An anonymous Iranian writer whose family lives in Iran:

But there is deep complexity here that needs to be reckoned with. Is sudden, intense suffering from foreign missiles more merciful than prolonged, systematic oppression at the hands of your own government? When people have endured decades of oppression, does the source of their potential liberation matter as much as the liberation itself? And who bears responsibility when both action and inaction guarantee someone will suffer?

These complexities can’t be captured in social media soundbites or simple slogans. They are the impossible calculations that ordinary Iranians are being forced to make.

Kitchen Chalk Talk

Hearing Paul Sellers exclaim “this is very, very efficient woodworking“ while he slowly hand chisels a dado is about as glorious a thing as you will ever find on YouTube.

“The wind is speaking, but we’re living in a motorboat world.” — A wonderful essay and insightful approach from Chis Owen!

Sometimes a poem really blows you over — “Often the Dying Ask for a Map”

Is it David Brooks or is it just me?

Kitchen Chalk Talk

Finished reading: The Home Place by Wright Morris 📚

I put a roof nail in it here.

“We are not building people up by giving them helpful tools, we are tearing people down by convincing them they can’t function without the tools.”

I plan to be very mostly offline this summer. Work will be shifting back closer to home and I would like to be there — as mentally there as physically.

I think I have been in cognitive retreat (or worse) for a while now, and I’m feeling more and more stuck inside the fog machine that is my brain. I have any of a dozen half-finished projects around the house that I haven’t even tried to find time for. I have emails and letters that have gone unanswered embarrassingly, shamefully too long — and I really do mean shamefully. I can probably paint a pretty sympathetic picture about age, parenthood, travel and 12-hr shifts — and, of course, the economy. But I also know that the sympathetic picture would not be the whole picture.

Honestly, this post is itself part of the problem. I jotted the gist down on my iPhone while I was making coffee last week, and I’ve since spent many of those spare, reflexively-pull-out-the-phone moments adding to it. (I’m doing it right now instead of talking to my coworkers.)

Here’s something I’m having to admit to myself: the question What can I post online? is occupying far too much headspace.

I’ve tended to treat micro.blog as something entirely other than social media, and that for a couple reasons that I’ve mentioned before. One is that micro.blog does such an excellent job avoiding all the known nefarious pitfalls of basically every major social media platform.

But the main reason is that I started using it explicitly as a blog for those who are not on micro.blog. It started as 100% for the “Why aren’t you on Facebook?” friends and family. (In fact, most people who I know in real life don’t even know that it’s technically… dun dun dunnnnn… social media.) I still mostly post on it with those folks in mind, but the percentage has dropped. And while I really don’t know what number to give it, I do know that I have mixed feelings about Why I Post Online.

I explained some of what’s driving this a couple years ago in “Looking for the Cracks,” the title of which I don’t think I did enough to emphasize. But more importantly, the substance of which I have not done enough to live.

Anyway, summer feels like a damn good time to shift focus back to earth, to make looking out my window and walking out my door — and making coffee — enjoyable unto themselves. Hopefully I’ll say more in a newsletter soon.