Craig Morey
April 2026 onward
In April 2026 I began doing short daily when-I-feel-like-it bits of writing and putting them up on my website, as something sort of in between an overly-self-indulgent blog and a freewriting exercise. The first two entries have a more complete explanation for why I write this stuff and why I post it online. I don't really expect anything here to be particularly interesting or worth reading for anyone who isn't me, but its here on my website and so you are welcome to read it if you do feel so inclined.
In northwestern Scotland, on the ferry to Lewis. Passing all the bare and forlorn-looking little islands out past Broom Firth, it makes me think of Napoleon exiled to Elba (not Elba, that was his first exile before Waterloo, I'm thinking more of his second exile on an island that I can't remember the name of.) Imagine having the powers-that-be of the world deem you to have such a dangerous mind, or such dangerous charisma (or, more realistically, maybe just such a dangerous history and reputation and influence) that they decide the best thing to do with you is stick you way out in the middle of the ocean. Imagine sitting there in the wind and drizzle by yourself, just waiting to die, and thinking about how that's what the world thinks of you.
I think maybe we should bring it back. There's some world leaders who seem suited to it. It certainly is cruel, but maybe no crueler than the prison system. And really, I think they'd like it, in a way. If I think about Trump stuck out on some little island, I think he'd be pleased as punch to know that the world hated and feared him so much. Obviously he'd be pissed about being deposed and isolated and all that, but I think his ego would be gratified. I think a lot of less-than-ideal world leaders would feel that way. We could make a whole archipelago.
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I'm almost too seasick to read or write. I have to keep taking breaks to look out the window. I've never felt seasick before, despite having been on ferries a dozen or so times before this. I hate it. Not the seasickness itself, that's whatever. But I hate thinking that there's something my body just isn't able to handle, and through no fault of my own. It's like if I were to suddenly find out that I was actually nearsighted, or allergic to nuts or something. There are very few things that my body is less than perfect at handling, my intermittent back pain and my weak sense of taste/smell are the only other ones that come to mind, and the taste/smell thing I don't even consider to be a true drawback really.
I am hoping that if I force myself to power through it and keep reading and writing as much as I can without puking, it will gradually make me less prone to being seasick. I don't actually know if seasickness works that way. Even as I write this just now I can feel myself starting to get a headache in addition to the nausea, so maybe it really would be better to just look out the window the rest of the trip. I'm going to go out onto the deck and see if fresh air helps any.
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Fresh air is helping I think. Beautiful view sitting on the stern deck watching the Highlands fade away into the dusk and the distance. It's crazy to think about all the Hebrides natives sitting around me who do this commute so often that the views must get to be a boring routine.
I figured I should write a little about what and why I'm writing. I've never been a diary person before. I remember briefly having a diary when I was fourteen or so, which became so personal and my fear of it being discovered became so great that I ended up burning it after only a couple months. My reasons for starting again now are at-least-twofold (fewfold):
Firstly and most immediately, I'm currently about three quarters of the way through reading Among Others by Jo Walton, which is an epistolary novel in the form of a girl's diary, which got me thinking about journaling. It's a YAish story about a teenager in a British boarding school with light fantasy elements, which ordinarily would make for a book that I would hate, but really I'm enjoying it. And I'm only very slightly ashamed to say so.
Secondly and most significantly, I really want to write more. I enjoy writing, but I don't do it nearly as often as I would like. I have lots of little thoughts that I would like to have written down but never actually make the time. The bigger problem, rather than not having time, is that for quite a while I have pushed all of my desire to write into two opposite and inconvenient extremes: I either write inane little microblogging posts online, or else if I have any thought that seems like it could be larger than a tweet, I mentally file it away for later use in my other main writing endeavor, which is Writing The Next Great American Novel. Suffice it to say that the big novel-writing project is not actually happening, even a little bit, but the thought that it potentially could has been sapping and subsuming all of my actual will to sit down and put pen to paper (/finger to keyboard). I used to write little essays and short stories and things from time to time, but the problem with those is that I would only ever write them out once I had a fully formed and fleshed-out idea. I'm hoping that a diary, even if it isn't actually updated daily, will give me an outlet for putting down thoughts that don't need to be completely thought out first. I think I read the idea once somewhere, and thoroughly believe, that every person has some concrete amount of crap writing that they have to do before they become good at writing. Maybe for some people it's a million words and for some it's a billion, but everyone has a number, and if they can manage to write that much, it doesn't matter what they write about or why, once they reach their number they will open the door to being able to actually write well. To paraphrase another different person's metaphorical explanation, the good writing and the bad writing all come out of the same tube, and in the beginning the tube is plugged up with all the bad writing, and so if you want to get the good writing to come out of the tube the only possible way is to push the bad writing out first, to actually just make yourself write it all down for as long as it takes and as crap as it might be. So it's in that spirit that I'm writing this diary now. I'm clearing out the tube.
Lastly (and leastly), I believe that I am living in interesting times, and also that I am an interesting person who is doing interesting things. Although it is true that the interesting things I am doing are largely unrelated to the interesting times I am living in. But I'm currently (in addition to reading Among Others) about three quarters of the way through Mike Duncan's biography of the Marquis de Lafayette, in which a lot of the history is pulled directly from diaries of Lafayette and his contemporaries. And even though a lot of the info is coming from the big players like Marie Antoinette or the American ambassador to France, even random low level soldiers who kept diaries get their moments in the spotlight, contributing to the storytelling in ways that kings and ambassadors would not have been able to. I don't know that I'm actually motivated by thoughts of helping out future historians (especially in an age where things generally seem to be so much more well documented than they were two hundred years ago), but I do feel that my life is a part of history in some minor insignificant way and so even if no one ever actually reads it the things I write do still have some intrinsic value.
Boat is pulling into Stornoway now
I can only motivate myself to write things here if I actually truly believe that they are going to be shared, or at least that they could potentially be read by others at some point. The thought of all of this just sitting and rotting on my harddrive is maybe the most comfortable for me, but at the same time it makes the writing feel pointless and so why bother. My plan is to post this diary onto my website as some sort of blog, that way it is publicly accessible and could conceivably be read, yet at the same time it's hard to imagine many people going through all the trouble of actually reading it. In a way, it's the same mindset that lets me busk with my accordion despite my fear and dislike of public performances. I'm playing music for everyone walking by, but at the same time I'm playing for no one; in general no one is actually paying much attention to me specifically, I'm just there in the background, but all the same I get the chance to gradually build up my tolerance for performing music for people.
If I make this diary too personal, I will eventually run into the burned diary issue again that I mentioned yesterday. The only way for me to write things here while both staying motivated and also knowing they might be read some day is if I avoid writing anything too private, anything that I would be uncomfortable sharing with a friend, an enemy, and a stranger all simultaneously. So in a sense, this really won't be an actual diary, it defeats most of the purpose of why people keep diaries. I'm not sharing my deepest thoughts and my intimate moments, I'm just recounting surface level events and superficial observations plus long drawn out reflections on things that do not actually feel private or close to my heart. Oh well. If that also starts making me feel demotivated then I'll try to find some other solution I guess. Maybe two diaries, one public and one private.
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Arrived at the croft in Leurbost last night. Terrain here on Lewis reminds me a bit of Newfoundland, and I said so to my WWOOF host. She and I watched BBC coverage of the Artemis II moon mission and of Trump's Iran War. I wonder which event will be seen as more important fifty years from now. There are other American volunteers here as well, and we agreed that it's a very embarrassing time to be traveling abroad as an American. I keep joking that I want to start introducing myself to people as being Canadian.
I occasionally feel like it's a deriliction of duties, that I'm running away from my inherent American responsibility to try to improve the situation, but realistically what could I really do? Even if there was a full blown civil war, would fighting in it really be a productive use of my life? As it stands, any sort of meaningful action I could imagine myself taking back in the states is mostly just stuff that would quickly land me in prison. Maybe it's cowardly, but I don't have a huge interest in making myself a martyr and doing some big ultimately-irrelevant political statement just to then get locked away for years. But at the same time, I don't think I could really approve of myself just keeping my head down and living a normal life in Pittsburgh in the midst of everything going on right now. It makes me think of questions like what would I do if I were living in Germany back in the 1930s. So for right now anyway, I'm continuing with what I've been doing for the past five months. I'm running away. And for the next two months that means living on a little farm out in the Hebrides.
My WWOOF host has a son and a daughter-in-law with a two-year-old son, and there's also an American couple volunteering at the croft with their five-year-old daughter. It's always interesting for me meeting people my age who have a family, a career, a house, and so on. I wonder what they think of me. I do think the drifter lifestyle that I've been living for the past decade or so has its own sort of dignity and respectability to it, but I doubt many of the people I meet would be interested in changing places with me. I'm also not really ever sure how I feel about them. They seem happy at least, and I don't know that there are any specific things about their lifestyle that I could pinpoint and know that I would be unable to live with, but all the same I don't think I would be happy living their lives. My experiences so far have been that the closer I get to domesticity and settled stability and all, the less content I am and the more I start to feel trapped and stifled and depressed. I have a very hard time imagining myself happy with or motivated by the things that seem to guide other people through their lives.
I don't dislike kids, and it's certainly been entertaining to have the young kids around the farm here, but I'm also feeling very happy with my choice of having gotten a vasectomy. Having said that though, I am seeing some of the appeal of parenthood while here, more so than I have in the past. There is some core human experience there that I have cut myself off from, there is an entire dimension of life that I will never get to see except via little glimpses into the lives of other parents that I meet. But their choice comes at the cost of an enormous sacrifice. Access to the experience of parenthood requires carving off and offering up a large chunk of one's own life, which is a cost that I am not and will never be willing to pay. Those who would criticize my choice not to have children might call it selfishness, and in a sense I think they're right. I am selfish about my own life, I am unwilling to exchange any of it, and by hording it the way I am there are incredibly meaningful experiences and connections that I will simply never have, and I'm okay with that.
I used to think that I would probably be more interested in having children if I lived on Anarres. Which is to say, if I lived in a society which shared responsibility communally for child raising, and which was built around an ethical framework I supported and had a potential future that was worth bringing children into. Thinking about it more though, I'm not convinced I actually would. Certainly on Anarres I would feel more optimistic about children being born into the world generally, but I think blaming society for my unwillingness to have children is externalizing a problem that is actually just internal. I think I am simply by nature uninterested in the role of parent, and I don't think that would change even if I were living in a utopia. I believe that it is perfectly reasonable and natural if people choose not to have kids for practical or logistical reasons, but in a case like mine where the choice precedes any actual concrete reasons for it I do kind of feel like it might be indicative of something actually wrong with me. I think it is normal for people to weigh the pros and cons and decide to not have kids, but I worry that it points to something deeply abnormal about me that I can't even imagine any hypothetical scenario where the pros could outweigh the cons.
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Finished reading Among Others. Wrote a review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8507983658
Somehow hadn't noticed until reading a news article today that the USA's 250th anniversary is this July. Very happy that I'll be abroad for all of this year.
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Work so far this week has been tree planting, and building fences to protect the new trees from deer and rabbits. The twenty acre croft here is being planted with native tree species, partially funded through grants from the Scottish government as part of a larger environmentalist effort to reforest the Hebrides. The previous two farms that I've worked at had a little bit of a feeling of winding down their operations, but this one, as with most farms I volunteer at, has much more of a character of planning and building for the future.
As much as I enjoy doing volunteer farm work with the WWOOF program, there is a sort of contradiction there between my worldview and that of most farms and farmers I work with. We are both motivated by thoughts of sustainability and environmentalism, but whereas the typical WWOOF ethos is one of optimism, my thoughts about the future are mostly tinged with pessimism. I don't really want to think about what the world, and especially the natural world, will be like decades in the future after this croft has finished being reforested. Actions to preserve or reclaim the natural world and to fight climate change feel like loosing battles at the best of times and pointless self-delusion at worst. It is difficult to enjoy my work if I think about it in these terms, and so I mostly try not to. I do believe that there is some inherent value in well-intended projects that are undertaken even in the face of a hopeless future, but it's difficult to come up with a real justification for that value. I almost feel as though I am planting trees for a hypothetical lost future that could have been, rather than for the real one that's coming and that I have no particular interest in seeing. There is real good in the world, there are well-intentioned people doing well-intentioned things, but the good and the bad alike are all going to be drowned in a flood of runaway climate change and the resultant shortages, famines, and wars.
So, why bother planting trees? If the world cannot be saved, which I don't believe it can, I might as well ask why anyone should ever bother doing anything. I think the best answer I can give at present is that if I were living in a good world with a good future, it would be good to plant trees, and so even in the real world there is still some lingering goodness wrapped up in the act of planting trees, even if they will one day be knocked over by man-made hurricanes or bleached by acid rains. Or maybe the better answer is that I'm planting trees purely for myself. That in the moment of the act of planting a tree, I am connecting myself, however briefly, with some lost timeline where a better world was possible.
I feel in some sense as if I have transcended doomerism and come out the other side. I can't quite say that I've made my peace with the approaching age of decline, but I've reached a stage where I can somehow draw satisfaction and fulfillment from hopeful actions like reforestation even without having any actual hope in me. This stuff all used to make me depressed but it doesn't anymore.
More fencing and tree planting tomorrow assuming the clear weather holds.
Headache today. Fellow volunteer thinks it might be from gasoline fumes from me having spent all day using the brush cutter. I have some Ibuprofen with me but haven't taken any. I usually don't like taking medicine for headaches unless things get really bad or unless there is some particular reason why I definitely need my head to be functioning optimally as soon as possible. I mentioned all this to some of the people here when asked, and said that I am generally fairly anti-medication, but I didn't really have a concise explanation for why. The best short answer I think I can give is that taking medicine for a non-serious issue feels like taking the easy way out. But I don't know if that answer by itself really holds up to serious scrutiny. I am not generally interested in making myself pointlessly suffer or in making my life harder or more painful just on principle. Every time I use any sort of tool or technological convenience could conceivably qualify as "taking the easy way out" and yet those other shortcuts don't usually bother me. I think maybe a more accurate explanation for my avoidance of medication is that I don't want to get used to always being able to wipe away any minor inconvenience just by swallowing a pill. If I keep Ibuprofen set aside as a rarely-indulged luxury, I will always be able to tolerate its absence and will never have to live to see it become a taken-for-granted necessity. Maybe someday I really won't have access to modern medicine anymore, and so I'll be glad then that I never made taking headache medication into a habit. Although having written that, I suppose I can just as easily imagine myself shipwrecked on a deserted island or surviving in the post-apocalyptic wastes and suffering from a bad headache and thinking "damn, I really should have taken every opportunity to use Ibuprofen back when I had the chance." I'm not actually expecting to ever be unable to access modern medicine, really, and I don't actually justify my avoidance of medication by thinking about how civilization might collapse someday. But the general principle is there regardless, that I don't want to ever become completely accustomed to something that I know I can manage to do without. This same principle applies to several other conspicuous self-deprivations in my life, for example: I regularly sleep on floors, in part because I don't ever want to feel like I'm unable to cope with not having a bed available; I regularly take cold showers, because I don't ever want to feel like I need to have hot water; I (used to) regularly wash my clothes by hand, because I don't want to feel that my life requires me to have access to a washing machine. (Though people who know me may be tempted to suggest that my eating habits should also be included in this list, my general neglect for how my food tastes isn't really due to self-deprivation; rather, its usually the case that I really just have no actual desire for better-tasting food.)
I believe that all of these sorts of self-deprivation ultimately contribute to my freedom in life. If I choose to live a life where a bed, a hot shower, and a laundry machine are all necessary requirements, then I am restricting the sorts of lives that I am able to choose to live. I won't ever be able to do something or go somewhere that involves losing access to those things without it feeling like an unpleasant deprivation. Whereas on the other hand, if I never regularly use any of those things anyway, then I won't feel like I'm giving anything up by losing my access to them and so I will be perfectly free to travel anywhere and do anything without worrying about whether a bed, hot shower, or washing machine will be available. Ibuprofen is a little bit different in the sense that it's something small that can be carried with me, but the overall idea is the same. I don't want to ever feel that my choices in life are restricted to only those where medicine is easily available.
The counterargument to this whole line of reasoning, and (I assume) the reason other people don't usually live their lives this way, is that it is comfortable to sleep in beds, to take hot showers, and to not have a headache; and that feeling comfortable is generally more important than abstract hypothetical ideas about freedom. If I felt that material comfort was a major component of happiness then I would maybe be more open to this argument, but I honestly just don't. I don't think any material self-deprivations have ever made my life even slightly less happy. There's a quote from Thomas Jefferson that goes "we never repent of having eaten too little" and I think that goes for a lot of things. Maybe a cold shower is uncomfortable in the moment, but I never look back on it thirty minutes later and think "oh that really was so uncomfortable, I really should have taken a hot one instead." Comfort and discomfort are fleeting, they are ephemeral. The "happiness" that a person might measure by taking stock of their immediate material condition and deciding how comfortable they feel is a type of happiness that I have very little interest in. And just to be clear, nothing about this line of thought ever leads to me causing myself to suffer, or reveling in my own suffering, because lack of material comfort is not actually a form of suffering. Conflating discomfort with suffering is the purview of animals, small children, and helpless spoiled aristocrats.
Added a color-coded world map to my website today (https://t0bor.neocities.org/world_map.png), sorted into four categories as: places I've been to for less than a week, for more than a week, for more than two months, and for more than two years (so, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Sierra Leone for that last category).
I realized after making the map (or maybe while making it?) that most people might sort the places they've been to into either "places I've lived" or "places I've visited", but I don't really feel like I have a clear divide between the two, or at least not since becoming an adult anyway. At eighteen, it always sort of felt like I had one foot in my parents house and one foot in college, without either place really feeling like my home. The closest I've felt to actually living somewhere, as an adult, was probably the year I spent in Pittsburgh immediately after college graduation. Other than that it's just been a series of shorter or longer stays in various places without ever really feeling settled or moved in anywhere. I felt like a guest the whole time I was in Sierra Leone, and felt like a sort of long-term couch-surfer the other two times I was in Pittsburgh, and other than that I've never been anywhere for more than six months, with even those six-month stays being in foreign countries where I was volunteering with WWOOF and staying as a guest in someone else's house.
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Finished reading the Lafayette biography. Wrote a review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8514574644
Briefly tried reading a YA fantasy novel that had been recommended to me but gave up very quickly. (Not going to say what book or who recommended it other than to just say that it almost certainly wasn't you, person-who-happens-to-be-here-reading-this.) "Then, he could emerge from the cave a [magic monster-slayer]: a survivor gifted with one of four magical classes. He was tired of being a student. Going off to discover what happened to his father was completely unreasonable without having the strength of a [magic monster-slayer]." Actual excerpt from the first two minutes of the audiobook. This book could easily have been written by an actual middle-schooler. I dropped it and started reading Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg instead, and the contrast between hot garbage YA and an actual fairly-well-written novel by and for adults is astounding. Guess which one has a higher aggregate review on Goodreads of course...
I think if all the hot garbage YA out there was only being consumed by middle-schoolers it wouldn't make me as upset, since then I'd be able to fit the whole thing into the mold of "low quality product being foisted on ignorant teenagers who don't know any better, shame on the writers and publishers for taking advantage of children like that." What gets me is how many educated and otherwise-intelligent people my own age happily read this stuff and seemingly can't even tell the difference between it and actual good literature. Certainly it's always been true that a lot of people enjoy crap or have shitty tastes, but I feel like the thing that's changed more recently is that there isn't an obvious public distinction anymore between the crap and the good stuff. People are out there having serious debates about whether or not the Marvel movies are the pinnacle of modern cinema. The garbage used to all be published on pulp, you could look at the quality of the paper itself and know more or less what you were getting. Now I have to wade through an undifferentiated sea of bestsellers without being able to tell whether its actually good or just low-effort pageturner slop that I wouldn't have liked even as a teenager, unless I just go ahead and get ahold of the book to try it for myself. This happened (to an admittedly less egregious extent) with Gideon the Ninth, which I was tricked into reading by enormous hype and after multiple people whose opinions I otherwise respected had made it sound as if it was a book that adult readers could expect to like. I keep my guard up a bit more these days (e.g. I'm not going to touch Dungeon Crawler Carl with a ten foot pole) but it still keeps happening. I don't like living in a world where I can have serious and sophisticated conversations with a thirty-year-old, tell them I enjoy reading science fiction and fantasy novels, and then have them earnestly recommend me this afternoon's attempted hot garbage YA novel, without them having the decency to tell me that it's hot garbage YA, or even without them seeming to know that that's what it is. People are allowed to like what they like, that really isn't my issue here, it's just that they (and more importantly, society generally and all the cultural powers-that-be) need to be able to notice and articulate the difference between good stuff and low-quality trash, even if they then choose to continue to enjoy or even prefer the trash.
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I've been trawling through and consolidating some old correspondence, as part of the same recent general effort to write more and to better document what I've written that led to me starting this journal. Came across this paragraph, taken from an email to my dad written in January 2015:
"I think you're right that a lot of what's bugging me is having to choose what to do with my life after college. Ideally, it wouldn't matter too much what I decide to do immediately afterward, since I should always be able to switch paths, but I'm worried that I'm the sort of person who would just get complacent and decide that that wherever I am is good enough. I get your point about how I should be able to make any path I choose into the right path, but that sounds to me too much like settling with what's just good enough. I think I'd rather be the sort of person who switches what they're doing all the time, rather than be a physicist or philosopher or whatever and wonder if I would have rather done something else."
Mission accomplished, baby!
Funny how my perception of age changes as I get older. Ten years ago, age sixty onward seemed to me to be all one sort of indistinguishable monolithic Old. Whereas now, it feels like there's a huge difference between sixty, seventy, eighty, and ninety.
The croft has an electric piano that I've been playing a bit the last couple days. I really enjoy playing, but piano in particular can also be frustrating for me. With guitar, for example, I already have more or less all the skill I've ever really aspired to have, I can play basically every chord (or at least any given chord in any song I'm likely to encounter) and my skills are comfortably at what I usually describe to people as "campfire level", without me feeling like I need to put any time or effort into maintaining my skills. When I play guitar, I just play for enjoyment without ever feeling like I'm missing anything or ought to be pushing myself toward anything.
With piano, in contrast, twelve years of formal lessons have both given me a higher level of skill (which I've since then largely failed to maintain), and have also showed me the possibility of new levels of skill that I could potentially reach if I were more diligent about practicing regularly and if were to actually put effort into improving. I have always had the problem, even as a teenager actively taking piano lessons, that when I sit down at the piano I mostly just want to enjoy playing songs I already know well, rather than work systematically to improve on difficult passages or to practice new material, let alone actually drill finger exercises and such. On the one hand, the fact that I enjoy playing so much means that I never feel as though I have to force myself to sit down at the piano, but on the other hand actual improvement feels like pulling teeth. And unlike with guitar, I have a hard time just being content with where I'm at rather than feeling like I ought to be improving.
The fact that I spend so much time traveling without regular access to a piano certainly isn't helping things. Whenever I do get brief chances to play (such as here), and time to myself to actually practice rather than just playing through whichever songs I remember, any effort I'm able to put into practicing is taken up entirely with just trying to relearn things I've forgotten and trying to slow down my overall decline a bit. I know I still have quite a bit of skill at the piano but it's frustrating always comparing where I am now to where I was ten years ago, and losing things faster than I can ever regain them.
At this point I only really know about a dozen songs well enough to play them confidently, and only a couple of them actually fully showcase my skills. It would probably require a year of daily practice to get myself back to the level I was at back when I stopped taking lessons, so that I could then actually start trying to improve and to learn new things. But given the sort of life I'm living and the lack of self-discipline I tend to have with regard to actually practicing rather than just playing for fun, that year of daily practice is probably just never going to happen. And so instead, every time I sit down at the piano, even though I'm having fun and people tell me how impressed they are with me, I'm still always also thinking about what could've been, what could potentially be. Which is frustrating.
Accordion is a nice middle ground. I've never had any actual instruction in it, so as with guitar I'm mostly able to treat it as just something I do for fun rather than as a curriculum that I've given up on part way through. Objectively I'm better at piano than at accordion, but a lot of the skill from the former carries over to the latter, and with accordion being less common and less central in classical music and music education it's easy to feel that I am much farther along, relatively speaking, with accordion than I am with piano. Sort of like how if you spend a lot of time practicing at chess, you might be able to qualify as a novice, whereas if you spend that same amount of time practicing at a more obscure board game you could easily be one of the best in the world at it. I'm certainly not one of the best in the world at accordion or anything, but there are comparatively fewer people out there for me to be forced to compare myself with, and fewer people qualified to judge me. I feel much more comfortable with calling myself good at accordion than I do with calling myself good at piano, despite my objectively higher skill level in the latter.
I miss my accordion. I wish it was small enough to be easily brought with me when I travel.
The moors are on fire out on the far side of the loch. The assumption is that it was some sort of controlled burn that then got out of control. There was smoke visible all day and now at night I can see the fires from my bedroom window.
There were several women over at the croft this evening for my host's Tuesday craft night. I'm working on knitting another pair of mittens, not so much because I need another pair of mittens but rather because I'm worried that if I don't keep knitting somewhat regularly for a while I'll forget everything I've learned so far and the muscle memory and have to start from scratch if I ever want to knit anything again in the future. The big gossip tonight among the other knitters was that next week Gabe Newell is apparently going to be renting out a lodge here for a couple months; the husband of one of the women works as the lodge's gamekeeper. I was the only one present who knew who Gabe Newell was.
Having one of those days where it feels like a struggle to convincingly portray a normal well-adjusted human. The sort of day where I find myself getting derailed thinking about how long to wait before responding during a conversation, how close to stand or walk near people, where to look when I'm not looking at anything, what to do with my hands, etc. Everything I say and can think of as potentially wanting to say feels awkward and/or banal, whereas the things other people say feel completely correct and yet also completely fake.
I think being around small children brings out this sort of feeling more often. Not the children themselves, though. Small children are straightforward and tactless and so talking to them requires no overthinking or performance from me. Sort of like with Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot. But the way parents and other adults interact with small children is full of artifice, dishonesty, and manipulation, and to see adults constantly switch modes as they switch between talking to children and talking to me serves as a stark reminder of the reality of how orchestrated and artificial every conversation really is. Every line is a performance, an attempt to influence or misdirect or achieve something in some way. Every bit of communication and every interaction is wrapped up in layers and layers of what that communication is subtly and indirectly meant to accomplish beyond just conveying information. I don't mean to imply that the people around me are conscious and calculated manipulators, I think it all mostly happens unconsciously and automatically and is just a default part of how human interaction works. I also don't mean to imply that this whole charade is something that I consider to be beneath me or that I'm personally excused from it. Of course I do it too. It's just that with small children around I'm suddenly frequently much more aware that I'm doing it and that everyone is doing it to me, whereas usually it's something I can often manage to ignore or just forget about.
It's always difficult for me when it feels like the people around me all have their shit together in terms of how to navigate social interactions. I find it reassuring whenever I see someone clearly struggling with awkwardness or with the little subtleties of conversation and social expectations, since it shows to me that they are in fact having some authentic experience down there that they're then visibly struggling to filter into the social mask that we all wear. It's like seeing someone in a stage play briefly and accidentally break character and in that way remind you that they are in fact a real person and not just a robot following a script. I've been getting comparatively few of these sorts of reminder moments from the people around me at this current croft where I'm staying. It almost makes me feel like I should be mentally categorizing myself with the raw and affectationless two-year-old and five-year-old rather than with the polished and masked adults. I feel like I'm in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, trying my best to convincingly pretend to be one of the aliens, while simultaneously hoping to be shown some sign that any of the aliens around me are actually still humans.
Finished reading Dying Inside. It was good. Pleasantly schizoid and misanthropic. Going to start Where The Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler next. Also starting to slowly trudge my way through Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov. Unclear if I'm actually expecting to like it or if I'm just desperately chasing the high of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and being unable to read them for the first time again.
I also skimmed through a big how-to book on different types of needlework (Good Housekeeping's Step-By-Step Encyclopedia of Needlecraft, Judy Brittain, 1979) that had been left behind by one of the ladies at craft night to give to a different craft night member not present. I've read about a few new techniques now (specifically, cable stitch knitting, swiss darning/duplicate stitching, and cutwork embroidery) that I want to try to add to my repertoire with the occasional bits of knitting and embroidery that I've previously been doing.
I think tailoring and other sorts of string and fabric crafts have had happen to them the same sort of thing that happened to painting after the invention of photography, and western classical music during the ending of the common practice period. Those arts had been completely perfected within the scope of their original purpose, and in becoming perfected any further work became pointless and unnecessary. The only way to make worthwhile music or paintings was by purposefully breaking rules and always striving for a way to think outside the box. With knitting and weaving and sewing and so on, machines can now work more efficiently and perfectly than humans ever could, and the most perfect and functional and traditionally beautiful clothes have already been made and will never be handmade. The only reason left for practicing these arts is novelty, to make something that no one else would think to make and that no machine would be likely to ever duplicate. (Actually there is another reason, which is the desire for historic traditions and the human touch that keep things like Harris tweed and sweaters from Grandma in constant demand. This reason for doing handicrafts is completely uninteresting to me.) Industrial textile production has moved fabric craft as an art form thoroughly into the era of Picasso and Stravinsky. My end goal, in knowing how to sew or knit or embroider, is not to recreate clothes that anyone or any machine could make but that are unique in having been made by me. My goal instead is to hopefully be able to make weird and unexpected things that no one else could think to make.
I'm also not particularly interested in achieving any sort of traditional technical mastery over knitting or embroidery (or really any sort of craft or skill whatsoever). The Encyclopedia of Needlecraft book is full of hallowed techniques passed down through the centuries that someone could clearly spend their whole life practicing without ever reaching the end of it. My experience with piano (see 26-04-13) makes that whole route pretty unappealing. There are endless depths to many of these skills, but I believe I will only continue to enjoy doing them if I restrict myself to learning things as they come and as I want them and have use for them, rather than going as far in with the skill as I can simply because the depths are there and because I feel like I'm supposed to want to learn everything.
Trying to figure out who it is really that I'm in dialogue with when I'm out here planting trees. The Scottish isles were deforested gradually by their inhabitants roughly three thousand years ago. Is that, like slavery or the Native American genocides, a recent enough crime to still have some lingering ancestral culpability? Or is it all too far away now maybe to be seen through any sort of moral lens? In the 1700s and 1800s, after this land was incorporated into Great Britain, much of the native population was forcibly evicted and suffered under the Highland Clearances. Does that mean that maybe history has already settled the score for their crimes of environmental degradation?
Or, could it be that the deforestation was morally absolved as it happened, as a sort of crime of necessity, like when a hungry person shoplifts for food or like when my neighbors in Sierra Leone killed and ate a pangolin despite them being endangered. Could it be even more than that, could the deforestation have been not a crime at all, but instead the right thing for the people then to do, to cut trees for lumber and firewood and for making more pastures and farmland. Could it be that for those people, in the context they were living in, cutting down trees was the morally correct thing to do, but now in 2026 that act has now been reevaluated to have been bad and it's now me planting trees that is the right thing to do. Could it be that all of this is in a deeper sense just morally neutral, that the tree cutting and the tree planting and maybe even the slavery and the genocide and the Highland Clearances was all just people doing whatever seemed like the thing for them to be doing. Maybe I'm just assigning "right" and "wrong" to all this stuff in order to be able to tell myself a story, to fit myself and my actions into some meaningful larger narrative. What is it then that I dislike so much about that narrativeless alternative?
A world where some people long ago cut down trees and now me and some other people are planting trees, where there are no protagonists or antagonists or good guys or bad guys and instead only a bunch of background extras ad-libbing stuff with no actual plot relevance, just feels sort of empty somehow. I want to feel like history leads somewhere, and that by playing my part in it and trying my best to take meaningful actions I'm aligning myself with something that extends through the ages, a cosmic battle of good versus evil. When I go out to plant trees it isn't enough for me to just believe that what I'm doing is right, I need to feel like I'm righting some historical wrong. I need to be doing right in opposition to something, even if there are no actual individual people past or present for me to oppose. Even if it was just planting trees in the aftermath of a landslide, in opposition to a "bad" act of nature, that would at least still be something. I don't like this feeling that what the tree cutters did and what I'm doing is all just neutral, that we're all just going around doing whatever we're doing, endlessly, without ever opposing or moving toward or away from anything. A world in perpetual stasis, where a thousand years from now someone else will cut all these trees down again and none of it will have ever meant anything.
I remember seeing a video online years ago of footage of an aerial drone dropping a grenade on a Russian soldier. It was a Ukranian drone killing a Russian, and so it was put in front of me online in a celebratory sort of way, as opposed to Russians killing Ukranians which was tragic. I remember being disgusted with the video, but also thinking about how that video was probably representative of the future of warfare, both in the sense of robots killing humans without the victim even being aware of what was happening, and also in the sense of the whole thing being recorded and posted online as part of some sort of gaudy spectator bloodsport. Like watching a football match, except even better, because the opposing team was actually geopolitically evil and because the players were actually being killed in a big gory spectacle for our viewing pleasure rather than just being tackled or whatever.
I worry that I might be part of the last generation capable of reacting with disgust to all this. Certainly society is aware of the shift that's happening and will periodically try to comment on it with things like The Hunger Games, Squid Game, etc, but no amount of self-awareness seems to actually stop the cultural impulse to make entertainment out of mass death. I can't pretend that it's all anything new. I'm told that during the US civil war, battles were often treated by civilians as afternoon entertainment, with families going out to the field to watch the fighting and maybe have a picnic. People casually watched the guillotines during the French revolution the way people today watch TV. But I think there was always some inner voice and/or some fraction of the populace that was disgusted, that recognized the evil in war and execution regardless of how well deserving its victims were said to be. I've read that prior to the mid-1900s the majority of bullets fired during wars were intentionally fired to miss. But then that humanistic impulse was systematically overwritten through modifications in the way militaries are now trained (for example, using human-shaped targets during shooting practice). I'm worried that the internet and modern culture is having a similar overwriting effect on our natural impulse to be horrified and disgusted with any sort of killing.
The Palestinian genocide seems like a straightforward counterexample to this worry, a situation where most people seem sad and disgusted about what's happening, but I wonder if those people would feel the same way if it were happening to a population who were thought to "deserve" it somehow. Which is not to say that all of the grieving and mourning for Palestinians is inauthentic or only politically motivated, but just that we have in a sense been "allowed" by our political disposition to grieve in this case, whereas we might not be in others. Trump supporters are not "allowed" to grieve for families separated and imprisoned by immigration control, even if individual Trump voters might otherwise feel so inclined, but those same Trump voters do authentically grieve for fetuses killed by abortion since that's something they've been given permission to feel. If we were to strip away all of the political alignments surrounding every sort of killing, how much feeling is actually left? Do I actually believe that twelve million people murdered by Nazi Germany was a tragedy, do I feel it deep down in my soul, or is the fact that it was a tragedy ultimately just a fact to me, something that I've assimilated into myself and my identity and my political worldview but without it actually meaning anything in any real human way. I would like to believe there is some core observer inside me capable of actually judging, of separating out human tragedy from political tragedy, of noticing that a video of a robot dropping a grenade on someone is disgusting regardless of who the someone is, but the fact that everyone else in the world seems to evaluate tragedy as just a simple product of what they align themselves with and what they're allowed to feel makes me suspect that deep down I'm no different. I don't think the human brain is able to really comprehend the atrocities that humanity is capable of committing. The fact that we've entered an age where these incomprehensible atrocities are now being beamed into our awareness constantly from every direction in 4k resolution makes me think we're just destined for a future of thorough desensitization. The killings won't ever stop, we'll just learn to stop feeling anything at all about them.
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The croft has a free-range peacock and peahen in addition to the dozen or so chickens, and whenever the peacock is wandering around randomly in the yard or showing up unexpectedly in the background while I'm working it makes me think of The Lobster.
I feel weird talking to other people about having had cancer. Everyone has been touched by cancer in one way or another, it's always everywhere you look, and there have been several conversations where in hindsight I probably ought to have mentioned my own cancer but didn't. Typically the only times I bring it up are if it was incidental to some other topic, e.g. talking about my experiences with Medicaid, talking about why I didn't rejoin the Peace Corps, etc.
I got off too easily with my cancer. No chemotherapy, no long treatment, no lingering sense of mortality or uncertainty really. The progression from initial discovery to surgery to casually routine follow-ups all happened so fast that I never really even had time to dwell on the whole thing. To identify myself as a Cancer Survivor in the presence of other people actually impacted by cancer in significant ways feels like if people were talking about some war and I mentioned that I was also a veteran in that war but then it turns out that I had some bowel obstruction or something and was honorably discharged before having seen any actual combat. I feel like mentioning my cancer is stealing valor from the actual cancer survivors out there.
I can't even try to turn it into just some interesting fun fact about myself either, since being flippant about cancer feels wildly disrespectful to the real cancer victims (correction: I am in fact jokey and flippant about it among my friends, I feel safer doing so knowing people know me well enough to not ever take me too seriously and knowing that people my age are less likely to have their own cancer horror stories. But among strangers and the sorts of acquaintances I meet while traveling and WWOOFing like this, I do not laugh about it and generally keep the whole thing to myself). So the cancer stuff has to just stay there in my head quietly as a serious but simultaneously nonserious thing that happened to me, that I'm unable to brag about or joke about or seek sympathy for or sympathize with others about or even talk about really.
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Finished reading Where The Axe Is Buried (review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8537030538). Going to start The Name Of The Wind by Patrick Rothfuss next, which I expect will take me a while (28 hour audiobook. I'm also still planning on making it through Oblomov on my kindle, which will probably take longer, since I can't read it while working).
Offhand throwaway line from near the end of Where The Axe Is Buried that I've been chewing on since yesterday, concerning people's emotions and motivations when traveling: "He wondered if people went away simply so that they could return." It fits with a recurring theme running through some of Ursula K Le Guin's work as well, that going somewhere is only half a journey and that returning is the thing that completes it.
I do think my travels would feel very different if I didn't have Pittsburgh in the back of my head, this idea that I will presumably be going back there some day. There is no specific building there that I consider to be 'home' but the city itself does feel like a sort of anchor. I wonder if having that sort of thing is a basic human need. If Pittsburgh was destroyed somehow, if the whole US sank into the ocean while I was in Scotland, I wonder if I would then try to latch on to whatever farm I was at or maybe some farm I had volunteered at previously and try to make that into a new sort of anchor for me. I think about stories about people truly displaced, people who had a home that vanished and who are, for a time at least, unable to make a new one. Those stories always seem to say that it isn't possible for people to really be happy like that, but I've always assumed that the issue was more with being forced into it, having your home taken away or destroyed by force rather than by choice. I've personally always felt like I've managed to be happy while homeless and wandering, but thinking about it more I wonder if I would still be able to feel that way without carrying with me some abstract idea of coming back to Pittsburgh at some point in the future.
Last night and the night before were the first cloudless nights since getting to Lewis. Stayed up and watched out the window for several minutes to try to get a glimpse of the Lyrid meteor shower that peaked last night but didn't see anything.
It feels good to have little reminders of scale and permanence in the face of overbearing feelings of the present. I'm usually able to tune out current events if I want to but even thinking about things like the reforestation I'm doing and the long decades it will take for the trees to grow up gets all tangled up with feelings of decline and fatalism. But the Lyrid meteor shower will continue happening every year regardless of what humans manage to do to the planet. It's not that it's reassuring exactly, meteors and cosmic timescales and all that are completely separate from anything human, I can't manage to see a shooting star and think that there's a god out there tying it all together with some meaningful human connection. But if not reassuring, it is at least grounding and centering to think about recurring events that will continue to happen for eons no matter what. It helps put things in perspective.
When I was younger I assumed that living an unconventional life as a drifter wanderer type of person was more difficult, and that having a career and a house and a credit score and getting married and having two and a half kids was the easier more straightforward sort of life, the path of least resistance. I don't believe that now. I believe long-term relationships and marriages, parenthood, careers, and so on all take effort, both in the sense of requiring hard work and hard choices to establish them and carry them out well, and also in the sustained effort required to maintain them, to wake up everyday and continue with a marriage or a career, to make long-term sustaining choices rather than easy carefree choices. In contrast, the life I've mostly been living is more like the easy way out, it's the choice of life paths that a person more or less defaults to if they refuse to make any real meaningful choices, if they have no real interest in long-term goals or plans or commitments of any sort. I live a shallow sort of existence, but it is one that requires very little maintenance or dedication or effort.
I think my earlier confusion was partly due to the fact that the vast majority of people I encountered, especially as a kid, were people with conventional lifestyles rather than aimless drifters. The adults I might meet at school or via youth groups or church or my friends' parents were almost all, almost definitionally, people with careers and permanent addresses and typical nuclear family structures and so on. The only way really in which I was exposed to the idea of people being purposefully homeless or careerless or happily unmarried was through books, movies, and television. I think this led to me seeing the conventional sort of suburban life as the default, the thing people would grow up and fall into if they weren't strong enough or brave enough or dedicated enough to be some sort of romantic heroic adventure-movie-protagonist wanderer. Adults could sleepwalk into becoming normal and boring like my friends' parents, or else they could actively put effort into turning away from the beaten path, resist the pull of the trappings of normal boring life and fight to be something else instead.
So it then came as something of a shock to me, in my early twenties or so, to find out that there wasn't actually any gravitiational pull toward the conventional lifestyle stuff. It's like I sort of assumed that marriage and homeownership were things that would just happen to me unexpectedly if I didn't diligently keep my guard up. But in reality, I never had to fight anything. It turns out being single and careerless and homeless and so on at age thirty is as simple as simply doing nothing. I braced myself to pull against restraints that just weren't ever actually there. The people around me all rent nice apartments or work for promotions at their jobs or have children not because those are the things they've been brainwashed into doing or because there's some societal zeitgeist subtly urging them to conform, but because they actually just want those things for themselves. If I tell people about my life and about what I want or don't want out of it, they often get skeptical or confused but they don't usually try to change my mind or to convince me of the merits of the components of conventional life. To the people I talk to, those merits are self-evident and require no argument in their favor.
In theory all of this ought to lead to me having a greater respect for people who live these conventional lives, who put real effort into jobs and homes and families because they truly want those things. It mostly doesn't though. I think it would be different if the people around me actually seemed happy with their lives more often. I feel like I see too many relationships and marriages that look like people who have gotten used to each other rather than people who actively want to be with each other, too many people employed in careers that they don't actually seem to like in the day-to-day but feel too invested in to quit or too scared of being poor or unemployed, too many homes that people aren't really happy with but where they live anyway because they don't know where else they'd rather be or because they've decided that they have some arbitrary standard of living they feel they have to uphold in order to respect themselves. People actively put effort into getting these lives that they want but then it seems like they aren't ever really happy with it in the end all that often, they're just sufficiently comfortable with it.
So all things considered, I think I'm pretty happy with my life choices so far and intend to continue drifting.
