Okay, so I’ve just had a great throwaway. The first of many that need to happen.

Background and context? Possibly TMI, but whatevs.

So I’m not a nester. In fact, I suspect most men aren’t. Which is to say that I don’t actually want to spend much time thinking about my environment. Is it generally tidy? Do I know where everything is? Is anything in the way? Is it sufficiently warm, or sufficiently cool, to sustain life? Is there a space to work?

If yes to all of the above, we’re good.

However, I’m not just a man, I’m a divorced man.

My ex-wife, like many women, I think, was a nester. Which is to say that for her, the first task in any living space is to fill all of the nooks and crannies with cutenesses. By that I mean:

• Twee tchotchkes that look like something other than what they are (a basket that looks like a bird, spoon that looks like a basket, a wine glass that looks like a spoon, that sort of thing)

• Seasonal everything (salad plates for arbor day, butter dish for Christmastime, pumpkin silverware for Hallowe’en, that sort of thing)

• Accessories for accessories (a lace mat to go under the woven mat to go under the holiday dish to go under the holiday candy bowl, that sort of thing)

• Random stuff that I don’t really even understand (a hunk of wood, partially finished, with some sort of stand on it, shaped in abstract ways, that stands in the corner, that sort of thing)

I think most nesters do this thing where there is a constant inflow and outflow of things, i.e. there is always a stream of things going out (to friends, to charity, to the thrift store) to make way for a constant stream of new things coming in, and at the same time, there is a constant rotation of things, i.e. the New Year flower vase gets swapped for the Valentine’s Day flower vase, and then for the St. Patrick’s Day flower vase, and then for… etc.

So when there’s a nester around, the space is absolutely packed with stuff that isn’t particularly utilitarian, and more of it than any single person needs, but it is also very dynamic in that the huge library of stuff is never the same from one year to the next. Nesters invest a huge amount of their time (from my perspective at least) on maintaining this inflow, outflow, and rotation in an overpacked environment, and through this labor, manage to keep the environment looking “cute and homey” rather than just cluttered. But it is an active job that must be done continuously.

— § —

So now let’s add divorce into the mix.

Couple gets divorced. Man is not the nester (this is me), woman who’s the nester goes off to found a new house and begins nesting all over again with entirely new stuff.

What’s left in the man’s space in this scenario is a snapshot of the nesting universe, i.e. a densely packed wilderness of cabinets and drawers and containers and indeed rooms full of said twee tchotchkes, seasonal everythings, accessories for accessories, and random stuff that he doesn’t understand. And—note that this is the important part—he is not a nester, doesn’t care to engage in that labor of inflow, outflow, rotation, and organization, and more to the point, doesn’t even understand how to do it and couldn’t if he wanted to.

This is how we arrive at one of the regrets that I have about my life over the last eight years: I live in a house absolutely packed full of stuff that I only marginally recognize and never, ever use.

After my divorce, I just packed most of it away into already burgeoning closets and I haven’t done much with it. Part of the problem is that from a guy’s perspective, a lot of it is perfectly good… something. That is to say, all of those wine glasses are perfectly good wine glasses even if I don’t drink wine, and all of those seasonal dishes will in fact hold stuff and aren’t damaged, even if I never put them out, and that oven mitt shaped like a poinsettia is a perfectly intact oven mitt, though I don’t prefer it because it’s a weird shape, so it feels sort of wasteful to just discard it, but I really don’t have any interest in distributing to family and friends and charities and thrift stores and…

…and so there has been this whole universe of stuff I don’t care about and don’t use now gathering dust and (more importantly) representing a huge usurper of space and a huge clutter problem always threatening to break out as I try to navigate around it (guy perspective: a tool belongs in a cabinet and when I open said cabinet I just want to remove said tool and close cabinet again, it’s already an irritation that for some reason I have to first remove the stacks of unused decorative items that are in the way to get it out, and I’m in far too much of a hurry to fix something with said tool to immediately try to get them all back in there in organized fashion, I really ought to just throw them away, but it feels so wasteful, as they’re perfectly intact somethings-or-other…)

— § —

I have just had a big throwaway and it’s great. I threw a whole bunch of perfectly good wine glasses, decorative items, vases, baskets, dishes, whatever into the bin. They clanged and shattered and I did feel vaguely bad that I was destroying them and think to myself “you really ought to have taken these to the thrift store” but the fact is that I won’t; if I tell myself I’m going to do that they will either end up back in the cabinet in a week or they will first end up on the kitchen floor for a week, and then in the back of the car for two months, and then back on the kitchen floor for another month and then back into the cabinet in worse order than they were to start with. So the bin is the only option.

Into the bin they went.

And by God, that cabinet is fixed. I understand it now. It holds things now in a sane way. It doesn’t threaten to spill out into a cluttered mess at the slightest whisper. It’s fan-fscking-tastic.

And so voilà—a tiny bit of momentum, and the first of my New Year’s resolutions.

1. Throw piles and piles of shit away this year. As in, just chuck it out if I don’t use it and will never use it, even if it’s perfectly serviceable. Gleefully waste in productive ways.

— § —

And as I was doing that, I was also musing on other things that keep coming up again and again but for whatever reason do not get done (okay, reason tends to be that they do not generate enough in the way of immediate gains, but we’re far beyond immediate gains, I think, in my life right now). So here are more of the resolutions:

2. Start shooting stock again. This means getting ahold of some more equipment that I’d already let go, which will be painful, but that was a side income stream and a source of interest, activity, and intellectual stimulation that I could use again. Now I’m a dad with older kids, they may even be interested in some of the events, so it’s a two-fer.

3. Get the novel back on track. There is a novel that I’ve “been writing” for about twenty years. In fact, that’s not strictly true as I haven’t worked on it at all in probably twelve to fifteen years, but every time I think about starting to write creatively again I get hung up on the fact that I invested all this time previously in a novel I didn’t even complete yet and so why start another one if I don’t finish these things and so on, so let’s just finish that one for god’s sake.

4. Refresh the blog. One or two people (if that; I flatter myself) may recognize that the basic design, appearance, and nav of the blog here dates to 2017, and even that was actually a resurrection of a previous design from something done in Graymatter way back in 2007 before I was even married. So the current appearance here is like 13 years old. I’ve been hung up on the thought that I ought to get with the times and go to Substack or YouTube or whatever, but let’s be honest, I’m not going to—and probably shouldn’t as then anything I produce may in fact disappear without warning in the vagaries of corporate life. So—decision made. Blog it is. But when I log in here, the bones need to be now and not some ancient me that no longer exists. I need to feel like I’m posting in a blog and not visiting an archive.

So this is all incredibly boring and TMI if you’re not me, but let’s be honest, that was the whole point of blogs in the first place way back in the day, and this one started in 1999 and by God I’ve decided I’m going to lose the precious concern about whether or not I’m with the times and just continue doing what I set out to do here which was to write stuff to the universe and if someone happens to see, fine.

— § —

Okay, I feel good after today’s posting. I feel—dare I say it—a tiny budding bit, just the tiniest hint, just a faint seed—of possible momentum.

A post to start the year.

— § —

I was not always risk-averse.

So many of the biggest choices in my life were risky ones; the kinds of choices that you make, then immediately cover your ears and wince and run full speed ahead, thinking to yourself “What have I done?”

I have blog posts right here to that effect—say, when I moved to Chicago for grad school, or to New York for grad school again, or switched jobs, or started writing books, or…

There is a kind of talent—which I used to have—in being able to make a fairly good choice even though risk levels are high, then grit teeth and power through all the feelings of regret and uncertainty and “ohshitno” that follow it.

But there is that moment, that moment when you know you are going to regret it, but you flip the switch anyway, you push the button anyway, knowing there is no turning back, because you also know that you are likely going to not regret it long after you are done regretting it.

I seem incapable of doing this any longer. The ingredients of the fall are probably:

• Two parts parenthood

• Two parts divorce

• Two parts an impossible mountain of student debt

• One part a humongous, decades-long bet that ultimately wasn’t a clear victory (doctorate)

• One part age catching up to me along with the knowledge that I’m not as physically rock-solid as I once was

• One part not drinking any longer

But whatever the ingredients, the ultimate finished product is now different, day-to-day. And I’m not sure I like the change. But I’m not sure I can change the change any longer.

It may be that my days of decisiveness and exploration are over, which is tough, because underneath it all I have always been an explorer.

— § —

There is a weird way in which some of this is tied up in the concept of certainty. When I was younger, certainty was often a synthetic product. I was certain about what was important because I had decided what was important, and that decision was made, so it was certain.

There is a rhythm in that sort of living that is like the weather; wind comes and goes and nobody can fight against it (or thinks to fight against it), it just is.

With that talent not just waned, but completely evaporated, I no longer really know what’s important, much less am I certain about it.

(It occurs to me that I ought to go back up to the previous bullet list and change the recipe so that it reads “four parts divorce” but for now I’ll let it ride just so I seem less ambivalent about at least something.)

Thing is, when you don’t know what the essential things are, your life tends to clutter up. This is because you don’t know what’s essential, so everything might be essential. And, as a result, you invest in—and hang on to—everything.

And, paradoxically, because there is so very, very much of everything, your person is spread incredibly thin and your environment is spread incredibly thick and as a result everything sort of grinds to a halt.

— § —

And so it seems to me today, first day of the year, that the first step in a plan to find a way out of this is to try to figure out what’s important, and to try to synthesize some certainty about it.

Of course, this is all just another way of saying “need to set some goals, yo” which I’ve gone on about before here. Dangerous because I don’t want to start the year out with “everything old is new again” yet again, as I have been doing for what seems like a number of years now.

— § —

Meanwhile, age has a way of changing the meaning of “a number of years” in ways that aren’t entirely salutory.

Like, I know that I only have a few decades left, that quite literally most of my life is behind me, but I also have developed a temporal sensibility that I suspect is common to most people at this age according to which “years” is not all together very long at all.

You might think this would have the effect of imparting some sort of urgency to things, but in practice it’s often just the opposite.

Case(s) in point—everyone has “temporary things” scattered around their lives. I’ll fix this thing temporarily with some tape, the real repair to come later on. I’ll place this pile of documents on this countertop temporarily, until I can get a file folder to place them in. I’ll put this plant in this pot temporarily, until I can get a more decorative pot. And so on.

But because years and even decades are now so short, the temporary is currently running at about three to five years for me these days.

That is to say that if I set that stack of documents temporarily on the counter top until a file folder can be found, and they are still there two years later, I actually don’t feel much urgency because in fact it hasn’t been very long at all; we’re still within the legitimate realm of the temporary.

This now explains to me how some of the older people I knew growing up had temporaries scattered around their lives that were decades “temporary.”

I suppose they’d aged to the point where event a decade or two was simply not that long at all.

Is this a form of “procrastinaton” as the term is usually understood? I don’t even know.

— § —

Point being:

• I need to solve some problems this year (I begin every year recently saying that)

• In order to be solved, I must apply some decisiveness

• For this to happen in a timely fashion, I must find a way to accelerate… well… me—my being-in-the-world, to use a Heideggerian term

• I don’t know how to do this

Anyone have an idea for where to look? I don’t feel as though I’ve seen a lot of self-help books about “personal acceleration” or styles of therapy called “acceleration therapy” out there.

Maybe the term is “momentum.”

I’ve written about that, too, here, particularly in relation to all of the stuff that led to my divorce and that proceeded from it. And the fact that I am still sitting here musing on this topic eight years later is in fact a great moment to slap a big “QED” on everything I just wrote.

— § —

So there we have it. Maybe I’ve worked it out?

The project of the year is: momentum.

But toward what? And what are the practical steps for achieving it?

TBD.

End New Year’s Day post.

Okay, stuff is occurring to me as it gets later and later after midnight.

I’m going to try to lay it out.

As a guy, I think there are four basic impulses that make up my entire social being:

• Protect

• Compete

• Build

• Destroy

This is how I relate to the universe productively. Note that these are not conscious things that I think about or reflect on normally; rather, I feel as though every form of me relating to the world is some genre of the list above.

All of the above are deeply visceral; they feel like they’re “built in” at some preconscious, biological level that has been steadily evident my entire life. Everything else feels like a rationalization.

These are the things I can feel in my bones and in my spleen.

— § —

I raise this because, like any divorced guy, every now and then I look into the possibility of finding a new partner. And like, I suspect, most of the guys who are older than about twenty-five, finding a new partner seems to be one of those things that really doesn’t sit well, not for reasons related in particular to any person, but instead for reasons that have more to do with the current culture.

— § —

Aside from “adventure,” “travel,” “yoga,” “hiking,” and so on, here are the things that are universal to the dating profiles written by women these days:’

• Don’t need a man, but…

• Looking for someone to share “adventures” with

• Looking for companionship

The thing that I don’t think women get is just how (literally) unattractive this is. As in, there is no attraction—no draw—to any of these things.

— § —

There is no protective need here. I am deeply drawn to things that (a) need protection and (b) are a part of the “tribe,” i.e. affiliated with me.

One way to be “attractive” is to need protection. As a guy, I feel so hard-wired to protect. But if protection is not needed—okay, cool, no need for me on that front.

— § —

The whole “share adventures” thing is just uninteresting. Now, if you had said “go to war together” or “build an empire together” or things like that, I’m possibly in.

But “share adventures” leaves me cold. Who cares?

“Share” is woman talk. What will we make? What will we win? What is the nature of the competition? Sharing does absolutely nothing for me. In fact, it feels like drudgery or at the very least like work.

Sharing is what our female teachers made us do in grade school while we really wanted to battle it out.

Guys don’t share things with each other, we fight it out and to the victor go the spoils and that feels fulfilling, win or lose.

— § —

Same thing with “companionship.”

Who cares?

Give me a choice between a woman looking for “companionship” and a guy looking to “test my skills against another guy” and I’ll chose the latter every time.

“Companionship” can potentially mean several different things, but it has the whiff of egaliatarian “sharing” about it. This is so terribly uninteresting to me at a visceral level.

“Companion” feels like just another voice that wants a vote but can’t contribute very much. If that voice is a member if the tribe and needs protection then fine, I’m there, but it’s already been stated that this voice doesn’t need a man, so now it’s just in the way.

Now, tell a man you’re seeking to co-architect greatness, or you want to compete against him in every aspect of life and see who wins, or you need protection, etc., and he’s there.

But “companion?”

Men don’t like companions. We don’t like each-other companions and we don’t like women companions. A companion is someone who keeps talking while you’re trying to analyze the situation or who interrupts you with all kinds of unimportant shit while you’re trying to catch the fish (or whatever animal) that is the actual goal of the trip.

No to companions. Hello to collaborators, fellow soldiers, and damsels in distress.

— § —

I can hear the feminists howling at this one from a mile away and that’s fine. I don’t begrudge anyone their perspective or opinions or positions or whatever.

I’m just here to say that for me as a man the most common female approach to opening the dating stakes is also the one that I find least attractive, as in, most completely generative of total apathy.

Women tend to do the I’m independent, I don’t need protection, I don’t need a man, I hate competition, I’m just looking for companionship thing right out the gate.

Which I find so unmoving. I don’t hate it. It just makes me not care. As in, “okay, so whatever, good luck to you and have a nice life,” etc.

Meanwhile, a really attractive (as in, I’m drawn to it) package of items like:

• I really need a guy; I need someone to protect me and help me

• And sometimes I’d also like to compete with you and see how I stack up

• And I’d really like to build together, let’s build and/or conquer an empire

…never, ever happens or gets said.

Because of course women are different from men. I presume that they actually do want “companionship” or whatever.

— § —

I don’t know how we got to the point where women and men just aren’t attractive to each other any longer, but a lot of signals tell me we’re there.

I know it’s been seven-going-on-eight years since my divorce. Off and on I’ve seen a lot of dating profiles. I have yet to see one that seems “attractive” or “interesting” to me rather than just “girly” in the “sounds like the stuff that girls think that I don’t really get or feel” way.

And though I know there’s a whole essay to be written in feminist terms about this, I’m not interested in it and I just don’t sort of care, at a visceral level, in just the ways that feminists would call out (i.e. sure, accusation stipulated to). Because… I’m a guy.

— § —

Thing is, it would seem that women want men to be full of passion and deep compulsions about relationships. But we already have a list of the historical models that have worked:

• Woman needs protection, encourages her man to build in the world

• Woman needs protection, encourages her man to compete against other men

• Woman needs protection, encourages her man to destroy enemy/enemies

• (More rarely:) Woman competes against her man

• (Even more rarely:) Woman is mortal enemies with her man (but they can’t live without each other as a direct result

All of these inspire in me, as a man, deep, visceral feeling.

But “companionship” and “sharing?”

That sounds like what mom demands that you do with your grandma because “she’s not always going to be with us.”

It sounds like homework and stuff you make yourself okay with as a matter of social propriety.

It also doesn’t cause you to feel things. Or at most, maybe in the “heart.” But in fact (and most women don’t seem to get this), the heart is not so very visceral for a guy. That’s female talk. How about the guts?

If women want to feel stuff in their heart, men want to feel it in their guts. If it makes you burp, vomit, grimace, or double over, that’s real feeling.

“Sharing” and “companionship” (i.e. grandma stuff) does not get felt in the guts. It probably does, in fact, get felt in the “heart,” which means it doesn’t resonate so amazingly well. It’s not going to get us up at 3:00 am or cause us to sacrifice much. That is to say, it’s “cute” but not “important.”

Cause us to feel in our guts and we are drawn to a woman like nobody’s business.

— § —

I guess this is my “seven years without a date and I haven’t even seen a woman I’d be interested in spending time with” post.

Once you’re too old to be moved by the raw dating call of just a pretty face, what’s left is the reality of the rest of life and what your role in it is. Right now, women and men just don’t need each other and don’t care to need each other.

• I haven’t bothered to celebrate the ‘New Year’ for many years, but this year for the first time the kids are really challenging that. They’re overcome with emotion.

• Seeing them so moved by the passage of time makes me think I’ve lost something important.

• I have no idea how to get this important thing back.

• I haven’t properly read a book in some time and tonight for some reason I realize that this is a shift in my life that I once would never have imagined occurring.

• I am finding it increasingly difficult to know what I am thinking at any given moment.

• There is an inherent beauty and grandeur in humanity that the “progress people” are trying to obscure because ultimately they late life.

• People are most essentially human at around one year old; after that, they gradually lose their humanity until they are a dying, empty husk.

• People reach husk stage at varying rates, some in their 20s or 30s, others in their 80s or 90s, but nobody over one year old is as human as the average one year old.

• Feeding yourself in pre-industrial society is not the same as feeding yourself in post-industrial society.

• I have trouble seeing people who post a lot on social media as real people any longer; I tend to think they committed a kind of essence-suicide as they “became online.”

• I routinely forget that I have a Ph.D.

• I am one hundred percent wasting my life in a fit of immoral laziness and complacency, apart from the parenting part.

• I can remember when I used to dream of the Contax full frame camera system back in the day and think it was something I’d never, ever own; these days, serious cameras with exponentially better specs are a dime a dozen.

• That said, I don’t even shoot stock any more, much less shoot for pleasure and reflection as I used to.

• The foliage in my yard is both overgrown and needs to be ripped out and undergreen and needs to be watered and nurtured.

• I saw a prettyish girl at the convenience store earlier tonight who smelled of a lot of perfume and for some reason I instantly thought she was likely a call girl, and I don’t know why.

• Once a very, very long time ago I made a bucket list, which I stored in an Apple Newton 2100. I tend to believe and claim that I’ve done everything on the list.

• That Newton is still here and it still works and has all the data in it, but I haven’t actually checked the bucket list in years.

• I haven’t copied the bucket list out to some newer format and I have no plans to do so.

• Swiss watches are better looking than Japanese watches, but Japanese watches are many times more robust; also, nobody wears watches anymore, which is also an indication that the general population is a lot less human than it used to be.

• I once took a Chinese class a million years ago in grad school but I still don’t really speak any Chinese in any useful way.

• All young women are pretty, but all young guys are not handsome.