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.