dozens of blank journal books. Ten years ago, I went digital with an app called Day One, and I have been using an iPad to journal since then. My journal holds thousands of entries — over a million words — spanning more than thirty years of private thoughts and memories.
Keep the Change
As I walked through the throng of travelers at LAX recently on my way to a flight that would be canceled the minute I got to the gate, I reflected on how change is the only real constant in life. In less than a week, I found myself hurrying through crowded airports in Seattle, Denver and Los Angeles (fun fact: these three airports accounted for 60% of all holiday flight cancelations). From Denver, I drove 1,200 miles to Los Angeles in a Jeep with Connor and his ten-month-old puppy, listening to baseball podcasts (yes, that's a thing) through Colorado and New Mexico. The music changed to hip hop in Arizona, and I felt nostalgic for the podcasts. I paid nearly $7 per gallon for gas in California and felt nostalgic for Arizona. We survived freeway driving in the rain as we neared Los Angeles with Connor relying on his 19-year-old reflexes -- or the Force -- to weave in and out of 80-mph traffic.
The Craft App —A Year of Magical Linking
It’s been a year since I adopted Craft as my primary research and note-taking app. I shared my impressions of Craft early on, but I thought I would provide an update on how I’m using the software and why, with all the other choices available in the personal knowledge management (PKM) space, I’m still all-in with Craft.
The Gales of November
We’re in the middle of a wet, windy month here in the Pacific Northwest. A weather phenomenon known as a “bomb cyclone” brought sustained winds of 30 knots and gusts up to 50 knots earlier this month. Since then, successive weather systems, aptly called atmospheric rivers, have pummeled Puget Sound, bringing rain and high winds almost every day. Today is no exception: a new storm has knocked out power to our entire island, so we’ve added the steady hum of our noisy generator to the whistling of 40-knot winds and the percussion of rain strafing the windows.