Learn from death...

Julie Powell died last week (10.26.22), she was a wholesome early internet star known for her blog Julie/Julia which can still be read on the web archive.

The Julie/Julia Project in today's prism could be seen as a stunt for getting famous on the coattails of someone else's legacy. It is a great writing exercise though, everything is there. A singular topic you can focus on, but you get to also bring your persona to the narrative.

When it comes to writing i’ve always struggled with writing about one thing. Maybe the second lesson to be learned here is that in deconstructing Julie Powell’s early writing, the Julie/Julia Project gave her a forum to write about three things; cooking, herself, life around her as it related to cooking.

The other more recent lesson i’ve taken from Julie came with her passing. I don’t really worry much over mortality. It is a wick that seems burnt out from my youth. I know i’m going to die. I know I i’m not privy to when that will happen. I also know i’ve been holding my breath. I’ve been waiting to live my life. This life I live now, oh i’m a lowly caterpillar and one day i’ll be a butterfly. Except, what happens if I die a caterpillar? I never think about that. This is apparently where I still have feelings about mortality.

What I know of my years writing KungFu is that my friends and family were my Julia. These days I don’t interrelate with people in the same way, more importantly my writing spirit seems somewhat chained to the past. Like all time travelers I had this great power (to travel back and forth through time), but not change much. I am alone, even when i’m with others; they don’t understand.

Remodel

#overheard Dana talking to her mom “Oh good! We have a new countertop, the dishwasher is back too!

I don’t know how long the dishwasher has been gone. Almost a year I figure, maybe nine months or so?

Living through a remodel is hard. There has been plenty to write about but I haven’t had the discipline or clarity to want to write…

cars

Every car has design flaws that are a part of owning that car. Maybe it chews through compressors. Maybe it runs really hot and you’ll always be replacing hoses. The Miata is still gone. The MR2 is still gone. The e320 probably is a HVAC eater, I think i’m on my third compressor, it’s not looking good. Toyota doesn’t make a perfect car, they also have quirks like any other vehicle. You just usually do repairs less frequently with Toyo, often times it is a less exciting experience, but you don’t think about repair so much.

There is a lot less instant gratification of late. There is a lot of just trying to get whole. At this rate, it’ll take me eighteen months to get all the cars where I want them. This will be because frugality is my first concern here. I can pay a lot to have some guys do some crap for me fast. If i’m to be honest with myself I like to edge everything out, really milk it, if you know what i mean.

Number One

Rosie and I worked on the appliance station this weekend. The kitchen has gone full Temporary Kitchen. When you go in the direction of the temporary kitchen you are just trying to live your life and be whole. You no longer care about anything other than just warming up a corn dog in the oven and wanting to not have spots on your silverware.

Why I stopped writing

It was too hard to sweep the thoughts out of my mind to get to a place where I just had one thought I could develop. And I want all the thoughts too. As i’m over here with two blogs (Scratch and KFO), my mind starts to drift to process and presentation which is usually when I get sad about the state of things. We are on the other side of this fuckery. We’re writing and stuff is going up and this is just that era.