Trees of Mystery

It’s rare for me to go more than a few days without remembering Alan Watt’s admonition that the point of life is just to be alive. It is, from any available angle, the simplest answer to a haunted, human question but it’s proven to be an ongoing stick in the bicycle spokes of my more conventional model for my life. I’ve only ever wanted rumored prizes hidden within tumultuous quests, and as such my directive north star for deciding what to do next with my time here has hinged on how uncomfortable or painful a particular path felt. The worse it made me feel, the more I felt I had to do it, and the further down the path I went the more I ignored the feedback my body gave me that this didn’t feel right for me. Of course it doesn’t, I’d regularly respond, because I’m becoming successful or I’m becoming a man or whatever the current aspirational target was. The real me was always somewhere out there waiting for me to have the balls to achieve and deserve it, and the present me was worth ignoring because it was an obsolete model bent on self-preservation amidst the circling apex predators of my possible evolutions. Surprisingly enough, most of my experience as an adult has been unquestionably miserable.

Before meeting Sloane, the great loves of my life were all the least attainable or least compatible women I met. The companies and products I built were largely in the hardest avenues or markets or conditions available to me. I probably don’t need to go into much detail to convince you that building a vinyl record company in the early two thousand teens was a fucking swamp, so I won’t. I’ll just confirm what I hope is already your suspicion that the world does not need another music startup and you should not build one. And on top of that, you should not build a licensing business of any kind which does not also include something proprietary. I can promise you with absolute certainty that the juice, if you ever even get to that point, is not worth the squeeze. But in every endeavor, the value of the journey always lay in how far away the home-adjacent destination seemed. The greater the separation, the stronger the pull for me. And this is where the real lie was. What felt like self-clarity was something closer to self-mutilation or punishment, and what I defined as wanting to live a meaningful and impactful life played out as something closer to an ongoing argument that I didn’t really deserve to exist. If I achieved one of these impossible things then maybe I could prove I did, and if I didn’t then I’d just be finally confirming my own and everyone else’s suspicion. Etc etc ad nauseam.

The last few months have been an exercise in rewiring my mind, or perhaps my life. If the point of it is just to be alive, which has continued to resonate into deeper and deeper places in me, then I’d like to enjoy the passage of my time here. That impulse towards peace and contentment has always been in me (we all have it I think), and has always felt selfish for reasons I can but don’t want to explain because I’m tired of even thinking about them. Sort of like the summer I spent living in the Adirondack mountains and doing 15,000 pushups and memorizing 60 Bible verses in hopes, I guess, that getting jacked in various ways led to something transcendent or important. After finishing that challenge, the camp gave us shirts that quoted Gladiator’s famous “what we do in life echoes in eternity”, and my friend Brian spent the remaining weeks echoing “push ups, push ups, push ups” at every opportunity. The only difference between that and entrepreneurial success is that fewer people in the latter are willing to take it all less seriously.

But to bring the cathartic ramble to an end, I’ve been giving myself more these days to things that bring me joy rather than bring me closer to a grand, architected plan. The first comes from this weekend, when Sloane and I went to a vintage market here in Austin and found a projector from the 40s listed for $65. It came with a 16mm reel of film the guy selling it hadn’t watched, so once we got home Sloane set herself to cleaning the machine and getting the reel ready to play. I’d like to say I was excited to explore it but I wasn’t at first, I frankly was a little worried we’d just stepped into the opening credits of a horror film about a prairie ghost passing its curse from home to home via traveling trinket merchants, and also I’d just spent most of Saturday cleaning the garage. The idea of unpacking anything else, spectral or otherwise, made me sort of bitchy and unfun about the whole thing but thankfully she prevailed. Below is a montage from the film she made, I’m in the background holding a flashlight up against the projector’s little lantern/bulb chamber as the original one hadn’t weathered whatever storms the unit as a whole had seen. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere about the way the present provides light for revisiting the past but who cares. The real shit here is the reel itself, which seemed to be a collection of home videos from a truly bygone era and you can check it out for yourself below.

@sloaniesmith

Anyone recognize their relatives? I’d love to get this film in the right hands! #vintage #filmclips #film #filmtiktok #projector #projecto... See more

The second thing for me lately has been The Overstory, a collection of short stories about the relationship between plants and people which has overtaken me much in the same way nature reclaims so many of our lives’ creations after we die. I cannot remember reading something this stunning maybe ever in my life. I’m sure it’s happened and I’ll no doubt hear an unhappy rattle in the attic of my mind sometime soon from some other book demanding I remember it, but in the meantime I recommend checking this one out over the upcoming holiday.