Gettin' shit done in the sun.

Feyn's Sunday Reads | Week 3 Shop Class As Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford The subtitle, "an inquiry into the value of work," is an homage to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ("an inquiry into values"), and sums up the central theme of the book well. Published in 2009 (with brief references to the then-recent financial crisis), it examines the nature of work: what makes some work fulfilling and enjoyable and what makes other work soul-crushing and dull. There is also consideration for the economics of work, with prescient predictions on the future stability of certain types of blue collar work versus white collar work, long before viable AI. "The time is ripe to dwell on this unease rather than dismiss it. The scope of the economic crisis is still uncertain as I write this, but it appears to be deepening... Out of the current confusion of ideals and confounding of career hopes, a calm recognition may yet emerge that productive labor is the foundation of all prosperity. The meta-work of trafficking in the surplus skimmed from other people's work suddenly appears as what it is, and it becomes possible once again to think the thought, 'let me make myself useful.'"

I think I'm getting to the point in my life where 1: My increasing desire for a clean home, and 2. My sustained desire for animal companionship, are 3. Starting to override my distaste for the appearance of hairless cats. I've got two short-hairs right now and I swear, 95% of the food these things eat just goes towards superfluous hair production. It's fucking EXCESSIVE. Maybe I oughta get into snakes...

Burrata, prosciutto, pear, espresso martinis, live jazz. A night out in Little Italy with my beautiful wife. PV nostr, and GN ✌

It's September 19th, and I'm sat at a little park in front of a large toad carved out of stone, drinking matcha. I don't particularly like matcha, but I'm drinking it today because Matt drank it all the time, and today marks seven years since he died. This is my little ritual each year: come to The Toad, drink matcha, remember Matt, and meditate on life and death. We weren't even that close, really; I could probably count on one hand the number of times we hung out just the two of us, including one very powerful psilocybin trip. But we did spend a lot of time together over a handful of years, working in the same kitchen and hanging out as a larger group of restaurant folk. The Toad is located just a short walk from that restaurant, and was the go-to spot for after work chilling sessions, drinking cheap liquor and smoking weed as the gears in our minds gradually wound down from the frenetic pace of the kitchen to something approaching normal. Matt had a complicated relationship with alcohol. On the one hand, he seemed to want to push back on cultural stereotypes about his ethnicity and alcohol abuse, but on the other hand he was just like the rest of us: a young man in his early twenties, scraping by on slightly more than minimum wage, and under intense pressure to produce perfection at speed in the punishing crucible of a restaurant kitchen. Most people aren't cut out for that lifestyle. You have to be willing to sacrifice your entire life to the restaurant for the love of the game, and those people are few and far between. Most of us were just there because we needed a job. We did our best and had some fun and learned a lot about cooking, but it took a psychological toll on us and many of us turned to vices to cope. Seven years ago today, Matt had been drinking with his sister and some friends at his place on his day off, and in the early hours of the morning he got up and left to "go for a walk." He didn't bring his keys or his wallet or his phone, he just left and never came back. It took a couple of days for his body to be found, drowned in a nearby river. We'll never know if it was a drunken accident, or his decision to end things. The point of coming here each year isn't to mourn the passing of a dear friend; as I said, we weren't that close. It is simply to take a couple of hours, alone, to reflect on life and death, hope and despair, light and darkness, and pay tribute to a flawed but ultimately good young man who walked the path of life beside me for a few years, then disappeared without a word.

I went back to the place where I met my wife today. Not for sentimental reasons, but because I needed a loaf of sourdough. We met at a bakery, you see. I was baking bread for $12 CAD an hour and renting the living room couch at a friend's place for $400 a month. It was a real low point in my life. She worked the front counter on the weekends and was the only cool person there, as far as I was concerned. We had a very intense relationship for a couple of years, then broke up and went our separate ways for many years while we did some growing up (OK, mostly just me). We've been married three years now, but our history goes back fifteen, all the way back to that little bakery. I ended up there because I was broke and desperate and I just needed a job, any job, to keep me off the streets. Any port in a storm. It turned out to be the most consequential job I ever worked, even though I only held it for ten months. I don't believe in fate. I don't believe that everything happens for a reason, except in the most trivial sense of the laws of physics. Some things just turn out to be important and some things won't matter a year or two from now, and it's hard to tell sometimes in the moment which is which. Best to take it all seriously, in my opinion, but you could just as well go the other way. I'm a pretty serious guy, most of the time, so it's probably good that I ended up with a fairly silly woman.

"Must be nice..." The apprentices think I have a pretty cushy job, sitting at my desk while they do the actual physical labour of the job out in the elements. But the ugly truth is that I spend most of my days sedentary, in a makeshift office in a windowless, concrete room in the basement, staring at a laptop with two additional monitors blasting blue light into my eyes while my phone rings and buzzes constantly, precluding deep focus. It's terrible for me. So days like today are nice; up on the roof, alone, wind in my hair, working with my tools again. I need more of this.

Big city life 😑

Feyn's Sunday Reads | Week 2 On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt A short, academic treatise on the concept of bullshit. What it is, what it is not, and notably, how it is distinct from lying. An essay, essentially, that was published as a tiny book that can be read in an afternoon. First published in 2005, it is more relevant today than ever, and provides a useful lens for understanding communication in modern politics, social media, and marketing, among others. "When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensible that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says."

Meditations on different planes of reality, healthy and otherwise. View article →

Celebrating the arrival of autumn with the cutting of the inaugural squash. This Japanese blade has served me well for almost 20 years. I was a dirt poor teenager when I bought it; it cost me a week's wages and was the most valuable thing I owned for awhile. In the first year I owned it I dropped it and chipped the base of the handle. It didn't affect the functionality but has served as a timeless reminder to take care of my tools and treat them with respect.