Worth reading: “The IKEA Humans” by Samuel Biagetti

Jennifer and Jason are drawn to IKEA because it reflects who they are: they too are modern, movable, and interchangeable, their wants satisfiable in any neighborhood with a food co-op and a coffee shop. More fundamentally, Jennifer and Jason are untraceable, a “composite material” made from numberless scraps and pieces. They have a long catalog of home towns, and their accents are NPR neutral. They can probably rattle off the various nationalities in their family trees — Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, and Jewish, maybe some Venezuelan or Honduran for a little color. From these backgrounds they retain no more than a humorous word or phrase, a recipe, or an Ellis Island anecdote, if that. They grew up amidst a scramble of white-collar professionals and went to college with a scramble of white-collar professionals’ kids. Their values are defined mainly by mass media, their tastes adorably quirky but never straying too far from their peers’, and like the IKEA furniture that they buy in boxes, they too cut themselves into manageable, packaged pieces and market themselves online. They are probably “spiritual but not religious.” They have no pattern or model of life that bears any relation to the past before the internet. For all intents and purposes, they sprang up de novo in the modern city.

Peter Larson, A Year and a Day on Just a Few Acres:

Every place on the Earth has its own, unique energies. When I was an architect, I learned how to sense these energies, define them, and put them into terms others could understand. Healthy, living places were made, or most often grew, via working with, not against, their underlying energies. I think people used to sense these energies of place more than they do now, and used to value them more than they do now. The loss of this sense had increasingly allowed economics to dictate the qualities of places, and resulted in the creation of more and more “dead” places: shopping strips, placeless housing subdivisions, whole centers of communities blown out for corner drug stores and parking lots.

Worth reading:

• “Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI” by Erik Hoel
• Dougald Hind’s reply to the above, “The Hand Made Web”

No one is more surprised than me that the screen door I’m building is square and the half-lap joints are mostly okay. Tomorrow I’ll put dowels in the joints.

Still the funniest video on the internet. Rachel and I think of this every few months and laugh ourselves silly watching it over and over.

Two great ideas from the “In Defense of Maintenance” episode of the Mortise and Tenon podcast:

• “Maintenance-free” means “disposable.”
• The value of maintenance is that it requires attentiveness to and participation with the things in your life. This is a better framing than “self-reliance.”

I’m looking forward to this book: Land Healing: Physical, Metaphysical, and Ritual Approaches for Healing the Earth by Dana O’Driscoll (Grand Archdruid of the AODA). It looks like a great mix of both practical and spiritual work for those who want to contribute to renewing the land.

Rex Krueger says “don’t measure”—and I’m trying to live by that as I build a new screen door for our back porch. I was recently burned by over-reliance on a tape measure when building a garage shelf.

My grandpa’s license plate. My dad’s tool box. He added the State Farm sticker; I added the Mortise and Tenon sticker.

Lost Art Press is having a sale on their book Anarchist’s Tool Chest. Also, they have a great FAQ on what they mean by anarchism: individualist, non-revolutionary, and no bombs. Which fits nicely with my own anarchism.

The Luddite comic I posted a few days ago mentioned a couple of movements I hadn’t heard of before so I followed it up by watching a couple of videos. Actually, a few seconds of a couple of videos, because it quickly became apparent that the videos were part of yet another trendy lifestyle. “I tried slow living for thirty days and it changed my life.” More would-be influencers with clickbait titles trying way too hard.

But, listen, I get it. It’s easy for me to mock these folks because their style is most definitely not my own. But underneath that style? I get it.

We’re all so damned self-conscious. So many of us are trying to live authentic lives (whatever the hell that means) but the best we can do is define ourselves against the regnant culture and slap together practices wistfully imitating lifeways that have been destroyed by … well, pick your destructive system. There’s a lifestyle trend available for opposing whatever you hate.

It’s the self-consciousness that gets me. Maybe we’d be better off without it. Maybe it’s what the Adam and Eve story is about. Maybe it’s our “happy fault.” I just don’t know. There are times when I envy the apparent mental freedom of wild animals; their lives may be short but at least they don’t blog.

Consciousness feels like an unbridgeable gap. Are Buddhism and Taoism not pointing to the abandonment of self-consciousness as the solution to our suffering? What is ultimate human happiness in Christianity but the beatific vision, the abandonment of self-consciousness in union with God All-in-All? And what are we dirt worshippers looking for if not a rapprochement with the nonhuman world and a more “animal” existence?

Aren’t we all just wishing for our long-lost, unselfconscious primate existence on the African savannah? Who knows. Anyway, it’s going to be a nice weekend and I have work to do.

New use for chatbots: having it rewrite a blunt statement into a more professionally acceptable sentence. Example:

We have too much slack in the budget. If you need new funds, please reallocate from your existing budget.

Rewritten by Microsoft Copilot as

Our budget currently has excess flexibility. If you require additional funds, kindly consider reallocating from your existing budget.

Pretty colors across the street this morning.

Elizabeth Oldfield:

I want to be a conscientious objector to the culture wars. I want to hold fast to a belief in the dignity, preciousness, humanity and yes, changeability of people who don’t just disagree with me but may even hate me, no matter their political position, identity, age or anything else. I believe it because my tradition teaches me to, but also because it is better for us all when we do.

This is so good.

“Welcome to the future. Sabotage it.”

Despite an unusually warm February, there doesn’t seem to be any early wildflowers in the woods so far. Mostly wild garlic and garlic mustard.

Ted Goia has a good follow-up post on his dopamine culture piece. In the follow-up, he focuses on ritual as one of the resistances to dopamine culture.

Two more things from the show last night:

1. They opened with “The World Can Wait.” Linford said the song was about JOMO: the joy of missing out.
2. They played some new, unrecorded music. Folks, when you get your ears on “Bella Luna,” you’re going to love it.

The Over the Rhine show last night was…well, they seem to get better with each passing year. The music that just seems to flow out of them is unmatched in my experience. It feels effortless. Their live shows are always deeply moving experiences for me.

Hanging out at the record store before the Over the Rhine show. I’m thankful to have such a great place nearby.

I have a very special sweetgum tree in my yard. I’ll tell you the story sometime. But it does require a lot of raking: we fill a few of these barrels with their spiky seed pods every year.

Finished reading A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. The best thing about this book was the way Chambers imaginatively de-centered humans. Apart from that, I can’t say it ever quite gripped me. I’m interested enough to read the next book though.

Speaking of zines, here’s a good post from Jay Springett on the subject.

First pro bike race of the spring Cobbled Classics, Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, in 48 hours! I will be continuing my completely cheesy tradition of marking the occasion with waffles and Belgian beer. (Yes, at 8am. It makes for a interesting morning.)

So whaddya say, folks, should we just start sending zines to each other through the mail? (via @jaheppler)

I think about this a lot, actually. I don’t have time for it now but maybe, sometime?