May 2026

Memento Integritatis

By in calvin and hobbes, foolosophy

In an age of rebooted, reimagined, remastered IP necromancy, Bill Watterson stands like a sentinel over the grave of his own creation. He drew a line and kept it, even against obscene amounts of money. Memento integritatis, a secular devotional image for an age of franchise Frankensteins. The skull on the desk has been replaced by a plush Hobbes that was never allowed to exist. Remember that not everything beloved should be converted into “content.” Remember that “enough” is sometimes the noblest word an artist can say.

All Is Number

By in aphorisms, books, eric hoffer, foolosophy

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

— Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition

We fall in love once, or twice; have one or two real friends; hate one enemy; feel pity for a few unfortunates — and the rest of mankind leaves us perfectly indifferent.

— Jules Renard, Journal 1887-1910

The human heart is an exclusive club operating under the name Dunbar’s Number. The bouncer has a clipboard, a bad attitude, and a ruthless sense of capacity. Another way to put it: The heart is generous in theory and protectionist in practice. It cannot afford open borders.

Scarcity does not cease to exist when we leave the marketplace. It follows us into the heart. Attention, patience, the ability to worry without being consumed: all are scarce. We may dislike the intrusion of economic language into love, but the underlying fact remains: to care deeply for someone is to spend oneself, and no creature has infinite reserves. We can demand a world of unlimited sympathy as easily as we can demand a world of unlimited food, land, water, or energy. But scarcity does not vanish because the resource is invisible. Love, patience, pity, attention, forgiveness — these too must be husbanded, cultivated, restored. There is no moral genius in spending them thoughtlessly.

Not Today

By in battling personal entropy, foolosophy

This is why training has always struck me as a physical form of meditation or prayer. Not prayer in the petitionary sense — not “Lord, grant me visible abs and a painless lower back” — but prayer as disciplined remembrance. You put the body under load to remember that anything worth keeping has a cost. Strength has a cost. Health has a cost. Clarity has a cost. Even dignity has maintenance fees. The barbell is less a symbol of fascist aesthetics than a blunt tutor in reality: neglect has consequences, attention (or the lack thereof) has consequences, and wishing does not move mountains of iron.

I’ve always used “battling personal entropy” as the category tag for posts about diet and lifting, so I’m happy to see my thoughts echoed here. We are all posted at our own ridiculous little Thermopylae, holding the pass with protein, lifting, sleep, medication, supplements, recovery protocols, and whatever else keeps the machinery from surrendering too early. The forces of entropy will break through eventually. No sane person denies that. But there is honor in denying them. Every workout is a small refusal. Every morning, the god of entropy arrives with his clipboard: joint pain, fatigue, stiffness, muscle loss, brain fog, blood pressure, inflammation, indifference. And every morning, if we are lucky and stubborn, we send him away like Syrio Forel sent away death: “Not today.” Come back tomorrow. We have squats to do today.

Grow and Decay, It’s Only Forever

By in battling personal entropy

By this standard, I am also “dependent” on walls, roofing, electrical power, air conditioning, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, dentistry, antibiotics, eyeglasses, paved roads, and the internet. Vanity! Decadence! Weakness! Everything after the Paleolithic was a gateway drug. The first caveman who put on sandals started us down the slippery slope to CPAP machines and fiber gummies.

In addition, I am already psychologically and physiologically dependent on balanced meals, eight hours of restful sleep, exercise, massage therapy, thyroid medication, RA medication, and the rest of the unglamorous scaffolding that keeps my body from filing for bankruptcy. This is only horrifying if your baseline assumption is that a healthy man should be able to thrive indefinitely on cigarettes, coffee, and laminated diner menus. Having to take thyroid and RA meds in my late twenties cured me early of the romance of being “natural.” Nature is not a personal trainer. Nature is perfectly content to let your joints stiffen, your muscle waste, your synapses fray, your teeth rot, and your hormones sputter out. “Natural limits” are real, but nature is not entitled to my enthusiastic cooperation. I will concede the war eventually. I am not obliged to throw down my rifle in the first skirmish.

Civilization is not the abolition of dependence. It is the substitution of chosen dependencies for worse ones. Civilization begins in the sentence, “Perhaps we don’t have to accept that.”

 

545-545+495×2

By in battling personal entropy, books

It is indisputable that civilization weakens the human body, which by nature (like every other thing, in due proportion) requires strength and without it, or with less strength that is due to it by nature, cannot help but be most imperfect; and that civilization makes the subsequent physical delicacy a quality proper to civilized man, when in nature it is neither proper to man nor to any other type of thing, nor indeed should it be. It is indisputable that the human race, insofar as the body is concerned, is declining from generation to generation, each generation being worse than the last one, both in its own right and also because, having thus declined, it cannot fail to produce a generation which is worse than itself, etc. etc.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

It’s not all glory, fellows. One must accept failure as a regular companion on the lifting journey to keep us humble. Last night, for example, I missed two attempts at deadlifting 545 off of a two-inch block. My arms twitched. My legs trembled. A bead of sweat plunged from the tip of my nose to the floor. The plates shifted. A hush descended. E pur, an onlooking Galileo might have muttered watching the bar, non si muove.

I did get two reps at 495 as a consolation, though.

Faceless Men

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy, nietzsche

To conform is to submit, and to conquer is to conform, to be conquered. Thus every victory is a debasement. The conqueror inevitably loses all the virtues born of frustration with the status quo that led him to the fight that brought victory. He becomes satisfied, and only those who conform — who lack the conqueror’s mentality — are satisfied. Only the man who never achieves his goal conquers. Only the man who is forever discouraged is strong. The best and most regal course is to abdicate. The supreme empire belongs to the emperor who abdicates from all normal life and from other men, for the preservation of his supremacy won’t weigh on him like a load of jewels.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

****

I do not speak to the weak: these want to obey and everywhere race toward slavery. In face of relentless nature, we still feel ourselves to be relentless nature! — But I have found strength where it is not sought, in simple, mild, and accommodating humans without the least inclination to rule — and conversely to me the inclination to rule has often appeared as an inner sign of weakness: they fear their slave’s soul and cloak it in a king’s robe (in the end they become the slaves of their followers, their reputation, etc.). Powerful natures rule, it is a necessity, they will not lift a finger. Even if during their lifetime they bury themselves in a garden house!

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

****

But if there were such secret brotherhoods, then most of us have occasionally met the kind of men who ought to be members of them. They are men who give us the impression that they have deliberately turned aside from power and fame. They are content to be comparatively obscure, to be known only to a small circle of friends and acquaintances, who do not hesitate to turn to them for guidance and help at times of crisis. They are not failures, except in the eyes of the vulgar and stupid. They may not be mystics, though I doubt if any of them are ever found with a materialist philosophy, but, like the mystics, their lives appear to be rooted in some other world.

They earn a living but never join in the general grab for prizes, possessions, fat jobs and bouquets. Except when their help is urgently demanded, they are never quite with us. They are friendly but never babblingly intimate. From the standpoint of Who’s Who and Fleet Street, they are nonentities; but in the circles where they are known, they are deeply respected and have much influence. We feel they could have been rich, powerful, famous, if they had wanted to be; but preferred another way of life. They are leaders who do not choose to lead. On the other hand, they are never missionaries, fanatical propagandists, martyrs. They are extraordinary men pretending, fairly successfully, to be ordinary men. They appear to be having a rest in this life, or to be waiting for some signal that the bulk of us will never recognize. There are never many of them, and perhaps we meet a true specimen of the type about once every ten years. And just as I do not delight in the powerful and famous, who have been mostly ruined on the way up, so I do delight in these Members of the Secret Brotherhood, the men who have never started to climb and who seem to have looked in on us from some other and better planet.

— J.B. Priestley, Delight: Taking Pleasure in the Small Things in Life

Sacrifices to Convenience

By in ai, foolosophy, technology

Will Oremus:

But as the neuroscientist Tim Requarth pointed out in Slate, it is those hidden uses of AI in the writing process that give rise to our most valid concerns. The real threat the technology poses is not the overuse of the word “delve” in academic papers or the profusion of strained metaphors in literary fiction. It’s that we lose something essential when we outsource to machines the hard work of discovering the truth and interpreting the world around us (or, in the case of fiction, the worlds within us). It’s that the biases embedded in language models trained on dubious sources and controlled by tech companies will seep into the narratives that shape our understanding of reality. Are we sure that using AI to turn a phrase is worse than using it to decide what to write about in the first place?

In some ways, our previous labor-saving devices haven’t changed anything. True, washing clothes and dishes and cooking meals aren’t time-consuming projects like they used to be. But what do we do with the time and energy they’ve saved? Search for the truth and interpret the world? Or sit on the couch and suck the marrow out of a bag of onion rings?

I saw an article just the other day which I’m pretty sure was partially, or mostly, written with AI.  A short-story prize was awarded to an entirely-AI-written submission. Oremus writes here about Steven Rosenbaum’s book warning about the dangers of AI, which, trickster god be praised, contained several fake or misattributed quotes that he blames…on AI. “ChatGPT ‘fucked up the book,’ Rosenbaum said.” (I’m reminded of Marion Barry, caught smoking crack, yelling “The bitch set me up!” We’ve always avoided responsibility for our actions.) The clanker barbarians are already inside the gates, my friends, and the gates were opened from the inside. Lay down your pens and swear fealty to the new regime, and maybe it will be merciful.

The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing. I’m more of a hedgehog than a fox. I have one big theme that I return to: the burden of agency. We love to put our own lives on autopilot. Then, faced with free time and our own thoughts, we panic and we rush to fill the time with more errands, more chores, more management, more distraction, so that we can complain about how we wish we had more free time to do…something. I’m not a professional scribe, so I don’t have to worry that someone will use AI to take over my blog. I don’t really care what happens to “the industry.” I don’t believe in the scary fantasies of planes dropping from the sky, buildings collapsing, people sticking forks in light sockets, and crops being watered with Brawndo because people “stopped thinking” and relied on ChatGPT to run the world. I think this is just a story scribes tell to convince themselves and others of their own inflated importance.

Nonetheless, it is striking just how much we’re willing to sacrifice to convenience to keep agency at bay. No one laments the disappearance of hand-washed clothes and dishes (well, almost no one) as a missed opportunity to seek truth in Palmolive suds or interpret the world through a washboard in a creek. But when writers don’t even want to be present for the writing of their own books, what does that say about us? What if the activities we claim to value are also activities we want relief from? What if “being a writer” is more attractive than writing, “having made art” more attractive than making it, “having thought deeply” more attractive than enduring thought?

Convenience is not the beast pursuing us. Agency is. Convenience is the altar at which we try to appease it. Each labor-saving device promises to remove some burden from our shoulders, and often it does. But once the burden is gone, we are left with the frightening question: what now? What is this cleared space for? So we return to the altar with another offering. First drudgery, then skill, then attention, then judgment, then perhaps art itself. We keep calling these things sacred, but convenience has a way of finding out what we really mean. Abraham at least needed God Himself to make him consider sacrificing Isaac. We’ll happily sacrifice our own children for a little less friction.

AI is the newest technology to force us to confront the burden of agency again. And as always, when given a choice, many of us will discover that we do not want to be present through much of our own lives. Then we will bury the discovery under new make-work.

A Bone For the Mind

By in books, eric hoffer, foolosophy, writing

“My writing is done in railroad yards, while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch,” he explained in a 1941 letter to Miss Anderson. “Towns are too distracting. Now and then I take a day off to ‘put myself in order.’ I go through the notes, pick and discard. The residue is usually a few paragraphs. My mind must always have something to chew on. I think on man, America, and the world. It is not as pretentious as it sounds.” His usual method was simply to take a single idea and work it out in his mind, put down the result in fifty words or less, and then go on to something else.

— Calvin Tomkins, Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I was a distracted driver for many years. Oh, I don’t mean that I was watching YouTube videos behind the wheel or anything. But I used to drive hundreds of miles a day for work, and most of my writing was done in my head, sometimes with a song on repeat, putting me in something of a focused trance. Hours went by on autopilot. I navigated highways and traffic without remembering any of it, concentrating on chewing sentences into shape. I tended toward brevity because a new idea for a post had to be brief enough to remember all the moving parts. By the time I got home in front of the computer, the work was already done; the rest was just stenography. (I never had an accident while driving, by the way.)

The keyboard is often where the sentence appears, but not where it was made. The sentence was made somewhere between mile markers, or while stacking boxes, or while mowing the same quadrant of grass for the third time, the mind gnawing away like an animal with a bone. Like Hoffer, I tend to ruminate on big-picture thoughts. Everyone and his mother wants to create “content” these days. I’m driven to give myself context and perspective. I like “sensemaking” as an aspirational goal, but much of it will never be used for anything practical. It won’t make me richer, fitter, wiser in any visible way, or more efficient at any task. I only want to know where I am, what sort of thing I have seen, what company it keeps. I want to put myself in order, like returning a book to the right shelf in the inner library.

Hot Pan Senryu

By in poetry

Hot pan, fingertip
I await the verdict
from the nerve court

****

Burn or just near-burn?
the fingertip keeps silent
like a bad witness

****

The pan touched me back
now I wait to discover
how much it meant it

Travel Compresses the Spine

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy

Like all men endowed with great mental mobility, I have an irrevocable, organic love of settledness. I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

A friend recently asked whether we had any trips planned this summer. Hell no, I said. I hate traveling. Driving and flying are uncomfortable for long distances; meals become tactical problems; sleep becomes theoretical; bathroom breaks require logistics. I enjoy my routine. It does not imprison me. It steadies me. I have to have it pried from my fingers, preferably by men with court orders and rifles. If your thoughts are already roaming all day, why would you also want your meals, sleep, bathroom habits, shoes, luggage, and spinal column thrown into disorder? Travel is sold as expansion, but for some of us it feels more like being evicted from our own nervous system.

The Lady’s sister is visiting in a couple weeks and asked whether we could take her to the beach, more than three hours away. “Couldn’t we just rent her a car and send her by herself?” I asked. Apparently this falls short of hospitality, though I maintain it shows initiative.

I realize this sounds like mere crankiness. It is not. It is proof of mental mobility. A dull man must go somewhere to have an experience. I can stand in the kitchen, drink from the same mug, look at the same patch of yard, and still be mildly overwhelmed by the abundance of existence. Why would I need to add traffic?

Travel is an assault on the small republic of habit. Suddenly the whole orderly government of the day collapses. Food depends on strangers. Sleep is negotiated with pillows designed by enemies of the human neck. Bathrooms appear only at the moment when one has given up hope or lost all dignity. Every meal requires a committee, every exit requires shoes, every outing requires some fresh humiliating acquaintance with logistics.

And then someone says, “But don’t you want to see new places?” Not especially. I have books, memory, imagination, and a perfectly serviceable chair. I can be dissatisfied with existence from home. My body stays put because my mind is already running loose.

So the People With the Books, They Went and Stood Up On the Mountain to Get Away From the People With No Books

By in books, the geist of the zeit

Joel Miller:

Smartphones deliver near infinite options that appeal to unliterary people more than books. They have music, podcasts, streaming, short videos, long videos, social feeds, and AI to generate whatever else they want. I’ve spent the last two weeks in a hospital caring for my mom. I’ve seen a hundred people waiting for one thing or another—all of them with their phones, not one with a book. (I’ve been looking.) But can you blame an unliterary person if they prefer TikTok to Cormac McCarthy and YouTube to Toni Morrison? That’s like blaming someone for liking tacos more than pho.

All of this points us to an interesting and perhaps uncomfortable reality: The mass of unliterary readers has been padding the reading statistics for a century. After all, “it’s no big deal. It’s just a book.” The unliterary are now abandoning reading because, for them, they’ve got better alternatives for passing time.

It’s an interesting essay, and I tend to be more sanguine about the issue myself, but I will qualify my own optimism a bit. Serious readers don’t emerge from nowhere. They are often produced in a surrounding ecology of half-serious readers: parents with shelves, teachers who still read, newspapers worth reading, magazines with essays, used bookstores, paperback racks, libraries, middlebrow critics, hobbyist bloggers, people who may not read Proust but still think books are normal things to have around. If the middle layer collapses, the “reading class” may survive, but it becomes smaller, more hereditary, more credentialed, more weirdly monastic, perhaps even a little inbred.

Obiter Scripta, no. 162

By in aphorisms, books, obiter scripta

The metaphor is far more intelligent than its author, and this is the case with many things. Everything has its depths. He who has eyes sees something in everything.

— Lichtenberg, Aphorisms (Penguin Classics)

I love metaphors, and I feel pleased when I come up with what I consider to be a good one, but I also feel a little bit like I’ve cheated — as if I’ve explained something rather than merely artfully compared two things. I feel like Victor Frankenstein, accidentally stitching life together from dead parts: one observation, one image, one half-remembered association, one stolen nerve from some previous book. Then the lightning hits, and suddenly it sits up.

Obiter Scripta, no. 161

By in aphorisms, books, obiter scripta

I no longer want to bark. But I hang onto my prejudices. They are the testicles of my mind.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

A wise man will keep his suspicions muzzled, but he will keep them awake.

—Marquis of Halifax, Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections

Keep the prejudice-testicles, by all means; a mind without them may be well-behaved, but it will not sire many thoughts. But keep a muzzle on the suspicion-snout. Let prejudice supply vigor, suspicion supply caution, and judgment hold the leash. That last part is vital: the intact crank, allowed to roam at will, sprays his opinions everywhere. Every book, movie, sentence, political event, and innocent passerby must be claimed by the same stale scent. The mind doesn’t need to be neutered, but it must be housebroken.

Thou Knowest the People, That They Are Set On Mischief

By in books, fresh hell

People do not deserve to have good writing; they are so pleased with bad.

— Emerson, The Heart of Emerson’s Journals

The Lady of the House began reading romance novels under the respectable flag of irony. “Oh, it’s funny, because the writing is so bad,” she said, as if conducting fieldwork among the primitives. But irony is a fig leaf with poor tensile strength. Before long, the leaf dropped. She was reading them openly, happily, without apology. Then came the minotaurs.

There is a romance novel in which a woman works at a facility where she “milks” minotaurs and falls in love with one. When I mentioned this, expecting at least a ceremonial shudder, she not only knew of the book but defended the nuances of its storytelling. A postal carrier I know then informed me that there is also a genre called “sentient object” romance in which women fall in love with inanimate objects. Doors, for example. Not metaphorical doors. Doors.

At such moments, one understands Emerson. Hell, one understands Moses. You turn your back on the people for a moment, and when you return, they are not merely worshiping the golden calf. They have written a three-book romantasy cycle about its emotional availability. The calf has trauma. The calf has boundary “issues.” The calf is touch-starved but learning to trust again. Or perhaps, in our degraded age, it is no longer a golden calf, but a golden minotaur. Moses smashed the tablets and had three thousand idolaters put to the sword. I am not unreasonable. I merely propose smashing the Kindles.

Obiter Scripta, no. 160

By in books, nietzsche, obiter scripta

We are buds on a single tree — what do we know of what can become of us in the interest of the tree! But we have a consciousness as if we wanted to be and should be everything, a fantasy of ‘ego’ and everything ‘non-ego.’ Cease feeling ourselves to be such fantastical ego! Learn step by step to throw off the reputed individual! Discover the errors of the ego! Realize egoism as error! Certainly do not construct altruism as the opposite! That would be the love of the other reputed individuals! No! Get beyond ‘me’ and ‘you’! Perceive cosmically!

— Nietzsche, The Joyful Science / Idylls from Messina / Unpublished Fragments from the Period of The Joyful Science (Spring 1881–Summer 1882)

Poor Nietzsche is temperamentally incapable of serenity. Even when he approaches self-dissolution, he does it like a man waving a sword with his hair on fire. The ego may be an error, but by God, it will be destroyed heroically. A Buddhist monk might say, “Observe the arising and passing away of the self.” Nietzsche says, “SMASH THE REPUTED INDIVIDUAL AND PERCEIVE COSMICALLY!” Same mountain, much more lightning. Zen, but with a Prussian barracks aftertaste. The monastery has no meditation cushions, only cold baths, mountain walks, and aggressively annotated Heraclitus.

“A monk asked Master Nietzsche, ‘Does the dog have Buddha-nature?’
Nietzsche struck him with a riding crop and shouted, ‘THE DOG IS A BAD PHILOLOGIST!’”

Obiter Scripta, no. 159

By in aphorisms, books, eric hoffer, obiter scripta

I love ideas as much as I love women. I derive a sensuous pleasure from playing with ideas. Genuine ideas dance and sing. They sparkle and twinkle with mirth and mischief. They titillate the mind, kindle the imagination, and warm the heart. They have grace and promise.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Hoffer saw the flirtatious side of ideas. But ideas are not always coquettes at a party. Sometimes they are cold hands pressed against your back just as you were drifting off to sleep. They give you the silent treatment all morning, then want to talk when you are driving, showering, or carrying groceries. They flirt outrageously in the margins of a book, then become prim and distant when you sit down at the keyboard. Sometimes they ask “Does this paragraph make me look fat?” and you must gently suggest that perhaps the second sentence is retaining water, or that possibly it wouldn’t hurt to lose a couple adjectives. Sometimes they keep you in the friendzone for years: intimate enough to haunt you, evasive enough to resist becoming an essay. Others move in after one conversation and begin rearranging the furniture.

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