/now
Spring Equinox, 2026
As I'm writing this, a Cardinal is singing at dawn. Where I live we've avoided a lot of the extreme March weather that has been happening in parts of the US but we have nonetheless been through some dramatic swings. This past Tuesday we had a high of 26. The Tuesday a week before, the high was 75. We had four or five days of nonstop wind that gusted up to 70 mph. These weather changes combined with daylight saving time have made everything feel out of order and time feel uncontrollable.
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I have been thinking about time a lot lately. Right now I am in the middle of a time audit, which is a period during which you keep track of everything you do during your day to see where your time actually goes. I don't feel that I'm wasting a lot of time but I do want to see how much time I am spending on things that are a priority for me. I will continue with this audit until the end of next week. Keeping up with it has been pretty tiresome, but as I'm only doing it for a limited period I am doing my best to stick it out.
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Keeping with the theme of time, I recently read Mason Currey's 2013 book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, which turned out to be more of a catalog of insanity than actual daily rituals. Currey includes snippets about the daily lives of around 200 writers, artists, and composers, mostly white Americans and Europeans, mostly from the 18th century to the present. (This is ideal for toilet reading, but as mine was a copy from the library I refrained.) For every two writers Currey profiled who said that they got up early and put in a few hours of work every day, there was another who said that they only wrote when they felt like it and never forced themselves to a schedule. For every writer who needed to be up before the sun in order to work, there was another who could only work after midnight. There were some common themes, though: many people had family members or servants to manage their daily needs and almost everyone self-medicated to manage their energy: everything from coffee and amphetamines for uppers and alcohol and sedatives for downers. Many people in Currey's book stole sleep and nutrition from their bodies to create more time for their work. Does it have to be this way? I'm not sure, but a lesson of the book is that creative work just does demand a lot of time and energy. Even with AI I'm not sure there's any way around that.
When I was in graduate school, the caffeine/alcohol routine was so normalized that I adopted it without much thought. I'm sure that some faculty and other students were partaking of harder stuff but I wasn't directly aware. After a couple of years I realized that I was ruining my health for seemingly no benefit: no stress relief, no added productivity, just sleep deprivation and constant anxiety. Nowadays, my needs for caffeine can be satisfied by a couple of squares of dark chocolate; drinking an actual caffeinated beverage feels like a bad drug experience to me at this point. And I probably have one alcoholic drink every 2 months. Can one do good creative work without chemical assistance? I am very invested in the answer being yes, but I honestly don't know.
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I've not only been thinking about time in daily life, but have been thinking about deep time as well. Perhaps as a reaction to the continuing polycrisis (a nice word for clusterfuck) that continues to whip through the world, I have been learning more about the history of Earth and some of its most famous inhabitants: dinosaurs. I was a total dinosaur kid when I was young but then gave up interest in them when I was a teenager. I've slowly been revisiting dinosaurs over the past decade or so, but recently made the decision to just become a dinosaur person again. Because why not--dinosaurs never stopped being cool. In fact, dinosaurs are actually cooler than they were when I was a kid. Part of that is because we know more about them than ever and part is that I have an intellectual capacity to appreciate them more. The information you can get from fossils now is wild. We have a much better understanding of dinosaur brains and even know with certainty what color some of them were. Dinosaur research has been in a boom since the late 90s when I lost interest in them and so to come back and see what we've learned over the past 30 years is astounding. When I was a kid, the lingering narrative was that dinosaurs were still these weird, slow-moving tail-draggers who just couldn't keep up with changes on the Earth. Jurassic Park, which came out when I was 8 (and scared the shit out of me) was just starting to change that narrative. Now I understand that dinosaurs were in many ways remarkably similar to how animals live and behave now, except they lived in environments that could support enormous biodiversity and biomass. They're still weird, though, because life on Earth is weird. (And of course we now know that dinosaurs still exist among us in the form of birds. Birds are not related to or descended from dinosaurs. They ARE dinosaurs.)
I also find that in learning about deep time, it is, if not comforting, at least stabilizing to realize that the problems we are encountering now are a drop in the bucket, insignificant compared to the problems that the Earth has faced before. We are not the first species to make ourselves vulnerable through our extravagant need for resources, and our end, whether it comes soon or in a long time, is just part of how things work on Earth. This isn't so much resignation to every bad thing that is happening right now, but just perspective on our place in things.
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As for what I've been up to: I am STILL working on the essay that I started in September (see above about creative work and time) and I am slowly getting my website update together. I may aim to have that done by June, so my current layout will be exactly two years old when it gets replaced. This website is going to get simplified and streamlined a bit. I'll explain more about why when the re-design goes live.
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Until next time, stay safe as you can.
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I got the idea of the /now page from Derek Sivers, which I found through 32-Bit Cafe.