path: root/friends.txt

# Sketches

# Published

## 001 - Cold, No Snow, Trees

Greetings Friends!

In case you've forgotten, you signed up for this mailing list at [luxagraf.net](https://luxagraf.net/newsletter/friends/) and you can unsubscribe just as easily, no hard feelings, there's a link at the bottom of this email. 

Hello from the early days of December, where it is finally, genuinely cold. What we call cold around here anyway. 

My desk is just to the right of the front door, which no one uses, and there's a window next to the door that I look out. But it's cracked and leaks cold air. It's 26 degrees F outside. There's a good chance it's colder wherever you are, but here in South Carolina, that counts as cold.

It's strange how relative temperature is though -- there were days when I lived in Massachusetts when 26 F would count as warm. Cold depends on what you're used to. Most things depend on what you're used to. Habit is a force to be reckoned with. 

I should really do something about the cracked window. The wafts of arctic air are terrible for the monthly electric bill. Right now though, I rather enjoy it. The cold keeps me more awake, gives me that slight discomfort that reminds you you're a human, in a body. Best not to forget that. 

---

<img src="images/2020/DSC03568_O1GZTQr.jpg" id="image-2526" class="picfull" />

Earlier today I did something I have never done in my forty-five years of living: I cut down my own Christmas tree. 

It was like temporarily living in a Norman Rockwell painting. We traipsed through the forest in search of an appropriate tree. There was no snow, but it was suitably cold at least. We ended up cutting down a tree much larger than we needed and then just using the top. Small trees turn out to be scraggly things, unless they're spruce or fir, neither of which grow around here. 

It sounds simple enough when I write it, but imagine it would have been hilarious to watch.

The only hand saw I have is a mitre saw, which is terrible for cutting down trees. It took an embarrassingly long time to get through a 6-inch diameter tree trunk. Then you'd have seen us dragging and pulling, grunting and sweating our way out of the forest and back to the house where we quickly realized it was still far too large. We have 12-foot ceilings here, but even with that I had to go back at it with the saw, taking off another foot or two from the base. 

Then we dragged it in the front door and tried to stand it up only to realize it was still way too tall. I cut another foot off right in the living room, sawdust piling on the floor. Tried to stand it up again. Still too tall. Sigh. More sawdust.

Eventually we got it down to size, but it's still so tall I can't reach the top of it.

Somewhere in the midst of all that sawing I started wondering how it was we ended up cutting down trees for Christmas anyway. Rituals that involve destruction of the natural environment around you tend to make for short-lived civilizations. Just ask an Easter Islander. 

It turns out Christmas trees are a relatively recent ritual. At least cutting them down. That habit was imported by the Germans about 150 years ago. Decorating with evergreen boughs -- a more sustainable approach -- goes all the way back to Greek times, possibly further. Of course the Greeks were celebrating the Winter Solstice, not Christmas.

Massachusetts, place of bitter cold and, historically, bitterness, once outlawed any Christmas celebration other than a church service. A win for sustainability and trees, but a loss for, well, everything else. People were fined for hanging evergreens or decorating in any way. Because who wants all that joy around them? Not Massachusettians of days past. Christmas trees were too much fun for Puritans. Or maybe they just hated trudging out in the woods to get one. There were witches in those woods.

We don't have any witches in our woods. So far as I have been able to observe anyway. Still, I wonder about these rituals we stumble through. I suspect they're far more important than we give them credit for. These stories we tell ourselves about ourselves shape us, they determine our behavior, our destiny to some degree, perhaps to a large degree. They feel like the kinds of things we should spend more time considering, but we don't. Or I don't. Not often anyway.

That's what gives them their power. Those stories are there, shaping our existence whether we stop to consider them our not. For me it usually takes something to jar me into questioning my habits, like being tired of sawing. Why am I sawing again? What are we doing out in this forest full of witches in the (relative) freezing cold? 

---

Technical note: the software that I wrote to generate, mail, and archive these letters may be a bit rough around the edges, for which I apologize in advance. I am sending this a week late because I needed to fix some last minute issues. But if you see anything completely, bizarrely wrong looking. Or you get 300 copies. Please do let me know. 

-s

## 002 - Is This Water?

Greetings Friends!

In case you've forgotten, you signed up for this mailing list at [luxagraf.net](https://luxagraf.net/newsletter/friends/) and you can unsubscribe just as easily, no hard feelings, there's a link at the bottom of this email. 

Well 2021 has arrived. We're well beyond the future dates I used to idly try to imagine during boring high school classes. It's a strange feeling. We are further into the future than past me was able to conceive of -- where the hell does that put us?

I don't know. What I do know is that hunting season is over. Deer season anyway. That deer season ends around January 1st is one of those factoids that I have always vaguely known, but never had a reason to care about. Now I do. 

Most of the land surrounding our current home, the land I call the 100 acre wood, because, well, it's roughly 100 acres, isn't technically part of the property we live on. We live on three acres *surrounded* by those 100 acres of woods. Those 100 acres are leased to a hunting club, so we can't really do much exploring during deer season. But that's over now and we've been getting out there on the dry days, which has been nice. 

About a half mile back behind the house there's a creek bed, never more than ten feet wide, but it's enough for the kids to get their feet wet and explore. I haven't tried yet, but I'm hopeful that my cellular hotspot will have some signal out there so I can work creekside when it warms up. I need a good portable desk. 

Not really though. Really I don't need anything. I need less things. It's the time of year when I find myself taking stock of things and seeing what I can streamline, simplify, and do without. It's my form of a new year's resolution I think. Or perhaps some seasonally wayward attempt at early spring cleaning. Whatever the case this time of year is when I go through my life and think, what can I get rid of? What can I do without? What can I improve on? What is no longer necessary? 

It's a fun thought process. I always change things up. Sometimes silly things, like the number of spoons in the drawer. Too many damnit. Out spoons, out. Other times I realize a don't need some tool I've previously considered indispensable. Some other tool I hardly pay attention to will turn out to do the job even better and I didn't realize it because I'd stopped thinking about the problem when I found the first solution.

The problems is those first solutions are often ugly hacks, temporary patch jobs, but then you forget to go back and redo them. Or I do anyway. It's good to go back and check your old work, make sure there aren't any hack jobs left around.

I don't do this annual taking stock to change my life, it's more of a cleaning out. It's a chance to pull off the rutted road for a few days and see what all is going on down there in the grooves. This is especially true when I get past the silly stuff like too many spoons in the drawer and start looking at my thought patterns.

Any pattern of thought soon becomes transparent. That's part of what the pattern is for, and for many things that's good. I don't want to think *what should I do?* every morning. I want to make a cup of coffee and relax for a bit, like I always do. Still, I am sometimes alarmed to find patterns I didn't know I had when I step back and detach, and really *look* at myself.

David Foster Wallace has a parable that I think is relevant:

> There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

Wallace's whole text is [worth a read](http://bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu/x4280.html) if you're not familiar (it was a commencement speech originally), but the salient point is, to quote Wallace's own explication: "the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about."

I think "realities" is too vague. I don't know exactly what Wallace had in mind, but for me "realities" are the patterns of thought that govern my day.

These patterns are hardest to see because they are the things that provide the framework in which we live. They're the things we decided way back when we couldn't even conceive of 2021 as a now that would eventually be *now*. They're the things we figured out so long ago we can't even recall exactly what we figured out. Still, they're there in the background informing everything we do. They're the water in which we live.

When you see the water around you, you see yourself differently. Sometimes that means you find a few spoons you don't need. Other times it might mean something more. 

So every year, around this time, I take a pen, a scrap of paper, and go for a walk. Woods are ideal for this, there's such a tangle of growth and life all around you that somehow the tangle of your own thoughts becomes less intimidating. From the tangle patterns emerge, pathways of thought through the trees. Somewhere in there I try to figure out what it is I am doing, where I am going, where I want to be going, and which patterns are going to close the gap between those two things. With any luck I find my way home before dark.

Until next month.

-s
## 003
Greetings Friends of a Long year Subscribers-

In case you've forgotten, you signed up for this mailing list at [luxagraf.net](https://luxagraf.net/newsletter/friends/) and you can unsubscribe just as easily, no hard feelings, there's a link at the bottom of this email. 

The end of February brought strange, warm weather to our woods. The rest of the country was swathed in snow, ice, extreme cold, power outages, frozen pipes, and worse. Our relatives in Dallas lost power for days, their goldfish froze, their pool was a solid block of ice. Meanwhile, in the shire, as my Wired colleagues call this place, it was sunny and 75.

We took advantage of the warm dry weather and hiked down to the creek, exploring the woods and river bottoms on the way. The creek isn't huge, and its flow doesn't seem to fluctuate much even with rain, but there are some knee deep pools here and there and the water is remarkably clear. The water is so clear that it acts like a magnifying glass for the pebbles and rocks slowly making their way to the sea. What caught my eye one sunny day was the amount of tiny gold sparkles in the water.

It turns out we're in a geologically interesting area. Normally I am a birdwatcher, I leave the rocks and fossils to Corrinne. But it's winter, which means bird life is largely limited to the mixed flocks of chickadees, titmice, and wrens that inhabit the southern Appalachian woodlands this time of year. There is a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker that's been working on the large pecan tree that hangs over the bus for months now, and I saw a flash of yellow I couldn't identify at the top of the same tree this morning, but the flood of migrants that really gets birdwatchers like me up in the morning hasn't started yet. 

So rocks. In streams. I need a hand lens. And a lot more knowledge about geology than I currently possess. But I do know we're in a borderland, geologically speaking,  which is always the place to be -- edges are where everything gets interesting. 

We're between the Appalachian foothills, which you can see on a clear day if you get out of the forest, and what gets called the low country, the part of the state below the Fall Line, where the Piedmont foothills and Atlantic coastal plain meet. We're technically in the upcountry, but at the very edge of it. We're where everything washes down to, where the waters slow, meander, and the rocks start to collect.

This is a land of low, rolling hills with geologically complex things going on beneath the foot or so of red clay that's so hostile to growing carrots. Under that clay layer there's a mish-mash of [schists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schist) that bubble up everything from quartz to [amphibolite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphibolite) to, ahem, [gold](https://www.dnr.sc.gov/geology/pdfs/Publications/GGMS/GGMS3.pdf). 

Alas, it's tiny specks of gold. Also not our land. But, details. 

I always tell the kids they can keep all they can pan, but they never take me up on it. They're more interested in good-looking rocks with skipping potential.

Originally I didn't think the shiny golden flecks I saw in the stream bed could be gold because where I grew up anything you thought, hoped, prayed might be gold was absolutely not gold, ever. But then if you grew up in the 1970s and 80s you inevitably watched too many westerns with too many lonely, sun-baked, half-crazed gold miners to ever totally abandon the notion that you too might find some gold one day. If you just kept looking.

One day I spent an hour or two on the [SCDNR Geological Survey website](https://www.dnr.sc.gov/geology/) and discovered that indeed, there is quite a bit of gold in them thar hills. Enough in fact that the flecks we find in the rocks of our tiny stream probably *are* gold.

I haven't been back to the creek since I found out it might actually contain gold. The sunshine and warm weather didn't last. Well, the warm temperatures did, but the clouds rolled back in and we've had a week of rainy, foggy, dreary days. The red clay has turned to red mud, making hiking difficult. 

I'm ready for more sunshine. I've had to settle for warm rain, which I will take over cold rain, even if it is decidedly odd to have warm rain in the winter. There was a thunderstorm two nights ago. It's not even March. Strange times in the shire. Maybe Spring will come a little early. Or maybe that's just a February fantasy, like the gold in the creek. 


In March of 2006 I was in Austin Texas, at SXSW eating pulled pork with WIRED's then main music writer and my editor (who is vegan, but very polite about these things, and also, still my editor). We were eating, but actually do something that at that time was rather unusual: we were watching everyone in the building stare at their phones. The iPhone did not exist yet. Twitter had been around for a little while at that point, but SXSW, this particular day as I remember it, was when it really took off. I think about this moment from time to time and try to make sense of it.

Now a restaurant full of people staring at their phones is so common we don't even think about it, but back then it was so unusual we talked about doing an article about it. I can't remember if we did or not, but I remember talking about it because I remember that nothing about the scene felt particularly prophetic. It didn't even feel like something from the future, it felt like something anomalous.

We were talking about feedback loops. How short this one was. This was back when Twitter was mostly SMS-based. That feedback loop is even shorter now. 

All communication happens in loops. This is the start of a loop. I say something. You say something back, I respond to that response. The conversation begins, a loop is opened.

Most online communication these days consists of loops measured in minutes, hours at the most. I find those loop overwhelmingly short. I am convinced that loops this short are only meant to be experienced in the body, in person. That kind of immediacy requires intimacy, closeness of physical space. Without that you get... the culture we have. 

How long is the loop? That's the question to ask before you devote your time and energy to something. Is it the right length for me to be heard? Is it the right length of me to be able to listen to what you're saying? I find that the longer the loop is, the better the communication. Perhaps it's as simple as more time to think. Perhaps it is something more. This is just me of course. For all the talk of how awful social media is, I know several people who love it, would be devastated to lose it, and are otherwise happy, functional people.

My website is near the opposite end of this communication loop spectrum. I still get email asking about things I published nearly two decades ago. I have no idea how people find these older articles since Google generally ignores Luxagraf (as it ignores every small site), but they do. So I get to communicate with people in loops that span decades from my point of view.


## 004 Internet Bloom

Greetings Friends —

It is I, Scott, maker of stuff, including this. You signed up for this newsletter at luxagraf.net. If that does not ring a bell there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of this letter.

Spring has arrived down here. Earlier this month we had two solid weeks of glorious weather, 75 and sunny, flowers coming up, everything was wonderful. Then the pine trees decided it was time, and great clouds of yellow green pine pollen began to descend like a hazy fog from the heights of the forest. The wind shifted and dumped the vast majority of it on our house. Great swirling clouds come rolling off the tree tops in the mornings to coat everything and choke you the minute you step outside.

It's a small price to pay for private access to the 100 acre wood, but it is still a price.

Just before the great pollen cloud began I made a trip to Athens to visit a friend, in person. It is odd to me that we, that I, feel compelled to say, *in person* as if there were some other way to visit people. We caught up a bit, talked about what we had been up to, as you do, and at some point he asked if I was still making luxagraf. I said of course I am. Once I start something I am generally too foolishly stubborn to stop.

Then he asked, "why?"

There was an awkward pause in which I think he was thinking I had no answer, but actually I was sorting through about fifty different answers I have to that question and trying to pick one. The one I picked for him, which is my favorite one, is, "because it's wildly profitable."

Just kidding. I told him I do it because I enjoy making it. It's fun to build something that's your own. 

The strange thing is he was back to building his own site too. He's the person I learned to build websites with many many years ago. He's also more realistic so at some point he stopped. It never was profitable. That might have been what made it fun. 

But these days everyone says you need a website to promote your business or build your brand or whatever. I almost never hear people say you should build a website because it's fun. I try to encourage people to build their own stuff, but it could be that I'm one of the few who enjoys it. It's certainly still not profitable.

I once calculated the total cost of domain registration and web hosting for luxagraf.net, which has been online since 2002. I blocked out the number afterward, erased it from my mind. It was surprisingly large though. 

It reminded me of a story my grandmother used to tell me and my cousins, that she was sorry she hadn't set aside $1 a day for all us grandkids starting when we were born. She would then proceed to explain compound interest to us, and by the end all of us cousins would look at each other like, wait, what? Grandma could have made us rich? But she just now thought of it? Well, damn. 

I'm still not totally sure what she was up to with those stories, they were like seedlings I think. One thing I believe grew of them for me is a life long habit of multiplying out small monthly payments to form staggering, intimidating numbers at the end of the axis of time.

The point is, to have your own space online is not cheap, either in terms of money or time. It is an investment. One that seemed worth it to some of us. The internet has regressed dramatically since I started making this site, but once upon a time everyone made their own website and it was fun. It took some work, but all fun things do in my view. You had to learn how everything worked. You spent a lot of time looking up HTML tags and trying to make things look the way they were supposed to, but somehow never actually did. But that was part of the fun. Just like it would be no fun if the engine started the first time you tried to fix it. Where's the adventure in that?

*Aside: This is a curious thing though, because you have to be careful not to go seeking adventure. That would be asking for trouble. You have to *hope* the engine starts the first time. When it doesn't. Well, now you have an adventure.*

It turns out a lot of people don't think tinkering with engines or HTML is much fun, so sealed engines and MySpace came along to flatten out the learning curve. MySpace also showed you could make real money from the things people put online. And at that moment fun and adventure left the building. 

The web regressed from a fun, adventurous thing floating out there somewhere in the ether to a real thing with accountants. Statistics, money, and attention are harbingers of death for anything you love. They're good if you're looking to pay the bills, but still harbingers of death. 

In 2004, when the internet regressed and everyone became a blogger and slapped ads all over their websites and started rolling in the dough, I was too busy to do it. I never turned my website into anything more than something I did for fun. And so in 2011 when all that money dried up and everyone abandoned their sites in favor of social media, I didn't. I was still having fun. It wasn't that I thought all the ads and stuff was a terrible thing (although in hindsight I do), it's just that I never did. For me this remained a fun thing I like to do in moments like this, at 10:30 on a Sunday evening when I probably should get some rest.

The point is, I totally missed the memo about the transition of the web from a fun place where we all made crazy weird websites into this horrible shrieking pit of existential despair where you *still* can't find the phone number of the restaurant on the restaurant website because why the fuck would you want useful information when you could have a poorly lit close up of last season's entrees, and so consequently, I still have fun making my website. 

So much fun in fact that I keep adding to the site. I recently started putting photos online again. Like Instagram, but on my own site. I actually started it a while ago, but forgot to tell anyone about it. Anyway, you can sign up for [Range](/range/), as I call it, if you're interested. If not, that's fine, I'll still have fun doing it.

And grandma, wherever you may be, know that I did eventually figure out how I could use compound interest to my advantage. I haven't always done it, but I do think my habit of taking the very long view of things might have it's roots back there in those stories.

Until next time friends...

-s

## 005 June Letter

Greetings Friends —

It is I, Scott, maker of stuff, including this. You signed up for this newsletter at luxagraf.net. If that does not ring a bell there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of this letter.

Things have been pretty quiet in the woods lately. We've watched the world wake up from winter, turn green, [pollen-saturated](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2021/03/springsville), and lately we've been getting an early taste of the summer heat and humidity that's still to come. 

First though, thanks to the two people who emailed to say those blue flowers are grape hyacinth, I do believe you are correct. They're not native to this area, so I'd like to hear the story of how they ended up here, though I doubt I ever will. I'll also probably never get to know why there's a line of daffodils running though the woods not far from the house (old driveway? Original house? Caretaker house? Slave house?), or what the various mounds of bricks we've found wandering through the woods could have been, or how/why the rusted machinery came to be left where it rusts. There are so many stories all around us all the time. As a writer it's daunting to try to pick one.